Nigeria’s Central Bank opened a media campaign on Monday to try to discourage people from defacing or abusing the naira currency or hiding it in their underwear. In adverts on television, radio and in the press, the Central Bank said the naira should be handled with care and not defaced, squeezed, stained, torn or written on.
Up to 200 people died on Friday when an oil pipeline blew up at a beach village near the Nigerian economic capital, Lagos, a police officer at the scene said. An Agence France-Presse correspondent at the scene reported seeing scores of carbonised, disfigured corpses floating on the water.
Nigeria on Wednesday announced a 25-year plan to venture into space technology by manufacturing and launching locally its own satellite. Science and Technology Minister Turner Isoun said the federal Cabinet had already set up a seven-member ministerial committee to look into the details of the project.
Pressure built on Wednesday on Nigeria over attempts to give President Olusegun Obasanjo a third term in office by changing the Constitution, with United Nations chief Kofi Annan and the Economic Community of West African States weighing into the debate. African leaders should "play by the rules", the UN secretary general said in an interview.
Divisions emerged on Tuesday in the Darfur rebel group that signed a peace deal with Khartoum last week. Ibrahim Ahmed Ibrahim, top adviser to Sudan Liberation Movement leader Minni Arko Minnawi, sent a letter to United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan charging that his boss had been pressured into signing Friday’s peace agreement.
The drive for peace in the devastated Sudanese region of Darfur took a tentative step nearer success on Friday with one rebel faction agreeing to sign a peace deal, although another still refused. The African Union’s year-old drive to bring peace to Darfur with a comprehensive package had begun the day in crisis with continued refusal by the rebels to sign a deal to end the three-year-old civil war.
Both Sudanese rebel groups fighting in Darfur refused on Friday to sign a peace deal with the Khartoum government, their chief negotiators said, despite intense pressure from international mediators. Mohammed Tugod of the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) said that the African Union draft peace accord failed to answer his group’s demands for Darfur’s three states to be united into a single autonomous region.
African Union leaders will meet on Thursday on the Darfur crisis hours before the expiration of a deadline set for the Sudanese parties to sign a peace agreement, officials said. ”The meeting is temporarily set to begin at 6pm local time in the Nigerian presidency,” AU spokesperson Noureddine Mezni told Agence France-Presse in Abuja.
The United States and other international mediators battled on Thursday to strong-arm Darfur’s rebel leaders into accepting a peace deal to end three years of slaughter in their devastated region in western Sudan. US Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and British International Development Secretary Hilary Benn added their weight to African Union peace talks after the warring parties failed to meet a deadline for an accord.
International mediators battled on Wednesday to save the African Union’s make-or-break bid to end Darfur’s bloody civil war after peace talks between the Khartoum government and rebels ran into another quagmire. United States envoy Robert Zoellick and British International Development Minister Hilary Benn joined AU officials in seeking a new compromise after rebel leaders from the devastated western Sudanese region refused to sign a peace deal.
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.
At the Costain livestock market in Nigeria’s biggest city of Lagos, chicken buyers are again waiting while boys in their early teens slaughter, clean and cut up birds for them to take home. The sight had all but disappeared in the first shock that followed the discovery of Africa’s first cases of the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu.
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.
Nigeria’s crude oil revenues fell by -million in February because of the unrest in the Niger Delta, the hub of the country’s energy industry, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said on Friday. Nigeria earned ,177-billion from crude oil sales in February compared to ,877-billion in January, the bank said in its monthly report.
African leaders emerged from their first attempt at brokering peace in Sudan’s Darfur region without a major development on Sunday, though Sudan’s lead negotiator said the groups made ”some progress”. The talks aim to end more than three years of deadly civil war that has left more than 180 000 people dead in western Sudan and driven millions more from their homes.
Nigeria’s President Olusegun Obasanjo dropped his clearest hint yet that he hopes to stay on if Parliament approves a contested proposition to change term limits, he said in an interview published on Monday. ”The reforms that we are putting in place have to be anchored, anchored in legislation, anchored in institutions,” Obasanjo told the United States newspaper, Washington Post.
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.
Nigeria captured former Liberian leader and warlord Charles Taylor on Wednesday and deported him towards Monrovia, where United Nations peacekeepers were waiting to arrest him on charges of crimes against humanity. West Africa’s most notorious fugitive was flown out of the northern city of Maiduguri on board a Nigerian presidential jet.
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.
Nigerian separatist guerrillas released three kidnapped oil workers — two Americans and a Briton — on Monday after holding them hostage for more than a month, according to a state government spokesperson. "They’re all here. They’re all OK," the Delta State spokesperson said by telephone from his government’s local offices in Warri, an oil port 340km southeast of Lagos.
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.
The top 16 floors of a 24-storey office block collapsed in central Lagos on Wednesday, blocking the main commercial street through one of Africa’s biggest cities and leaving at least one dead and 24 injured. The building had been weakened by a fire that swept the structure earlier in the week.
Nigeria’s first national headcount in 15 years headed into a second day on Wednesday amid clashes between police and vigilantes, attacks on counters and protests by disgruntled census workers. Nigeria is recognised as Africa’s most populous country but has never conducted an uncontested census.
At least six people were killed in clashes over the weekend in south-western Nigeria, police said on Monday, while several incidents of violence were also reported in the north in the run-up to the country’s controversial census. President Olusegun Obasanjo has called for a headcount in Africa’s most populous country.
Sooty towers of flame spew into the air, night and day, as excess natural gas from the petroleum industry burns off, buffeting Nigerian villagers with jet-force heat and noise. For many living near the dozens of gas flares dotting southern Nigeria, the flames are just another, particularly potent, reminder that the country’s oil wealth has done little to benefit its people.
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.
Nigerian separatist rebels threatened to step up their attacks on foreign-owned oil facilities on Wednesday after dashing hopes that their three Western hostages would soon be released. A spokesperson for the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta confirmed in a statement that the hostages had been split up and warned of imminent raids across the region.
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.
Nigerian separatist guerrillas who are holding three Western hostages said on Thursday that they had fought off an attack by the military in a fierce gun battle on the Niger Delta creeks. Military spokespersons could not initially confirm or deny there had been a clash, but a boat captain operating in the area confirmed he had seen injured troops.
Nigerian officials stepped up efforts on Thursday to negotiate the release of two kidnapped Americans and a Briton after six of the hostages’ fellow oil workers were freed by militants. On Wednesday, separatist guerrillas allowed two thirds of their captives to go free after holding them for 13 days in the swamps of the Niger Delta.