Nigerian militant leader Henry Okah, who is on trial for gun-running and treason, has accepted a government offer for "unconditional" amnesty, his lawyer told Reuters on Thursday. President Umaru Yar'Adua last week ordered his interior minister to extend the amnesty offer to Okah and promised to release him if he accepted.

The Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM) hereby solidarise with workers in Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife in their current struggle to end illegal deduction from their salaries by the Prof. Michael Faborode-led university management running to over N400 million.

The Campaign for Democratic and Workers’ Rights (CDWR), Osun State hereby call for the immediate implementation of the long-awaited Teacher’s Salary Scale by the Oyinlola government.

A coalition of Nigerian and International civil society organisations and churches have strongly condemned the recent campaign of terror that has been inflicted upon the so-called ‘child witches’ at the Child Rights and Rehabilitation Network Centre (CRARN) in Eket, Akwa Ibom State by Lagos-based police officers.

More than 10, 000 Nigerian girls held captive as sex slaves in Morocco and Libya are to be repatriated, the House of Representatives Committee on Diaspora has revealed in a statement. The girls reportedly from Edo State, the southern part of the country, aged between 13 and 17, had been held captive by sex slave traders, the statement said.

The oil industry in the Niger Delta of Nigeria has brought impoverishment, conflict, human rights abuses and despair to the majority of the people in the oil-producing areas, according to a new Amnesty International report. Pollution and environmental damage caused by the oil industry have resulted in violations of the rights to health and a healthy environment, the right to an adequate standard of living (including the right to food and water) and the right to gain a living through work for hundreds of thousands of people.

cc Campus cults have ‘entrenched their diabolical tentacles’ across Nigeria’s institutions of tertiary education, write Kola Ibrahim and Ayo Ademiluyi, despite a mass movement against them in 1999 after five students were killed at Obafemi Awolowo University. Cults are to blame not only for the recent killing of twenty people in Edo State, but also for incidences of robbery, intimidation of students and the community and rape in a number of universities. Poor economic prospects make cultism an attractive option for youths, but there are also reports of officials allegedly using cults to protect their economic and political interests by suppressing student union activists, write Ibrahim and Ademiluyi. Noting that affected institutions lack a ‘viable, radical, independent and issue-based students' movement’, they suggest that this is what is needed to tackle the ‘monster of cultism’.

Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua has unveiled details of a 60-day amnesty for militants in the Niger Delta. Ministers of Nigeria's Council of State have approved the proposal - an effort to end years of attacks on the region's beleaguered oil industry. A presidential pardon, rehabilitation programme, education and training are being offered to militants taking part.

Nigerian President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua has been formally invited to attend this year's G-8 Summit of the world's industrial nations holding in Italy. Next month's meeting, holding from July 8 to 10, 2009 at L'Aquila will be the third since President Yar'Adua was sworn in on May 29, 2007 and the first he is being invited to attend.

Militants in Nigeria's oil-producing region say they have blown up a major pipeline belonging to Italian energy firm Agip. Agip has not yet commented on the claims. A military spokesman denied that a pipeline had been hit but said there had been a "skirmish". He also denied the militants' claims to have disarmed seven soldiers.

The report of the government-constituted Technical Committee on the Niger Delta, submitted to Nigeria’s President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua on 1 December 2008, offers an opportunity to reduce violent conflict significantly and begin longer-term regional development in the oil-rich region. The government needs to respond urgently and positively, in particular by accepting a third-party mediator to facilitate discussions of amnesty and demobilisation of militants, in order to dispel growing misgivings in the Delta, save the region from further violence and organised criminality, and ensure Nigeria’s continued reliability as a leading source of energy for the world.

The Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Center looks back at , and ponders whether the experiences and expectations, are worthy of celebration.

President Umaru Yar'Adua of Nigeria, halfway through his presidential mandate, has undermined the country's foremost anti-corruption body, done little to rein in an abusive police force, and failed to address the root causes of the escalating crisis in the Niger Delta, Human Rights Watch has said. Human Rights Watch said in a letter to Yar'Adua that there have been serious setbacks during the first two years in addressing Nigeria's chronic human rights problems and endemic corruption.

The parties in Wiwa v. Shell have agreed to settle human rights claims charging the Royal Dutch/Shell company, its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC or Shell Nigeria), and the former head of its Nigerian operation, Brian Anderson, with complicity in the torture, killing, and other abuses of Ogoni leader Ken Saro-Wiwa and other non-violent Nigerian activists in the mid-1990s in the Ogoni region of the Niger Delta.

There has been another delay in the Wiwa v. Shell trial, causing teeth-gnashing by journalists who have dedicated resources to cover the trial, hand-wringing by Ogoni people and human rights & environmental justice supporters worldwide, and head-scratching by nearly everyone else following along.

Almost a fifth of the oil imported by the U.S. comes from Africa, and in the decade to come this percentage will rise. The eastern part of Nigeria, from which Big Oil has pumped more than a trillion dollars worth of black gold since the 1960s, remains the poorest part of the country, and one of the most ravaged and polluted on earth. Thousands of gas flares have burned for decades, generating acid rains that have poisoned fisheries and crops.

As Ken Saro-Wiwa stood before the hangman’s noose in Port Harcourt, Nigeria’s oil capital, he spoke not just of his imminent death but also of the campaign against Royal Dutch Shell that had won him international attention. Sentenced to death after a deeply flawed trial, he had come to be seen as a martyr by those opposing alleged abuses involving the oil industry in his country. According to fellow activists, his last words before his execution were: “Lord, take my soul but the struggle continues.”

http://www.pambazuka.org/images/articles/436/56711_bombing_tmb.jpgFollo… the launch of the Nigerian military's latest campaign of violence against communities in the Niger Delta, Sokari Ekine looks at coverage of recent events in the African blogosphere, and finds the response to be ‘disappointingly sparse’. ‘I expected to read that there were Nigerians outraged by this attack on their fellow citizens by the Nigerian military, especially since the Nigerian mainstream media has been uncritical. Unfortunately there wasn’t as much as I had hoped and hope is all too important in the struggle against tyranny,’ says Ekine.

A decade after Nigeria's last military ruler ordered his troops to "forever resist the seduction and temptation of political power", democracy still has a fragile hold on Africa's most populous nation. Nigerians marked 10 straight years of civilian rule on Friday frustrated that corruption remains endemic, poverty widespread and infrastructure shambolic, but fairly confident that the military is unlikely to stage a comeback.

The Nigeria Red Cross says conflict-hit areas it has been able to access in the Niger Delta are in better condition than anticipated, but that continued restrictions on aid workers' movement leaves many questions unanswered. Government soldiers are controlling access in and out of the Delta, site of a military incursion launched on 13 May to crack down on Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) militants.