No image available
/ 12 February 2004
In the past two years, 800 policemen in Nigeria have been dismissed for extortion and another 65 have found themselves in court. But, the arrests and dismissals do not appear to be making a real dent in the levels of police corruption in Lagos, as far as extortion of money from motorists is concerned.
No image available
/ 4 February 2004
More than 14 000 people living with Aids in Nigeria who had been receiving anti-retroviral drugs subsidised by the government are running out of supplies, an HIV/Aids activist group said on Tuesday. ”By June 2003 some centres had stopped administering the drugs,” the president of Aids Alliance Nigeria said.
No image available
/ 4 February 2004
While African culture may venerate the aged, the continent’s pensioners don’t always find themselves living out a peaceful retirement. This is nowhere more true than in Nigeria, where the collapse of pension schemes has pushed many former civil servants into poverty.
No image available
/ 3 February 2004
Many people were feared killed in fresh violence near Port Harcourt, the oil-rich southern Nigerian city, at the weekend, police and press reports said on Tuesday. Fighting broke out when one street gang launched a reprisal attack on suspected members of another gang.
No image available
/ 28 January 2004
Relatives of the more than 1 000 people who died during the 2002 explosions at a military barracks in Lagos, Nigeria, have boycotted a ceremony to commemorate the event on Tuesday — this to show their displeasure at the government’s treatment of blast survivors.
No image available
/ 23 January 2004
When British officials intercepted a Nigerian man with a briefcase stuffed with  000 at London’s Heathrow airport, they thought they had stumbled upon a terrorist trail. Instead, the cash-filled carry-on has led to the highest-profile corruption case yet in Nigeria.
No image available
/ 21 January 2004
Nigeria’s top labour leader, Adams Oshiomhole, on Wednesday announced the suspension of a 12-hour-old nationwide general strike over fuel tax after a meeting with senior union officials. Hundreds of thousands of Nigerian workers stayed at home on Wednesday despite a court order banning the planned protest.
No image available
/ 21 January 2004
A court of appeal in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, has ordered the Nigeria Labour Congress to suspend a proposed strike that had been scheduled to start on Wednesday. It has also ordered authorities to reverse the one cent petrol tax that is at the heart of the labour dispute.
No image available
/ 13 January 2004
Almost 10 years after the death of Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, his father — Pa Beesam Wiwa — remains angry and sad. A tribunal appointed by General Sani Abacha, Nigeria’s military ruler at the time, sentenced Saro-Wiwa to death in 1995 after a controversial trial. Pa Wiwa says the execution left him embittered.
No image available
/ 24 December 2003
Nigeria’s generations-old father-to-son farming life is in jeopardy — because of concerns over the child labour it involves. Rights activists claim that many of these children are subject to hazardous conditions, including exposure to pesticides and being required to use dangerous tools like machetes.
No image available
/ 17 December 2003
A traditional doctor in central Nigeria has been shot dead by a patient who was testing the potency of an anti-bullet charm the herbalist had prepared for him, police said on Wednesday. Ashi Terfa died when patient Umaa Akor fired a gun at his head two weeks ago in south-central Benue state.
No image available
/ 27 November 2003
For an insight into how fake drugs affect the lives of ordinary Nigerians, look no further than the Ajibade household. Alice Ajibade, a retired nurse, recently sent her servant to buy medicine for her week-old grandchild. After taking a close look at the label on the syrup, Ajibade concluded that the medicine was fake.
No image available
/ 23 November 2003
There has been no decision taken yet about the participation of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe in next month’s Commonwealth summit to be staged in Abuja, Nigerian presidential spokesperson Remi Oyo said on Saturday. Zimbabwe has been suspended from the Commonwealth’s councils for the past 20 months.
No image available
/ 21 November 2003
Tribal militants armed with automatic weapons have seized two oil platforms in the offshore waters of Nigeria belonging to the oil giant ChevronTexaco, taking 18 workers hostage.
No image available
/ 18 November 2003
Blocked drains, heaps of garbage in the streets, remnants of food and disused household items: these things have become a common sight in the Nigerian commercial capital of Lagos over the past few years, prompting some to label it the ”dirtiest city in the world”. But Lagos is about to turn over a new leaf.
No image available
/ 11 November 2003
The litter-strewn streets of Africa’s largest and arguably dirtiest city woke up to a new broom on Monday, as Lagos’s latest uniformed enforcement squad launched a mammoth clean-up mission.
No image available
/ 4 November 2003
Several African churches severed relations on Monday with US Anglican congregations which support gay priests, leading a revolt in the developing world against the consecration of a homosexual bishop
No image available
/ 29 October 2003
Polio vaccines recently administered in a nationwide campaign in Nigeria will undergo laboratory testing to calm fears the United States is using the immunisation campaign to sow Aids and sterility among Muslims. Ninety-nine percent of all new polio cases in the world are in Nigeria, Pakistan and India.
No image available
/ 28 October 2003
A British man who was sentenced by a Nigerian court to be hanged for the murder of his Australian lover has appealed his conviction, his defence team said on Tuesday. Ian Millar, a 54-year-old long-term resident of Nigeria, was convicted last Thursday of the murder of his 43-year-old partner Anne Marie Gale.
No image available
/ 23 October 2003
Travellers and staff were evacuated from Lagos’ Murtala Mohammed Airport, Nigeria’s main air travel hub, on Thursday after a fire broke out in the basement, witnesses said. Thick smoke billowed through the terminal, an AFP correspondent at the scene said, and passengers were ordered out of the building as firefighters arrived on the scene.
No image available
/ 14 October 2003
Former Liberian leader Charles Taylor has alleged that unidentified enemies are planning to attack Nigerian peacekeepers in his country and put the blame on him. Taylor said he feared a plot to turn the people of his host country against him and persuade them to compel him to leave.
No image available
/ 14 October 2003
Members of Nigeria’s 17-million-strong Anglican Church — the world’s second-largest Anglican congregation — spent a day fasting and praying on Monday to protest the confirmation of homosexual priests and bishops in the United States and Britain.
No image available
/ 13 October 2003
Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo has met exiled former Liberian leader Charles Taylor to warn him not to interfere in his homeland’s fragile peace process. Last month the United Nations’s chief respresentative on Liberia, Jacques Klein, said that Taylor had been telephoning his successor, Moses Blah.
Nigerian trade unions angrily demanded talks with the federal government on Monday as the deadline loomed for a nationwide general strike over fuel price rises. Nigeria is Africa’s largest oil producer, and labour leaders have threatened to disrupt crude exports and shut down government offices and firms.
No image available
/ 28 September 2003
In a fiery liftoff from northwestern Russia, a Nigerian satellite blasted into orbit on Saturday aboard a red-tipped rocket, propelling one of the poorest nations on earth into space for the first time. Millions of Nigerians crowded around television sets to glimpse the early morning launch, broadcast live on state television.
No image available
/ 25 September 2003
A Nigerian man has been sentenced to death by stoning for sodomy, moments after single mother Amina Lawal had her stoning sentence for adultery lifted by another Islamic court. The conviction of 20-year-old Jibrin Babaji for sleeping with three boys was made by a Sharia court in the northern Bauchi State.
No image available
/ 25 September 2003
Nigeria has invited South African Airways to bid for its proposed new national carrier to replace the bankrupt Nigeria Airways. President Olusegun Obasanjo last month approved a new airline for Nigeria after Nigeria Airways was liquidated because of debts and inefficiency.
No image available
/ 24 September 2003
A Nigerian Islamic court will pronounce its verdict on Thursday on single mother Amina Lawal’s appeal against a sentence she be stoned to death for adultery. Lawal has become a symbol of the dispute within Nigeria over a penal code many regard as harsh and out of place in a newly democratic republic.
No image available
/ 11 September 2003
At least 100 people died in a multiple pile-up near the Nigerian capital Abuja this week, road safety officials said on Thursday, announcing a new, higher death toll. Seventy of the victims were burnt beyond recognition.
Amina Lawal, facing death by stoning for adultery, will be back before an Islamic court in northern Nigeria on Wednesday, hoping to launch her delayed second appeal against the sentence.
The Nigerian Senate is considering whether to advise President Olusegun Obasanjo to close the country’s borders with neighbouring Cameroon and Chad to stem cross-border crime, a spokesperson said on Thursday.