A clash between troops and unidentified ethnic militants on Tuesday in Nigeria's oil city of Warri left a soldier and four others dead, military officials said. Skirmishes between ethnic militants and soldiers occur frequently in the oil-rich Niger Delta, where militants steal crude oil from pipelines and sabotage oil facilities in a bid to export payoffs from the government and oil multinationals.

It happens at night, under cover of darkness. Thieves move into the mangrove swamps and creeks of Nigeria's southern Niger Delta region, homing in on the oil pipelines that criss-cross the area. They puncture the lines or open their valves, siphoning off crude and refined oil into barges or trucks. "Bunkering" - as this method of stealing oil is known - is taking a toll on local communities and the environment. After puncturing pipelines to steal oil, the thieves tend to leave them leaking. The resultant spills have proved detrimental for vast expanses of forests and farmlands in the Niger Delta - and have also led to fires.

The Eritrean government has denied soliciting for Nigerian mediation in its border conflict with neighbouring Ethiopia. In a statement, the Eritrean embassy in Nigeria said contrary to reports in the Nigerian daily, The Guardian, on 3 March, the Eritrean government had not sought any assistance from that country to intervene in the matter, because it regarded the April 2002 ruling of the boundary commission as "final and binding".

Nigeria’s predominantly Muslim Kano State, which is boycotting a global polio immunisation programme on suspicion that the vaccines are tainted by anti-fertility substances, plans to order its own supplies from Muslim countries in Asia, a senior official said on Sunday.

Nigeria is ready to mediate in the border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea, its foreign minister says. Olu Adeneji told the BBC's Network Africa programme that Eritrea's leader had asked Nigeria to intervene. If confirmed, this would mark a new strategy for Eritrea, which has insisted that the dispute was settled by a 2002 international court ruling.

Relief has come the way of persons living with HIV/AIDS as the first consignment of N500 million anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs has arrived the country. However, the drugs will be given to the 10,000 persons already enrolled in the government approved 25 access centres. This was announced by Health Minister Professor Eyitayo Lambo.

Members of a Nigerian committee tasked with verifying the safety of oral polio vaccine amid suspicion that it causes HIV/AIDS and infertility have deemed the product safe, the Nigerian daily Vanguard reports. Committee members were dispatched early last month to South Africa and India to monitor analyses of the vaccine and to Indonesia to meet with scientists at a vaccine production company. The team found trace amounts of estradiol, a hormone suspected of causing infertility, but said the amounts were minute, "much less than what is found in recycled drinking water in several developed countries."

In this third of three reports on e-mail fraud, Go Digital's Tracey Logan meets Nuhu Ribadu, head of Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, who is trying to end so-called 419 e-mail scams.

Some northern states opposed to the immunisation of children against polio are committing an unforgivable offence against the innocent kids and humanity, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) has declared. At the forefront of the opposition to the use of polio vaccine are Bauchi, Niger, Kano and Zamfara states. The Nigerian Supreme Council for Sharia NSCS (NSCS) set the stage for the controversy last year when it alleged that the exercise was a western plot to make women in the North infertile.

For the first time in recent years, justices of the Supreme Court are facing a barrage of criticisms related to bribery, according to the latest newsletter of the Independence Advocacy Project. The Chief Justice of Nigeria Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais had to speak out openly in court in Abuja in February on the issue: "We have nothing to hide. Let the police step in and do their job. We are interested in getting to the root of the matter. Let me say and assure all who are here and who would hear of this matter that there is absolutely no truth in the several uncouth and insupportable allegations made against me and my brethren in this court."

No one is sure just how many people have died due to HIV/AIDS in this town of 15,000 but to the people who live here, the deaths are adding up. The rising death rate here as well as across sub-Saharan Africa, where 29 million people are living with the disease, were enough evidence for 36-year-old Nduka Ozor, a Lagos-based business man and coordinator of the community’s Youth Forum, that people needed to get the facts about the disease.

Despite criticisms in some quarters, the Presidency and state governors has justified the Federal Government's move to accept white Zimbabwean farmers in Nigeria. The government described the proposed investment as "a positive move in the effort to move Nigeria from peasant to mechanised commercial agriculture." The government's position was disclosed after the presidential committee on the proposed investment of Southern African farmers in Nigeria rose from its second meeting in Abuja.

President Olusegun Obasanjo has approved the dismissal of Justice Chris P.N. Senlong of the Federal High Court from the Federal Judicial Service. The dismissal of the Plateau State born judge followed the recommendation of the National Judicial Council (NJC), which found him guilty of corruption.

As African Heads of State converged in Syrte, Libya to begin their two-day meeting, Independent Advocacy Project (IAP), the good governance group, again called on the federal government to seize the opportunity presented by this meeting to ratify and begin putting in place structures that would allow for effective implementation of the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption which was adopted last July. In a statement released in Lagos, IAP says signing and ratifying the Convention will compliment Nigeria's efforts under the Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) which is part of the monitoring process of the New Partnership for Africa's Development (NEPAD). Nigeria has voluntarily submitted itself to be reviewed under the APRM.

Silvia Sansoni, a journalist who works for the British weekly news magazine "The Economist", was expelled from Nigeria on 19 February 2004 after being taken to Lagos airport under police escort and placed on a Paris-bound flight. Reporters Without Borders (RSF) expressed shock over the incident, which the organisation considers to be a press freedom violation. RSF said, however, "We are not really surprised. The Nigerian authorities have been treating the foreign press with contempt for several years and have never stopped making the lives of foreign correspondents very difficult."

The value of news and public affairs took front and centre stage at the Internews Local Voices Radio Station Managers workshop that ended in Abuja on February 14. Amidst back-slapping and camaraderie of meeting old and new friends, radio station managers committed to actively strive for more depth in their coverage of news and public affairs. "We are returning to base imbued with ideas on programming and how to do better audience-focused communication in relation to HIV/AIDS", said the Manager Programs of Radio Kano, Hajia Sa'a Ibrahim.

United Nations health agencies have postponed plans to immunize children at the centre of the world's fastest growing polio outbreak, after a fourth Nigerian state announced a boycott over doubts about the vaccine's safety. The World Health Organisation and the UN Children's Fund had hoped Nigeria would release the results of new tests on the vaccine to disprove allegations by Islamic leaders that the immunization campaign is part of a U.S. plot to spread AIDS and make African girls infertile.

The Institute of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law (IHRHL) has raised an alarm that over 4,500 persons are currently being unlawfully detained at Federal Prisons in Rivers State. While it viewed the plight of these persons with “deep regret,” IHRHL noted that most of these persons “have spent years ranging from one to fifteen years without any form of trial for whatever accusations levelled against them”. The Institute further noted that “section 36, sub-section 5 of our Constitution is clear and unambiguous when it provides that these persons are innocent until proven guilty by a competent law court”.

The Minister of Education, Professor Fabian Osuji, has stated that there was need to evolve an education strategy that will rehabilitate restive youths in the country. In a keynote address presented in Abuja at the commencement of the Education Tax Fund National sensitization work-shop on rehabilitative education for self improvement and national development, the minister said the restive youth phenomenon has become a national concern and requires serious attention.

Almost five years after the end of military dictatorship, Africa's most populated nation shows a deep and pervasive sense of disappointment with the record of civilian government. After the wasted opportunities of President Olusegun Obasanjo's first term, his administration now has limited time left for completing belated reforms and making government more responsive to the country's pressing needs. No country provides a more graphic illustration of the curse of oil. Oil began flowing just as the colonial era ended, and has completely skewed the country's economic and public life. In the classic pattern of African oil states, power and wealth has up to now been concentrated in the hands of a corrupt élite.