Ethnic and political violence are likely to surge ahead of April presidential elections, Nobel laureate author Wole Soyinka said Friday. Soyinka, an outspoken critic of successive military regimes, said Nigeria was in an anarchic state in which normal government functions have been upended.

Once more attention is on education following the recent High Level Group on Education for All (EFA) meeting held in Abuja by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in conjunction with the Federal Government and other related international agencies. UNESCO has classified Nigeria among countries that may miss the 2015 deadline for the provision of Education for All if urgent action is not taken.

President Olusegun Obasanjo’s main challenger for Nigeria’s ruling party presidential ticket on Monday filed a suit in court to invalidate the incumbent President's nomination. Alex Ekwueme, a former civilian vice president, in his court papers said Obasanjo’s election at the 5 January People’s Democratic Party (PDP) primaries was in violation of party regulations.

The National Programme on Immunisation (NPI) has just released a report that shows a continuing and dramatic decline in the incidence of fatal childhood diseases in Nigeria. Diseases covered by the report include tetanus, poliomyelitis, diphtheria, measles, tuberculosis, yellow fever, and cerebrospinal meningitis, which have been responsible for high infant mortality in the country.

Former military rulers, who are blamed for much of Nigeria's woes, are back on the political stage - this time running as civilians in the April presidential election. And, no one is happy. "Unless a miracle happens, or less known parties form an alliance - none of them will pose a serious challenge to the big four parties which have nominated ex-military rulers as their presidential candidates," says Ronke Damilola, a political scientist in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial capital.

Nigerian police have arrested three men allegedly contracted to print as many as five million fake voters' cards ahead of April's presidential and parliamentary elections. The operation, in which police also seized 500,000 faked voting documents, took place in Lagos following a tip-off a week ago but was only announced on Friday.

Celebrations at the Armed Forces Remembrance Day climaxed with the first meeting in public of President Olusegun Obasanjo, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential candidate in the 2003 presidential elections, with his rival, All Nigerian Peoples Party (ANPP) presidential candidate, General Muhammadu Buhari. Clad in white flowing agbada, Gen. Buhari caused a stir when he entered the venue after the national anthem had been played and as President Obasanjo was about to march forward and lay his wreath on the tomb of the unknown soldier.

Swiss justice authorities will hand over to Nigeria files they built up in a money-laundering investigation of the West African nation's late dictator, General Sani Abacha, a leading official said on Tuesday.

Events in the lives of two women in Nigeria once more focus our attention on the position of women in class society. Safiya Huseini's face tells a life story - a woman oppressed by her religion, her womanhood, her society. For daring to challenge the dictates of a patriarchal society she was condemned to death. Amina Lawal is herself a no less "perfect" specimen of a Muslim woman. Neither was her crime any different from that of Safiya’s. They both had sex outside wedlock. But, while Safiya has escaped punishment Amina’s fate still hangs in the balance. Both women have more in common than a shared crime - and they share this with millions of women, particularly under the rule of Islamic law. To be sure the position of women in "Christian" society is not a paradise and much still has to be done to achieve genuine emancipation, but compared to her Muslim counterpart she has conquered more rights.

This week a lot of noise will be made regarding the nomination of incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo of Nigeria as the candidate for the People’s Democratic Party heading into upcoming elections. More than a few people will regard the convention just held as some sort of sign that democracy is on the march in Nigeria. The truth is very different. Functional democracy is in a fragile state and being suffocated by corruption, political violence and silence in the face of quite unacceptable practices on the part of government.

The upcoming Nigerian elections are being conducted by a body whose commissioners are appointed solely by the sitting President, who has gone out of his way to appoint associates and ‘party hacks’. Local government elections are actually under the thumb of the state governor who also has exclusive power to appoint a state commission. The control of the electoral commissions is just one element of a political system that has a long way to go before it can be recognised as anything like a democratic system in which individuals are confident that they can freely participate in elections where their votes will be properly counted.

I could go on at length about corruption of the current political process, and about how it starts from the very first stages of the election cycle and culminates in an election that is reduced to a meaningless charade. However for the balance of this editorial I would like to emphasise the role of the international community and the extent to which it legitimises regimes like those found in Nigeria.

Over the last four years the Nigerian government has wasted a great deal of goodwill both domestically and internationally. At the international and local level there has been a response that resonates desperation: that any civilian regime is better than a return to military rule. Unfortunately this is only partly true. In the last four years Human Rights Watch and others have chronicled human rights violations and mass killings, including several by government, which would have brought immediate sanctions against a military regime.

There is a crucial need for the international community to recognise that political elites, dressed in the garb of sham democracies, can be every bit as violent as the harshest of military regimes. For people from NGOs who have traditionally resisted government repression and are now encouraging political participation the risks of violence are real and ever-present. There have already been a number of political killings. The unfortunate reality is that as we struggle to bring forward genuine elections we face the risk of many more casualties, primarily at the hands of political thugs used with no fear of accountability by political incumbents.

If Nigeria is not subjected to intense pressure, both internally and externally, to allow the development of the fundamentals of democracy, then those of us in ‘civil society’ face a bleak future. While the belated registration of new political parties, after inexcusable delays which have wrecked their chances of normal development ahead of upcoming elections, is a step forward, the reform of Nigeria’s electoral laws and practices is a fundamental pre-requisite before Nigeria is even recognised as a democracy.

Nigeria is not alone in Africa in practising appalling shams of democracy. One of the reasons for some peculiar stances taken by ‘African leaders’ is that in too many countries we are ruled by elites who have no regard for the grassroots members of their society. Often civil society in the form of NGOs are pursuing quite different agendas to those of our so-called leaders. Some of the positions we are forced into are quite different to those that are assumed by international NGOs, who have sometimes neglected the question of legitimacy of many African governments. For example, my own experience is that there is considerable sympathy amongst NGOs in different countries for the firmest conditionality for governments seeking fresh loans to prop up corrupt regimes on various pre-texts.

Our appeal to the international community is based on the fact that Nigeria has repeatedly said the international community is welcome to observe how far it has progressed on the democratic path. This opportunity should be taken, but pursued vigorously in a manner where the international community seriously considers whether the fundamentals have changed in Nigeria and communicates exactly how far we have to go for the Nigerian government to achieve international respectability.

* Ledum Mitee is the President of Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), an NGO which has been campaigning for the environmental and human rights of the Ogoni people since 1990. [email][email protected]
Ph (+234) 84 233 907

* Send your comments for publication in the Letters and Comments section of Pambazuka News to [email protected]

Links

* Nigerian president fights for survival
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,869158,00.html
* "I'm sorry," says Obasanjo for civilian massacre

Nigeria's anti-corruption commission has a tough job - the country is ranked the second most corrupt in the world according to Transparency International. The commission to fight corruption was one of the bodies set up by President Olusegun Obasanjo soon after he came into office in 1999. But in all that time, its work has led to the conviction of just one public official.

The Executive Board of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has expressed concern over Nigeria's macroeconomic imbalances which it said remained large and persistent while poverty and social indicators are declining. The Fund also insisted that Nigerian economy shrank by 0.9 per cent in 2002.

Lack of funds and partial lack of awareness and the failure to commit full-scale attention to conservation of birds by Nigeria and many African countries in the past, may have stalled the interest of overseas non-governmental agencies' activities, a Daily Trust newspaper investigation has revealed.

A US federal appeals court has temporarily blocked the deportation of a Dallas woman who says she and her 3-year-old daughter, who was born in the United States, would be subjected to genital mutilation if she were forced to return to her native Nigeria.

Women's Aid Collective (WACOL), a non-governmental organisation which seeks to protect the rights of women, has decried the high incidence of violence against women in the country and called on all relevant authorities to help stem the scourge.

In response to the call of many teachers, critics, researchers, and writers of African literature, this book is being offered as a groundbreaking source that brings together literary practitioners and librarians into a century of conversations.

Patents are only one of many factors preventing widespread access to drugs in Nigeria. Other obstacles include high cost, poor infrastructure, government policy and corruption.

Nigeria's ruling party has announced that its presidential candidate in next year's elections will be from the south. President Olusegun Obasanjo is from the south and is standing for re-election.

The Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders has expressed its support for Nigerian human rights associations and its members who have been arrested and harassed in recent weeks. The organisation has condemned the climate of hostility against human rights defenders aimed at dissuading them from carrying out their human rights activities and their fight against impunity. It is urging all concerned parties and activists to write to the Nigerian authorities urging them to put an end to all forms of harassment and threats to all human rights defenders and their organisations in Nigeria.

Following a recent oil spill in the Niger Delta, send protest letters to Shell in Nigeria demanding:
1. immediate and full clean-up of the spill;
2. relief materials to the community to cushion the economic effects of
the spill;
3. adequate compensation to the local people whose environment and means
of livelihood have been destroyed by the spill.
ADDRESS:
SPDC Nig. Ltd
Freeman House
21/22 Marina, P.M.B. 2418
Lagos, Nigeria
Tel: 23412601600-19
Fax: 23412636681
[email][email protected] and [email][email protected]