About 600 people are now crammed into Nigeria’s disease-infested death rows and the number is certain to rise with a justice system that critics say has been resisting reform since the end of military rule in 1999. The situation was highlighted dramatically this month when the United Nations’s special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, ended a week-long visit to Lagos on March 10.

It’s certainly a logical suggestion: in an effort to make cocoa-producing countries in Africa less dependent on consumers abroad, why not increase domestic consumption of cocoa products? While Africa produces more than 75% of the world’s cocoa, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, the continent consumes only about 2% of this produce.

The release and re-arrest of members of a Yoruba organisation this week have marked the latest chapter in Nigeria’s bid to contain ethnic unrest in various parts of the country. Fredrick Fasehun and Gani Adams, leaders of the Oodua Peoples Congress, were initially jailed with four other members of the group after clashes broke out in the commercial capital of Lagos last month.

A government programme to provide primary-school children with free lunches has been launched in Nigeria, to encourage parents to educate their children — and to ensure that pupils learn effectively. It has become clear that poverty is still resulting in the exclusion of millions of children from the West African country’s education system.

More than a decade after its last headcount, Nigeria is preparing to conduct the country’s fifth census this year. However, religion and ethnicity — long the bane of national life — appear set to bedevil the process. The eventual publication of statistics on religion and ethnicity could deepen existing divisions along these lines — and even lead to social unrest.

The debate around a journalism school in Lagos that has withdrawn the admission letter of a new student after learning that he is living with HIV does not seem to go away. Adegboye Ibikunle’s dismissal by the Nigerian Institute of Journalism has sparked protests by civil societies who demand that the college take him back.

It’s a phenomenon that is now a permanent feature of the urban landscape in Nigeria: children hawking goods on the streets. A wide-ranging Child Rights Bill that was signed by President Olusegun Obasanjo in July last year seeks to check child hawking by prescribing penalties for the parents and guardians who allow children on to the streets.