Militants have released six foreign oil workers they deemed ”low value”, but held on to two Americans and one Briton and threatened crippling new attacks aimed at cutting off all oil production in Nigeria. American Macon Hawkins, who turned 69 on Wednesday, was the first to be released.
The United States oil giant Chevron has been forced to cut production in Nigeria by 13 000 barrels per day after a pipeline in an area patrolled by armed militants sprang a leak, a company spokesperson said. The damage came at a time when separatist guerrilla fighters were sabotaging nearby facilities operated by Shell.
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/ 23 February 2006
It all started with a series of provocative cartoons in a Danish newspaper, but few in Nigeria are worried about that now. The fury unleashed in protests against the European press has taken on a deadly logic of its own, and no-one knows how many will be dead before it ends.
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/ 21 February 2006
Nigerian authorities hunted for nine foreign workers being held as ”human shields” by rebel fighters on Tuesday as the crisis in Africa’s biggest oil industry forced world oil prices up sharply. The nine oilmen were seized on Saturday by separatist guerrillas during an attack on the energy giant Shell’s Forcados oil terminal.
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/ 21 February 2006
Militants holding nine foreign oil-worker hostages called on Tuesday for independent negotiators to mediate among the hostage-takers and a Nigerian federal government they deem illegitimate. The Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta said there have been no negotiations so far for the liberation of the hostages taken on Saturday.
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/ 20 February 2006
Nigerian separatist guerrillas taunted the army with claims of further attacks on Monday after a weekend of violence forced energy giant Shell to slash the country’s oil exports by a fifth. There was still no news of nine foreign oil workers seized by the gang on Saturday.
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/ 17 February 2006
Nigerian officials on Friday pressed on with mass poultry culling in the ravaged north to prevent bird flu from claiming human lives amid fears that the virus could have spread to yet another farm. Ali Hussani Dutsin-Ma, the top health official in the northern state of Katsina, said that the deadly H5N1 strain of the virus that can kill humans may have surfaced in a second farm near the state capital.
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/ 15 February 2006
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”.
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/ 14 February 2006
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.
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/ 13 February 2006
Samples taken from a Nigerian family suspected of contracting a fatal bird flu strain have been sent abroad so experts can determine whether the virus has jumped to humans in Africa for the first time. Two children were reported ill near a farm in the northern town of Jaji, where the deadly H5N1 bird flu strain was detected on a poultry farm on Wednesday.
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/ 11 February 2006
Nigerian officials battled to contain an outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu on Saturday amid reports that it is spreading rapidly through poultry flocks and approaching the Niger border. Agricultural officials were preparing to quarantine and disinfect two farms where tens of thousands of birds have died on the outskirts of Kano
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/ 9 February 2006
Africa’s first outbreak of a deadly strain of bird flu has spread to at least four farms, Nigerian officials said on Thursday, as the continent braced itself for a possible epidemic. Nigerian agriculture ministry spokesperson Tope Ajakaiye said tests on chicken carcasses had identified the H5N1 type of avian influenza.
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/ 7 February 2006
Nigerian state lawmakers burned Danish and Norwegian flags on Tuesday and cancelled a €23-million (-million) contract to import buses in protest at cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed. A rowdy session of the Kano House of Assembly also voted unanimously to ban the sale of all Danish and Norwegian products in the state.
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/ 7 February 2006
An epidemic has killed 60 000 chickens in northern Nigeria, officials said on Monday, while attempting to calm fears that the deadly bird-flu virus had spread to the country. Salihu Jibrin, director of veterinary services in Kano state’s agriculture ministry, said initial evidence suggests that the devastating outbreak was fowl cholera.
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/ 6 February 2006
An oil refinery in the southern Nigerian port city of Warri has been shut down because of damage to its crude oil supply pipeline, a company spokesperson said on Sunday. The refinery, which has a daily production capacity of 125 000 barrels of crude, was shut down last week because the oil supply from the Escravos pipeline was unavailable.
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/ 1 February 2006
Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has resumed production of 120 000 barrels per day of crude at an offshore oilfield that was shut three weeks ago because of hostage-taking, a spokesperson said on Wednesday. "Production has restarted at the EA field. We resumed at the weekend," the spokesman said.
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/ 30 January 2006
Nigerian insurgents released four kidnapped foreign contractors on Monday, but immediately vowed to press home a series of violent attacks against the country’s key oil and gas industries. ”We will shortly carry out greatly significant attacks,” said the militants in a statement from an e-mail account used by the hostage takers.
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/ 30 January 2006
Nigerian separatist militants released four foreign oil workers on Monday, after holding them hostage in the swamps of the Niger Delta for almost three weeks, officials and their employer said. The men — an American, a Briton, a Bulgarian and a Honduran — have been handed over to the Bayelsa State government.
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/ 27 January 2006
Nigerian militants said on Friday they have pulled out of talks on the fate of four kidnapped Western oil workers, as officials released the first picture of the hostages. The dangerous crisis in Africa’s biggest oil-export industry continued to push world crude prices back towards their historic high.
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/ 24 January 2006
Gunmen mounted on speedboats stormed a riverside oil facility in the southern Nigerian city of Port Harcourt on Tuesday and opened fire on the police, killing several of them, a witness said. An oil industry security source said that reports indicated that seven policemen and two civilian workers, including an expatriate, had been killed.
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/ 23 January 2006
Militants holding four foreign hostages in Nigeria claimed on Sunday they would release the captives soon, according to a statement purportedly from the militant group. The hostages were seized near a Shell oil field on January 11 by a group that also claimed responsibility for other oil industry attacks that have cut Nigerian production by almost 10%.
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/ 22 January 2006
The leader of Nigerian militants who captured four foreign oil workers said on Saturday he would not talk with negotiators sent by the government and reiterated threats to launch new attacks on oil installations. The workers were seized on January 11 near a Shell oil field by militants behind attacks on Nigerian oil installations.
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/ 19 January 2006
British Airways plans to help the Nigerian aviation industry modernise in the wake of several recent air disasters that have claimed hundreds of lives, said a Nigerian government statement on Thursday. Nigeria’s aging aviation fleet is made up of mostly secondhand or leased aircraft from former Soviet block countries.
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/ 18 January 2006
Tension was mounting on Wednesday in the city of Warri as soldiers hunted for a heavily armed militia that has attacked oil facilities in southern Nigeria and kidnapped four foreign workers. Boat crews and human rights activists said military forces have deployed in strength on the waterways of the Niger Delta.
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/ 18 January 2006
United States First Lady Laura Bush announced on Wednesday that Nigeria will receive -million in US assistance to fight Aids as she heard a young woman at a small Aids clinic tell how medications helped her avoid death from the disease. Bush visited health workers and Aids patients at a hospital on the outskirts of Abuja.
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/ 17 January 2006
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) on Monday revoked the operating licences of 14 banks that it described as ”unhealthy” after they failed in their efforts to recapitalise or merge with other banks. Despite failure of the banks, their individual and corporate depositors will not lose their money, CBN Governor Charles Soludo said.
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/ 13 January 2006
Nigerian troops were searching on Friday for an armed gang which stormed an oil industry supply vessel and kidnapped four foreign workers, a military spokesperson said. The hostages were taken on Wednesday when around 40 gunmen in three canoes seized the boat Liberty Service in waters off the Niger Delta, 180km east of Lagos, naval Captain Obiara Medani said.
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/ 12 January 2006
Four Shell foreign oil workers have been abducted from an offshore oilfield in southern Nigeria, a company spokesperson said on Thursday. The Nigerian press said two of the Shell employees were Britons and the two other Hondurians, who were aboard a tanker, the <i>Sea Eagle</i>, loading crude oil in an offshore extraction zone.
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/ 11 January 2006
Defeated in the field by a bloody military crackdown, Nigeria’s home-grown Islamic insurgency has dispersed amid the dusty back streets of the country’s teeming northern cities and is plotting its comeback. Small numbers of militants await the moment to re-launch their campaign for a Muslim revolution in Africa’s most populous state.
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.
The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has liquidated 13 commercial banks which failed in their efforts to recapitalise or merge with other banks, the CBN said on Tuesday in an official statement. Twenty-five mostly private banks at the weekend met the CBN December 31 deadline to rake up 25-billion naira (-million), merge or face liquidation.
Two plane crashes which killed more than 200 people, including schoolchildren, and a clampdown on opposition figures were the striking events that blighted Nigeria’s social and political landscape in 2005. ”2005 is a year that is ending on a catastrophic note and I do not expect any radical change from our leaders in 2006 because they are bereft of good leadership,” said reverend Gabriel Osu, spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lagos.