Three years ago in 2002, police statistics showed that four to six females were raped daily in Lagos. But 60 per cent of rapes in the area was said to be unreported officially. Subsequent official and newspaper reports indicate that the frequency of rape, especially of minors, has rapidly increased nationwide, particularly in such cities as Lagos, Enugu and Cross River State. By official estimate, 70 per cent of the cases was not reported officially.

On 10 February 2005, agents of the State Security Service (SSS), Nigeria's intelligence agency, raided newsstands on Old Market Road, the main distribution centre for the city of Onitsha, in Anambra State. The SSS agents confiscated large quantities of "The News", "The Source" and "The Week" magazines, as well as copies of "Hallmark" newspaper. They also arrested a newspaper distributor, Ikechukwu Obisi, and took him to an unknown location. The SSS officials, who were from Awka, the state capital, took the action on the grounds that the news vendors were distributing publications carrying stories about the Movement for the Actualization of the Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB).

The Voice of America, which reaches listeners in northern Nigeria through its Hausa language service, is officially launching a new Kano Reporting Center (KRC) on Feb. 16 2005, in conjunction with a health-reporting workshop for women journalists from Feb. 13-18 2005. The official opening coincides with a four-day workshop for female journalists to be led by Development Communications Network, the leading public health and science journalism training organization in Nigeria. More than a dozen Nigerian women journalists are participating in the workshop focusing on health reporting and covering issues including HIV/AIDS, polio, tuberculosis, leprosy, malaria and other epidemics.

As a follow up to the success of the ICT Africa Investment Summit 2004 in Johannesburg, South Africa, the Nigerian Government through the Ministry of Communications has agreed to co-host the next Summit (ICT Africa Investment Summit 2005) in Abuja, Nigeria. The theme of the 2005 Summit is: Facilitating private sector investments in the ICT sector in Africa - policy, regulatory and technological challenges. The Summit aims to bring together decision makers, service providers, financial institutions, and other stakeholders in the ICT African sector to address relevant issues that are critical to securing increased investments in Africa.

The health minister of Nigeria has said that capacity building in science and technology - and particularly in the health aspects of biotechnology - is essential if Africa is to meet development goals agreed by member states of the United Nations. But he warned that, at present, sub-Saharan Africa was "off track" towards achieving almost all of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which governments have committed themselves to achieving by 2015.

Nigerian troops on Friday shot and killed four villagers who were protesting at the main export terminal run by ChevronTexaco in the Niger Delta, one of the demonstration's organisers said. More than 200 protesters from the village of Ugborodo near Warri stormed the Escravos plant just before dawn to demand a fairer share of the 300,000 barrels of crude oil that are pumped out every day.

In the oil-rich Niger Delta, the struggle among local leaders for oil revenue and government funds has fueled violent clashes between rival armed groups, Human Rights Watch said in a new report. An escalation in violence last year killed dozens of innocent people and disrupted oil production, pushing global crude futures over a record $50 a barrel. The 22-page report, "Rivers and Blood: Guns, Oil and Power in Nigeria's Rivers State," based on a December fact-finding mission to the region, documents fighting between armed groups in the southeastern oil-producing state that escalated in late 2003 and continued throughout 2004. The clashes resulted in the indiscriminate killing of local people, displaced tens of thousands of villagers from their homes, and forced the oil industry to evacuate staff and scale back its production. On October 1, the federal government brokered a peace agreement between the two main rival armed groups. The federal and state governments then granted an amnesty to the fighters. While commending the government's effort to end the conflict, Human Rights Watch said that the perpetrators of grave human rights abuses must not be given immunity from prosecution.

The Chief of Party will direct the implementation and oversee all management aspects of a new five-year USAID-funded program, designed to strengthen civil society capacity to promote good governance at the federal and selected state and local levels through advocacy, awareness-building and citizen empowerment. The incumbent will serve as principal liaison with all implementing partners, the donor, and host government counterparts on all matters related to the program. Qualified candidates send resume with salary history to: Human Resources CEDPA 1400 16th Street, NW, Suite 100 Washington, DC 20036 Fax: 202-667-1900

On 19 January 2005, the Rivers State Police Command arrested Jerry Needam, publisher of the Port Harcourt-based weekly tabloid "National Network", for publishing reports considered negative to Rivers State Police Commissioner Sylvester Araba. A team of police officers picked up Needam, publisher of the newly established newspaper, on the morning of 19 January as he arrived at his office in Port Harcourt. Needam is also a former special assistant to the Rivers State information commissioner.

As heads of state from more than 25 African countries met in Nigeria to tackle some of the continent’s most urgent problems, another potential crisis on Nigeria’s own doorstep is being ignored. According to a new report by the Global IDP Project, resolving the situation of internal displacement in Nigeria must be a key priority. “Although the current situation of internal displacement in Nigeria may not amount to an ‘emergency’, especially when compared to other conflict-induced displacement crises in Africa, there is real potential for renewed violence that could quickly spread and cause major population movements,” said Raymond Johansen, Secretary-General of the Norwegian Refugee Council.

The governor of the Plateau State in central Nigeria, whose trial recently resumed on money-laundering charges, may also be tried in Britain on similar charges. Scotland Yard officers arrived in Nigeria this week to testify against officials linked with the disappearance of millions of dollars from the coffers of Plateau State in Central Nigeria. Scotland Yard says that Mr. Dariye may also face charges in London for laundering several-million dollars from the state treasury to British bank accounts.

The long-awaited report of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission, completed in May 2002 after two years of public hearings, has now been made public, not by the Nigerian government but by civil society organizations. In December 2004, given the Supreme Court ruling that the panel's original mandate was unconstitutional, the government said it was not planning to publish the wide-ranging report, which is popularly known as the Oputa report after the name of the panel's chairman, retired Chief Justice Chukwudifu A. Oputa. The Nigerian Democratic Movement (NDM), based in Washington, in collaboration with the Civil Society Forum in Nigeria, decided to take the initiative to make this public domain document available over the internet. It is now being widely distributed in Nigeria through copies on CD-ROM as well. Available through the link below is the latest copy of the AfricaFocus Bulletin that contains excerpts from the NDM press release on the report's publication, and brief excerpts taken from the report's overview volume.

Nigeria is to phase out malaria-resistant drugs such as chloroquine immediately and switch to the more effective but more expensive artemisinin-based drugs, Health Minister Eyitayo Lambo said on Tuesday. With the mosquito-borne disease responsible for 30 percent of all childhood deaths, Nigeria has adopted a World Health Organisation (WHO) recommendation to use artemisinin-based combination therapy.

Experiences from a UK Department for International Development funded project in Nigeria suggest that greater critical attention must be given to the impacts and effects of HIV/AIDS on communities, and the ways in which conflict can develop, emerge and be sustained, resulting in severe breakdown of social cohesion and reduction or cessation of HIV/AIDS activities. It is argued that conflict can be fuelled by the different priorities and perceptions of community members and groups vis-à-vis those of development organisations, and by the impact of funds on often desperately poor communities.

A human rights commission appointed by President Olusegun Obasanjo has concluded that three of Nigeria's former military rulers were personally liable for extrajudicial killings perpetrated while they were in power. Its report, published on Wednesday after a delay of more than two years, recommended that all three men be banned from holding high office in the future. One of those fingered by the report, General Ibrahim Babangida, is widely believed to be lining up a bid to succeed Obasanjo as elected head of state in the 2007 presidential elections.

The chairman of Nigeria's ruling party has resigned following a bitter row with President Olusegun Obasanjo. People's Democratic Party chairman Audu Ogbeh has handed in his letter of resignation, his spokesman said. Mr Ogbeh had disagreed with Mr Obasanjo over how to handle a crisis between rival party factions in the south-eastern Anambra state.

Rapid population growth only promises to exacerbate water shortages in Lagos. According to the United Nations, the city's population will jump to 24 million during the next decade, making Lagos the third largest city in the world. "We have to speed up infrastructural development because as we increase, so the population increases. We have an institutional problem in the sense that as our infrastructures improve they also attract more people, so it is a circle that keeps growing," says Olumuyiwa Coker, group managing director of the Lagos Water Corporation. Global leaders have made 2015 the deadline for halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water.

On 30 December 2004, Sam Obi, a Nigerian journalist and presenter for the privately-owned City Limits Radio station, was detained and subjected to questioning by officials of the Gambia Police Force's Serious Crime Unit for six hours, in Serre Kunda, following an interview he granted to Radio France International (RFI). According to Media Foundation for West African sources in The Gambia, Obi's interview with RFI dealt with a march organised by the Gambia Press Union to protest the brutal murder of Deyda Hydara, managing editor of the Banjul-based newspaper "The Point" (see IFEX alerts of 6 January 2005 and 17 December 2004).

The Committee to Protect Journalists said in a January 6 letter to Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo that it was "deeply troubled" by the recent violent attack on journalists by government security forces. On Tuesday, January 4, police acting as security at a meeting of the National Executive Council of Obasanjo's ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP) in the capital, Abuja, assaulted at least 10 journalists who were covering the meeting.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) is to send accounting specialists to Nigeria and Kenya, to help them trace and recover money stolen by previous corrupt governments. The Vienna-based agency said it will 'conduct in-depth assessments of the institutional and legal frameworks' in these countries, making detailed proposals to 'overcome obstacles to asset recovery'. At the initiative's launch, the UNODC claimed that in the 1990s, corrupt officials in Nigeria stole and exported at least $2.2bn.