Nigeria's Niger Delta region is one of the largest wetlands in the world. It is a source of great irony, therefore, that people living in the area struggle to get hold of clean drinking water: they take what they can from creeks and rivers. "To drink water in this village is a problem for us. As you come here now, we can't give you the water to drink; if we give it to you we are poisoning you,” says Daniel Akpere of Okuokolo village.

JSI Research and Training Institute, Inc (JSI R&T), a Boston-based public health management firm dedicated to providing high quality technical and managerial assistance to public health programs throughout the United States and the developing world, is currently recruiting for a potential Chief of Party for an HIV/AIDS Program in Nigeria. JSI is developing a proposal to submit to USAID to support its HIV/AIDS prevention, care and support initiatives, based in Abuja, Nigeria.

The National Commission for Nomadic Education (NCNE) says it has taken its mobilisation and advocacy campaigns on girl-child education to six states in the country. Executive Secretary of the commission, Dr (Mrs) Nafisatu Dahiru Mohammed who made this known in an interview with Vanguard said this was as a result of gender disparity in nomadic schools. Mohammed said the states include Enugu, Bauchi, Taraba, Gombe, Adamawa and Yobe. "The gender disparity in our schools is disturbing. Out of a total of 294,951 pupils in the nomadic schools only 124,797 are girls."

At Saint Finbar’s College in Lagos, more than 50 pupils pack into a small rundown classroom for their English lesson. Patches of sky are visible through the corroded tin roof. Surrounded by the mouldy walls and windows that have long since lost their panes, Denrele Akinfenwa throws her hands up in resignation when asked how she manages to teach. "I can’t really complain because the situation in my class is quite typical," she sighed. "In some parts of Nigeria pupils don’t even have a roof over their head and have to study under trees."

Kenya's officials are investigating a bank suspected of being used to launder millions of dollars stolen by former Nigerian dictator General Sani Abacha. Detectives from the Central Bank of Kenya's banking fraud unit are examining documents and accounts of the Trans National Bank from as far back as 1997. They say they want to see if some of the bank's customers helped launder an estimated $100 million that General Abacha allegedly looted from Nigeria's coffers and transferred to the United States, Switzerland, Britain and other countries.

This report explores the reasons behind the link between mineral wealth and child poverty in countries such as Azerbaijan, Colombia, Nigeria, Sudan and Venezuela. Comparing these countries with success stories such as Botswana and Norway, the report identifies positive, practical and achievable approaches to lift the ‘resource curse’. The report argues that different actors (government, donors, extractive companies, civil society) have particular roles to play in ensuring mineral resource extraction brings benefits for ordinary citizens, and emphasises in particular that extractive companies are best placed to trigger change now.

Over 300 primary school teachers in Delta State this week stormed the state House of Assembly and held legislators including assembly workers and visitors hostage for over three hours in protest against non-payment of their due entitlements. The placard-carrying protesters barricaded the gate thereby preventing entry and exit from the assembly complex.

Investigators looking for billions of stolen money stashed overseas by former Nigerian strongman Sani Abacha have moved the search to Kenya. Drawn from Nigeria and Interpol (International Police), they are scrutinising records at some Kenyan banks in a bid to find out how the money travelled overseas. Sources in the Kenyan security network say preliminary investigations have established that some of the money was withdrawn and used by someone in Kenya.

Civil Society Organizations should design and implement an aggressive advocacy campaign programme in their communities and at local, state and national levels in order to generate widespread understanding and support for community broadcasting across the country, according to the communiqué of a seminar on building community radio broadcasting in Nigeria held in January. The communiqué said a network of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) should be formed to provide a common platform for the articulation of stakeholders' interest on community radio broadcasting.

The Nigerian government on Friday announced that it is sending state and religious representatives to South Africa, Indonesia and India this week to observe testing of the polio vaccine and "bring back proof" that it is not contaminated with HIV, according to reports. In October 2003, health workers in Nigeria launched a project to immunize 15 million African children at immediate risk of contracting polio. However, the vaccinations were hampered when some Muslim leaders in the northern part of the country said the immunization effort is part of a U.S. plan to decimate the Muslim population by spreading HIV/AIDS and infertility.

The death penalty as applied in Nigeria violates fundamental human rights and is sometimes used in a discriminatory way against women, Amnesty International says in a new and its first report on women and the death penalty entitled: "Nigeria: The death penalty and women under the Nigerian penal systems". "The Nigerian government should abolish the death penalty and place an immediate moratorium on any pending executions," the organisation said.

There is wide preoccupation with the vital issue of democracy in Africa, and its implication for the world at large. The reality is for the most part that on the African continent, democratic freedoms are suppressed; violence and atrocities flourish; and a critical mass of the citizens are disenfranchised with few or no rights in their own countries; for many, this process having been driven by their own governments. This book demonstrates that citizens have however always sought ways and struggled to expedite an arguably inevitable process towards greater freedom. It examines how barriers to democracy have been overcome in Nigeria; the legacy of the Babangida administration; state feminism and democratisation; civil society and democratisation, including the roles of the mass media, student vanguardism, intellectuals and academics, the left and trade unions; and liberties, rights, ethnicity and citizenship.

An age-long tradition which should have been thrown to the dust bin years ago, the circumcision of the girl-child, is a tradition still prevalent in certain parts of the country until now. About ten states of the federation have passed legislation in their houses of assemblies banning the practice.

Nigerian authorities have failed to secure a court order stopping unions from holding a strike in protest over a new fuel tax. Nigeria's trade unions postponed a general strike over the tax last month following a court order. The trade union leader Adams Oshiomhole has said they will now meet to decide whether they will resume the strike.

A solicitor in a small north London firm has been named in connection with a $180m (pounds 100m) French and American corruption investigation which could lead to the indictment of Dick Cheney, the US vice-president. The solicitor has been identified in the French press as a financial intermediary in the deal being investigated. The Paris inquiry, led by Judge Renaud van Ruymbeke, concerns allegations of bribery against an international consortium building a $4bn liquefied natural gas (LNG) plant in Nigeria during the regime of the late dictator Sani Abacha.

While African culture may venerate the aged, the continent's pensioners don't always find themselves living out a peaceful retirement. This is nowhere more true than in Nigeria, where the collapse of pension schemes has pushed many former civil servants into poverty. A number of retired government workers have been awaiting pension payouts for periods of between 10 months and two years. Perhaps the worst part of their plight is that many are people who resisted benefiting from the rampant corruption that has characterised Nigeria's government for most of its recent history.

Gunfights raged Tuesday in the third day of fighting between rival armed gangs in Nigeria's volatile oil delta, leaving at least 10 people dead, residents and police said. The violence flared up Sunday in the town of Bukuma in southeastern Rivers State among rival bands within the Ijaw ethnic group and was said to be over control of revenues and jobs granted by the multinational Royal/Dutch Shell Group.

Reporters Without Borders has called on a public service radio corporation in the state of Ondo, in southwestern Nigeria, to reinstate nine journalists who were suspended indefinitely on 21 January at the governor's behest because of their coverage of an opposition protest about an increase in the prices of petroleum products. The Ondo State Radiovision Corporation (OSRC) claimed that the decision to suspend the journalists was taken internally, by the corporation's management, because they dedicated too much air-time to the protest by the opposition Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC).

More than 14,000 living with AIDS in Nigeria who had been receiving antiretroviral (ARV) drugs subsidised by the government are running out of supplies, an HIV/AIDS activist group said on Tuesday. Nsikak Ekpe, president of AIDS Alliance Nigeria (AAN), an organisation which represents people living with AIDS in Africa's most populous country, said the government had stopped supplying drugs at almost all the 25 treatment centres selected for the programme across the country.

United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan was due to meet the leaders of Nigeria and Cameroon in Geneva on Saturday to review progress on their deal to end a long-standing border dispute and to dampen tensions between the two countries. The meeting will be the third between Annan, President Paul Biya of Cameroon and his Nigerian counterpart Olusegun Obasanjo since the UN chief stepped in to encourage the west African neighbours to follow an International Court of Justice ruling in 2002.