Two weeks before Nigeria’s election, Ike Okonta takes aim at progressive politics in Nigeria – or the lack thereof. He traces the crisis back to the rule of General Ibrahim Babangida in the 1980s, when universities were devastated by economic policy.
One of the WikiLeaks documents sheds light on how Pfizer Pharmaceutical conducts business overseas.
The Nigerian government needs to show commitment to the Protocol on the Rights of Women in Africa by passing relevant laws and allocating funds to women’s rights.
Nigeria’s future, in many ways, turns on the question of ethnicity and politics, the same questions that have hounded Nigeria since its founding. These questions will be at the fore as Nigerians head to the polls next year to elect their next president.
Spills, leaks and deliberate discharges are happening in oilfields all over the world and very few people seem to care.
President Barack Obama’s election brought jubilation to the streets of Nigeria. However, hopes for a new U.S. engagement with Africa under the Obama administration are dimming. Nigerians are rankled by two high-profile events that illustrate how U.S. foreign policy still ignores the opinions and perceptions of African people.
For the past two months, the Nigerian military has been engaged in a standoff with armed resistance groups in the Niger Delta. The full-scale offensive, launched by Nigerian forces on May 13 with fighter-planes and gunboats, has destroyed villages and displaced upwards of 30,000 people from the region.
Behind fighter-planes and gunboats, Nigerian forces launched a full-scale offensive in the Niger Delta on May 13, displacing 30,000 people and sparking a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of civilians fleeing destroyed villages are now trapped between armed resistance groups and the Nigerian military. These civilians are hiding in the bush without food, water, or medical supplies, let alone Internet access to alert the world of their plight, as Iranians are doing via Twitter.
Someone very important is visiting Africa, specifically five countries including Tanzania, Rwanda, Benin, Ghana, and Liberia. He is the president of the United States of America. The hassles of hosting a U.S. president are bad enough. His people take over your whole country and make our normally inefficient states go into overdrive and our egregious first ladies and their husbands go into overkill to show their hospitality. We never knew many of them could bend their knees until they were leading cleaning troops across the capitals in preparation for Clinton’s visit in 1998 from Kampala to Accra!