Nigeria's exploding population

Nigeria's This Day has a piece on the country's skyrocketing population. There were 140 million Nigerians five years ago but that figure has already risen to nearly 168 million and is expected to hit 221 million by the year 2020. The head of the country's National Population Commission pointed out that this meant that Nigerians represent fully 2.4% of humanity.

Jos

The BBC World Service’s Assignment program has a good documentary on sectarian divisions that persist in the Nigerian city of Jos.

Enugu police on the rampage

The BBC has a disturbing report on what appears to be a killing spree by the police in Enugu, Nigeria.

The Chief Medical Director at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu says his staff are being forced to carry out mass burials because of the corpses that are flooding his hospital.

The Enugu State Police Commissioner said he was 'too busy' to talk about his out of control forces.

Nigerian police have come under widespread criticism for extrajudicial killings.

Rawlings denies Nigerian funding

Peace FM reports that a spokesman for Jerry Rawlings has denied media reports that the former Ghanaian president helped channel $3.5 million into his National Democratic Congress' 2008 electoral campaign. The $3.5 million allegedly came from the governor of Nigeria's River State, who is under investigation by a Nigerian anti-corruption commission.

Ghanaian law prohibits political parties from receiving money from foreign citizens or institutions.

NDC candidate John Atta Mills, once Rawlings' vice-president, was narrowly elected president in the campaign.

"Oil Industry Has Brought Poverty and Pollution to Niger Delta"

Amnesty International recently issued a damning report on the manner in which the oil industry has destroyed Nigeria's Niger Delta Region. The title says it all: "Oil Industry Has Brought Poverty and Pollution to Niger Delta."

The Amnesty report notes: The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) describes the region as suffering from “administrative neglect, crumbling social infrastructure and services, high unemployment, social deprivation, abject poverty, filth and squalor, and endemic conflict.” This poverty, and its contrast with the wealth generated by oil, has become one of the world’s starkest and most disturbing examples of the “resource curse”.

Oil has generated an estimated US$600 billion since the 1960s. Despite this, many people in the oil-producing areas have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water, and eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins.

“More than 60 per cent of people in the region depend on the natural environment for their livelihood,” said Audrey Gaughran “Yet, pollution by the oil industry is destroying the vital resource on which they depend.”

Oil pollution kills fish, their food sources and fish larvae, and damages the ability of fish to reproduce, causing both immediate damage and long-term harm to fish stocks. Oil pollution also damages fishing equipment.

Oil spills and waste dumping have also seriously damaged agricultural land. Long-term effects include damage to soil fertility and agricultural productivity, which in some cases can last for decades. In numerous cases, these long-term effects have undermined a family’s only source of livelihood.

The destruction of livelihoods and the lack of accountability and redress have led people to steal oil and vandalize oil infrastructure in an attempt to gain compensation or clean-up contracts.


Black Looks blog has written quite extensively on the catastrophe as well...

Shell pays blood money to Ogonis

The Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell has agreed to pay $15.5 million in blood money to a group of Ogoni plaintiffs. The group had filed a lawsuit in US court alleging Shell's complicity with human rights abuses in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria. The multinational pretended that the agreement was a "humanitarian gesture," presumably thinking that someone might be fooled. If Shell is suddenly concerned with "humanitarianism," perhaps they could stop the toxic gas flaring and other environmental and resulting human devastation that they are causing in the Delta.


Other sources on the story...
-The Independent (UK daily)
-This Day (Nigeria daily)
-AllAfrica.com
-Essay by Ken Saro Wiwa Jr. (background)
-Shell Guilty (pressure group)
-Shell (corporate press release)

Morons in high places

Nigeria's Vanguard reports on some rather bizarre comments by the country's foreign minister.

Under its universal periodic review mechanism proceedure, in a session lasting three hours Chief Ojo Madueke presented an overview of Nigeria's human rights situation... His presentation caused a stir when he informed members of the council that the government of Nigeria had been unable to locate persons of gay and sexual orientation, despite concerted efforts by his ministry to include this category of persons in the consultations on the human rights situation in Nigeria.

The foreign minister is part of a government which has proposed to throw people in jail for up to five years who 'witnesses, abet and aids the solemnisation' of a same sex marriage. Two years ago, the foreign minister's party proposed a bill which would criminalize free speech that suggested that gays and lesbians deserved 'rights of recognition'.

Striking a blow for sectarian harmony, the government's virulent anti-gay crusade is one of the few things on which the country's normally fractious Muslim and conservative Christian communities can find common ground.

Given the government-sanctioned assault on (at the very least) their freedom, is it really much of a shock that gays and lesbians in Nigeria aren't eager to discuss their sexual orientation with a rabidly homophobic government?!

Mini-skirt measurers for Nigeria

In light of previous essays (such as this one) about vile anti-gay McCarthyism in Nigeria, it's only fair to point out that gays aren't the only ones targeted by the macho establishment. With all the problems of corruption, poverty and resource mismanagement in the country, the government has time to worry about regulating the skirt length of women.

Supporters argue that banning mini-skirts will prevent rape and preserve social morality.

If you want to reduce rape, here's a radical concept: punish more rapists.

I would say that the idea that men can't control themselves is a bit insulting to me as a male. Except at the end of the day, it's not men who suffer from this stereotype.

Men supposedly can't control themselves so the solution is to punish women?!!

The way closed-minded people twist logic is amazing sometimes.

Gay apartheid

I've written before about anti-gay McCarthyism in Nigeria. A few years ago, the federal government wanted to ban all free speech that argued in favor of gays as human beings. Specifically, legislation would "punish individuals who witness, celebrate with or support couples involved in homosexual relationships" with a 5 year prison term.

And then I read something in Wikipedia that sounded nearly identical to what the Nigerian federal government proposed.

An entity enacted a law that stated:

"Any person...who shall be guilty of printing, publishing or circulating printed, typewritten or written matter urging or presenting for public acceptance or general information, arguments or suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between [two groups], shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine not exceeding five hundred (500.00) dollars or imprisonment not exceeding six (6) months or both."

The entity was the US state of Mississippi.

The two groups in question about which it was illegal to ARGUE that there should be any equality between them were blacks and whites.

Debate over laptops

The UN's IRIN news service reports on the increasingly controverisal debate in Nigeria over the wisdom of providing one million cheap laptops to the country's schoolchildren.

Anti-gay barbarity in Nigeria, South Africa

A few times this year, I've written about the barbaric anti-gay witchhunt that seems to be sweeping through Nigeria. The federal government wants to ban not simply homosexual acts, which are already illegal. But they want to ban people from speaking about gay rights. And they want to "punish individuals who witness, celebrate with or support couples involved in homosexual relationships" with a 5 year prison term. Essentially, they want to imprison any citizen who treats gays as human beings.

Now, eighteen men in northern Nigeria may face death by stoning for alleged sodomy. The BBC reports that over a dozen Nigerian Muslims have already been sentenced to death by stoning, none have been carried out. [T]here have been two amputations in north-western Zamfara State which pioneered the introduction of the Islamic legal system in the country though the BBC doesn't indicate what was amputated.

South Africa, by contrast, has the first constitution in the world to specifically guarantee equal protection under the law for gay citizens. But societal attitudes remain extremely conservative. Human Rights Watch condemns the recent brutal murders of three lesbians in the country.

“Despite legal commitments to equality for all, lesbians in South African townships are still targeted for rape and murder,” said Jessica Stern, researcher in the LGBT Rights Program of Human Rights Watch. “Poverty, prejudice, homophobia and sexism are building a new pass system, where many women dare not walk openly on the street.”

Sadly, the hate crimes are not firsts. HRW indicates that the country is in the clutches of a 'climate of violent homophobia.'

African political elites often complain about the dehumanizing legacy of colonialism. And they spent many years agitating against the hideous apartheid system in South Africa and Rhodesia. But they are largely silent, if not eagerly approving, of aggressive homophobic state policy in places like Nigeria and Uganda.

If the three South African women had been murdered by whites because of their black skin, you can be sure there would've been continental, if not international, outrage. But since they were lesbians, their murders were seen as irrelevant, if not welcome.

I guess mindless hateful bigotry is acceptable so long it's based on one inate characteristic, but not another.

Another child kidnaped in the Niger Delta

Things just keep going downhill in Nigeria's oil-producing Niger Delta. A few days after militants kidnaped a three-year old British girl, a two-year old son of a local chief has also been seized. The BBC reports that while adults have often been kidnaped for ransom, especially oil workers, the seizing of children is a troubling new phenomenon.

The newly-elected (sort of) president Umaru Musa Yar'adua needs to put this near the top of his priority list.

Yet This Day newspaper wonders if Yar'adua is really in charge.

Africa's top oil producer needs at least $40 billion to meet MDGs

According to the BBC, more than half of all Nigerians live poverty (though it doesn't say what the standard is). This despite the fact that the country is one of the world's most important oil producers.

The poverty advisor to former president Olesegun Obasanjo recently said that Nigeria needs between $5bn to $7bn per annum to achieve the UN's Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in 2015.

According to the UPI, Nigeria has taken in an estimated $300 billion in oil revenue since the 1970s, or an average of roughly $8 billion a year.

I suspect that if even half of those revenues had actually gone toward poverty reduction or other broad-based social programs, Nigeria would be in a lot better shape than it is now.

The Second Biafran War?

As if Nigeria doesn't have enough problems with a de facto insurgency in the oil-producing Niger Delta, now it has trouble again in the southeast of the country.

The one-time leader of the Biafran secessionist movement Emeka Ojukwu says that the region has more reason than ever to leave the Nigerian federation. He said that the region's 14 million people were disenfranchised during Nigeria's recent rigged presidential elections.

"What upsets the Igbo population is we are not equally Nigerian as the others," he said.

The comments were made on the 40th anniversary of the beginning of the Biafran War, in which over a million people died.

Lagos

The Los Angeles Times has a 'portrait' of Lagos, one of Africa's largest and most chaotic cities.