ABUJA

Darfur rebels have bickered among themselves, violated a ceasefire and even been accused of attacking peacekeepers. Now they risk being seen as standing in the way of a peace agreement before a deadline on Tuesday at midnight.

The African Union will end talks among warring parties in Sudan’s Darfur region by April 30 if the Khartoum government and rebel factions fail to agree to a peace deal, a senior mediator said. Sam Ibok, head of the AU team mediating peace negotiations, said on Sunday his team was still working toward a United Nations-backed deadline to achieve a final peace agreement by the end of the month.

The chairperson of the Sudanese rebel Justice and Equality Movement, Khalil Mohammed, on Wednesday dismissed the ongoing Abuja peace talks on the conflict in Darfur as ”a waste of time, energy and resources of stakeholders.” He said the peace talks would not achieve any meaningful result as they were ”merely going in circles.” Mohammed, however, expressed the hope that a peace agreement would be signed before the end of April.

Shouts of ”Allah Akbar!” (God is greatest) rent the air in parts of Kaduna, northern Nigeria on Wednesday as a four-minute eclipse turned daylight into darkness. Many residents ran indoors before the eclipse started. Some did so for fear of looking at the phenomenon directly and damaging their eyes.

Former Liberian leader and fugitive war crimes suspect Charles Taylor was arrested on Wednesday in a northern Nigerian town near the Cameroon border, police spokesperson Haz Iwendi said. On Tuesday, President Olusegun Obasanjo’s government announced that Taylor had disappeared from his plush villa in the southeastern Nigerian city of Calabar.

Former Liberian leader and war-crimes suspect Charles Taylor has disappeared from the villa in which he was living in exile in Nigeria, the Nigerian Presidency said in a statement on Tuesday. The statement said Taylor had left his house in Calabar some time on Monday night and President Olusegun Obasanjo had set up a panel to investigate.

As Nigeria’s attempt to determine its actual population entered a third day on Thursday, abduction of census officials, abandonment by enumerators, shortages of materials and violence have continued to dog the exercise. Regarded as the most populous country in Africa, Nigeria has never succeeded in determining its actual population.

Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf has formally asked Nigeria to hand over her exiled predecessor Charles Taylor, a spokesperson for Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo said on Friday. Taylor, who has been accused of committing war crimes by international prosecutors in Sierra Leone, was given political asylum by Obasanjo in August 2003.

Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo briefed his South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki on talks concerning the fate of exiled former Liberian leader Charles Taylor, a Nigerian spokesperson said. In August 2003, Obasanjo and Mbeki persuaded Taylor to step down and accept asylum in Nigeria in a bid to end his country’s 14-year-old civil war.

Nigeria banned domestic poultry in its political capital, Abuja, on Wednesday as it redoubled efforts to contain Africa’s first outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu. Information Minister Frank Nweke said authorities were ”going around to pick up the birds and poultry that are being kept in residential homes”.

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw on Tuesday sternly rebuked both sides fighting in the brutal civil war in Sudan’s war torn region of Darfur and demanded that peace talks be speeded up. Straw told delegates to Africa Union-sponsored peace talks in Abuja that they had failed to live up to their promises.

Nigeria plans to free about 25 000 inmates, many of whom have been awaiting trial for years, in a bid to decongest overcrowded and unhygienic prisons and improve its human rights record. "The issue of awaiting-trial inmates has become an endemic problem in Nigeria," said Justice Minister Bayo Ojo.

Nigeria’s state radio, television network and news agency were operating a skeleton service on Monday after thousands of journalists went on strike over unpaid allowances. ”We have decided on the strike because all government’s promises since 2003 to pay our allowances have been broken,” said a senior editor at the News Agency of Nigeria.

Liberia’s new president elect, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, said on Wednesday that she hoped to find a role for her defeated rival George Weah in a broad-based government. Weah, a former football star and a hero to many of Liberia’s unemployed youth, lost to Johnson-Sirleaf in Liberia’s first election since the end of its latest 14-year bout of civil war.

An estimated 10 000 newly homeless Nigerians awoke on Tuesday in Chika, a squatter settlement in the country’s capital, Abuja, after being forced to sleep in the open following the destruction of their homes by government bulldozers. The bulldozers had on Monday pulled down more than 1 500 houses built illegally in the area.

Nigerian authorities have banned the private television station whose reporters were the first to find the site where an airliner crashed killing all 117 on board, the National Broadcasting Commission announced on Monday. Earlier, several Nigerian officials had incorrectly told journalists that the crash site was in Kishi, a remote rural area 400km further north.

Members of Sudan’s government and the two rebel movements fighting in the war-torn Darfur region began substantive peace talks on Monday as the African Union called for an end to a recent upsurge in violence. ”We cannot understand the repeated acts of banditry in Darfur,” AU conference chairperson Salim Ahmed Salim said.

Nigeria’s Anglican archbishop said on Thursday that Nigerian churches might cut ties with the Church of England if it did not revise its stance on homosexuality, which accepts gay priests in same-sex partnerships. ”As of now, we have not yet reached the point of schism, but there’s a broken relationship,” Archbishop Peter Akinola told reporters in the capital, Abuja.

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday expressed his satisfaction over the release of more than 400 Moroccans by the Algerian-backed Polisario Front after more than 25 years of detention. Morocco annexed the Western Sahara in 1975 but its claim was contested by the Polisario Front, sparking a conflict in the northwestern African region.