Garlic heals HIV infections in children; 20 years of AIDS: June 5, 1981-June 5, 2001; Measles cases increase by nearly 700 percent in Kano; UNICEF, northern states fight diseases.

First Bank Nigeria Plc, one of the oldest and largest banks in Nigeria recently announced a policy banning married couples from working in its employment. The Bank directed that it would retain only one partner out of a married couple working with it. Its reason was that the Bank was undergoing reorganisation and repositioning under a new management and there was a need for discipline and efficiency. First Bank Nigeria Plc announced that the affected persons would be adequately compensated.

Nigeria is traditionally a patriarchal society with an estimated population of 120 Million, with women making 49.5%. In spite of advances in education, women still lag behind in all areas of national development. Nigerian women face barriers to full enjoyment of their rights because of ethnicity, culture, religion or lack of education. The traditions in Nigeria can be characterised as a system of beliefs and practices which put women in a position of inferiority. This inferior status of women is protected in the name of tradition, culture and religion and have deprieved women of their rights as human beings.

Nigeria has a high unemployment rate and women's access to good corporate jobs remains very limited.

This policy pitted First Bank of Nigeria Plc against the Nigeria Labour Congress and Women NGOs who immediately began advocacy campaigns against the Bank.

Women's Rights Watch campaigned against the policy because in a patriarchal society where the man makes the decisions, the wife's career will invariably give way in order to sustain her husband's.

The First Nigeria Bank policy is a reversal of the few gains made in Nigeria for the economic empowerment of women. At present, women have inequal access to employment in Nigeria and the policy could be copied by other corporate organisations in Nigeria.

The policy infringes on women's fundamental human rights to marry and contravenes the UN Convention on Elimination Against All forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) to which Nigeria is a signatory. Article 11 of CEDAW prevents discrimination against women in employment and provides that States take appropriate measures to prohibit discrimination against women on the grounds of marriage - and dismissals on the basis of marital status.

The Nigerian Government has been very silent on the issue, but the NLC began a nation wide picketing against First Bank in protest of their anti-labour policies.

Happily First Bank Nigeria Plc on Wednesday the 30th of May, 2001 succumed to the pressure mounted on it by the NLC and NGOs and announce that it had reversed its policy against married couples. The bank in a memo dated 25th of May, 2001 and addressed to all heads of departments, branches, regional offices stated

"We are pleased to advise that management has revisited the issue and decided to allow married couples to remain in its employment"

Women's Rights Watch Nigeria (WRW) is of the view that corporate Nigeria is not gender sensitive! Women's Rights Watch is currently involved in a national gender sensitization campaign to lobby our national institutions - the Presidency, the National Assembly (Legislature) the Federal Ministry of Women Affairs, and the National Human Rights Commission to pass the UN CEDAW into Nigerian Law. Women's Rights Watch is circulating a petition and has collected signatures from 19 countries. They include Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Canada, Zimbabwe, United States of America, Romania, Sweden, Sri Lanka, Costa Rica, Noway, Australia, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Philippines, The Netherlands, United Kingdom, Thailand, Austria.

Please find below our petition. Send your messages of support to us at [email protected].

Shell has refused to publish the independent report it commissioned on its multimillion-pound community development programme in Nigeria, despite denying that the document is secret. Pressure on the oil giant was increased yesterday when Glenys Kinnock, the MEP and patron of the Ogoni Foundation, a human rights group, wrote to Shell demanding that it publish the independent report.

The Federal Government might have ordered stoppage of salary of the striking university lecturers who declared their trade dispute on April 2, 2001. Making this disclosure yesterday in Lagos was a member of ASUU negotiating team, Dr. Kayode Bamgbose of University of Agriculture, Abeokuta who briefed the zonal congress of the union on the development.

A benchmark for monitoring the conduct of Senators emerged yesterday with the submission to the Senate President, Anyim Pius Anyim, of a draft copy of a code of conduct and ethics to guide the conduct of senators in public affairs.

The people of Nigeria should be celebrating the second anniversary of the restoration of civilian rule, but as the BBC reports, few are in partying mood.

The Institute for Policy Studies and Friends of the Earth today denounced the World Banks plans to approve a $15 million loan to a financial intermediary that would provide subcontracting services to Shell Oil Corporation in the Niger Delta of Nigeria. The loan, which would be provided by the World Bank's private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), would provide hard currency to banks in the Niger Delta who could then onlend to subcontractors providing services to the Shell Oil Corporation. It is set to be approved next week.

Royal Dutch/Shell Group, the second-largest publicly traded oil company, will team up with the World Bank to spread the benefits of its oil projects to Nigeria's people, in a bid to repair Shell's image in the country. Shell's plans to join with the lender in setting up a $30 million fund to finance oil service contractors is drawing fire from human rights and environmental groups, which say the bank is
encouraging what they call Shell's abuses in the oil-rich Niger Delta.

There are signs that Nigeria's northern region is becoming increasingly vulnerable to annual epidemics of measles and meningitis amid widespread resistance to immunisation by suspicious locals. Taking advantage of strong anti-Western sentiments sweeping across the predominantly Muslim region since a number of states started implementing strict Islamic law over the past year and a half, some radical Muslims have launched a strong campaign against Western medicine.

Measles infections rose by 670 percent in northern Nigeria's biggest city, Kano, in the first 21 weeks of this year over the same period in 2000, the international medical organisation, Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF), said on Tuesday.

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A Lagos-based national newspaper last week did nearly a full-page feature on how recruitment into the police force is riddled with fraud such that a candidate is required to pay as much as N250, 000 for the recruitment form, plus so many other sums for greasing the palms of some officials and self- appointed recruitment officers. All that came shortly after the former Lagos State Police Commissioner, Alhaji Abubakar Tsav, went full blast on the police and its corrupt agents at the Oputa Panel which has just ended its sitting in Enugu.

Tension is growing in the Niger Delta, southeastern Nigeria, following a rash of oil spills which, in combination with communal and industrial disputes, have disrupted crude oil production by three transnationals, industry sources said on Friday. US multinational ExxonMobil Corp's Nigerian subsidiary shut its Qua Iboe oil export terminal on Thursday after it was besieged by protesters from the local Eket community who accused the company of neglect.

The U.S. government should call on President Olusegun Obasanjo to ensure thorough and credible investigations and prosecutions for human rights abuses by the Nigerian armed forces, Human Rights Watch said today.

Three Texas oil control specialists have arrived safely back in the United States after they capped a huge, potentially explosive oil spill in southeast Nigeria. Contrary to media reports, the company for which they work says the three men were not held hostage by Nigerians upset over the spill at an abandoned Royal Dutch/Shell well in the Niger Delta.

I want to thank you for the noble work you are doing for African non-profit. I read about an international conference of the Canadian Council for Refugees and I applied to participate. I am pleased to inform you that I delivered a paper on trafficking on women and girls to participants from over 120 countries. Keep up the good work.

The latest environmental emergency in southern Nigeria's volatile Niger Delta has been brought under control by US specialists, Royal/Dutch Shell's Nigerian subsidiary said on Monday. The three specialists from the Houston-based Boots & Coots International Well Control company were flown in on Friday to the affected area, Yorla Fields, to deal with a blow-out at a well which shot jets of crude oil and gas 30 metres into the air for the better part of last week.

A Federal High Court in Lagos has ruled that although every Nigerian has a constitutional right to inspect the assets declaration made by public officers, the right is not enforceable until National Assembly prescribes the conditions for it exercise.

Through the thick white fog stinging with the smell of raw gas, boys clutching handkerchiefs to their noses patrol making sure no one starts an engine, takes a flash photograph or does anything that could light a spark and ignite the whole area. The continuous hiss of rushing gas, so loud that people within an arm's reach have to shout to each other, can be heard 500 metres (yards) away from the site of the oil wellhead that burst on Sunday on an Ogoniland farm in Nigeria's southeast.

Nigerian Nobel Prize winning author Wole Soyinka has an Earth Week message for the world about his homeland - at least a third of the entire country is polluted in some way.