At least 25 people have been killed in a fresh outbreak of political violence in the volatile southern oil town of Warri, residents and officials said on Wednesday.

Nigeria is a riddle. With its 125 million inhabitants, it is Africa's most populous nation, and given its abundant human and natural resources, it seemed destined to become a regional colossus. It didn't happen. Seen from abroad, indeed, few countries have become so famous for all the wrong reasons. Television viewers know Nigeria as the country where some 200 people died last November in riots protesting their country's hosting a Miss World competition (the pageant moved to London). In news columns, Nigeria is known as the land ranked for three successive years as the world's second most corrupt country by Transparency International, a German-based monitoring group. On the World Wide Web, Nigeria is notoriously associated with spam e-mails headed "Urgent Reply" or "Confidential," promising riches beyond belief to those gullible enough to supply confidential banking information, a scam garnering an estimated $100 million annually from mostly elderly Americans.

The triumph of President Olusegun Obasanjo and his ruling party in Nigeria's general elections was as sweeping as it was unprecedented. But given widespread accusations of electoral fraud on a massive scale, their resounding victory has a hollow ring.

Crude oil from a ruptured pipeline oozed across farms and into a creek in southern Nigeria, unleashed by what residents and officials said Monday was tampering by unidentified saboteurs. A spokesman for Shell's Nigerian subsidiary said workers had found signs of "excavations" and "disturbed vegetation" surrounding the broken pipeline at Ubianuge village, near the oil port of Warri.

The outgoing Nigerian parliament last Thursday passed a controversial law that substantially reduces the powers of the country's anti-corruption agency, overturning a presidential veto on the law. The law limiting the powers of the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) was approved by both houses of the National Assembly in March but President Olusegun Obasanjo refused his assent.

Oil services giant Halliburton, already under fire over accusations that its White House ties helped win a major Iraqi oil contract, has admitted that a subsidiary paid a multi-million dollar bribe to a Nigerian tax official. Halliburton, once run by US Vice President Richard Cheney, revealed the illicit payments, worth US$2.4 million, in a filing last Thursday with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

At least nine people, including a senior government official, were killed in violence related to the elections for Nigeria's 36 state legislatures at the weekend, police said on Tuesday.

The Country Director is required to have a master's degree in International Relations, Public Policy or related field with a minimum of five years of international management experience; or a bachelor's degree with a minimum of seven years of international management experience. Experience in Nigeria preferred – the Director should have excellent knowledge of Nigeria and a realistic view of the economic, social and political conditions in country, not only their effect on the development of reformed election systems, civil society and local governance issues, but also on practical daily living in country.

Police authorities in Delta State have arrested the proprietor of a private radio station and four others over their alleged role in the broadcast where the Alliance for Democracy governorship candidate, Chief Great Ogboru, was declared winner of recent elections.

The European Union Election Observer Mission (EU.EOM) to the recently held general elections in Nigeria has described the coverage of the polls by the Nigerian media as "flawed". In its second preliminary report on the election released on April 22, the EU Observer Mission stated that the media "failed to provide unbiased, fair and informative coverage of the political parties and candidates contesting the elections".

The irregularities reported in this month's Nigerian elections are a mix of elementary and intermediate techniques - deplorable, but all too common around the world. Whether their total effect was enough to call the election a stolen one is a call for statisticians to make. But seen in stark political terms, any judgment of the election has to take into account not just the voting process, but the context - those endless organisational difficulties, not to mention the high cost -and the most vexed question of all: whether the fraud made any real difference to the outcome.

There has been a whole host of petitions and letter writing campaigns about Amina Lawal, who was sentenced to stoning to death for adultery in August 2002. Many of these are inaccurate and ineffective and may even be damaging to her case and those of others in similar situations, says the organisation BAOBAB for Women's Human Rights, which is responsible for initiating and continuing to support the defences of cases like Ms. Lawal's. The organisation has requested an end to the Amina Lawal international protest letter campaigns for now. "The information currently circulated is inaccurate, and the situation in Nigeria, being volatile, will not be helped by such campaigns."

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) must acknowledge that although it may have set out to conduct free and fair elections, not everything went according to plan. INEC should be bold and honest enough to admit its errors and successes. The INEC cannot seriously claim that elections have been successfully conducted in states such as Rivers, Enugu and Delta. In some other states, including Anambra, Abia, Benue, Imo and Plateau, where the election results have been willfully falsified, INEC must quickly review the process and restore the legitimate votes recorded.

The United Kingdom government has failed to denounce incidents of violence and intimidation that occurred in several areas of Nigeria during the elections of April 12 and 19, Human Rights Watch said in a letter to Foreign Secretary Jack Straw. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office had issued a press release welcoming the “relative calm in which the elections took place.” “In a situation where we have seen serious violence, with deaths and injuries, it is extraordinary for the British government to talk of ‘calm,’” said Steve Crawshaw, London Director of Human Rights Watch.

Union officials were on Wednesday hoping to negotiate with Nigerian workers who have taken nearly 100 foreign oil workers hostage on offshore rigs and reportedly threatened to kill them.

The outcome of the elections of April 12 and 19 has again brought Nigeria to the precipice. The elections were generally peaceful, even if not totally violence-free. There were some logistic hitches that were later smoothed out, but by and large, the elections were impressive. The jinx, it seemed, had been broken. But having peaceful elections is totally different from having free and fair elections. One does not necessarily lead to the other. The events of the last few days suggest it is too early to celebrate a successful civilian-to-civilian transition. There is every reason to be afraid for the democratic project in Nigeria, and for Nigeria itself. Lagos' independent This Day urges all Nigerian political parties to adopt a more conciliatory tone and to unite behind the effort to produce real electoral reform.

The All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) has foreclosed its participation in the next government to be formed by President Olusegun Obasanjo, who won the last presidential election.

Human Rights groups under the auspices of the Civil Society Action Coalition on Education for All are asking government to come out with strategies that will increase the enrolment of more girls in schools.

There were substantial flaws in some of the critical stages leading up to the elections which tended to undermine the credibility of the process, says a preliminary report from the Transition Monitoring Group (TMG), a coalition of 170 human rights and civil society organisations. Preliminary election-day reports received from TMG monitors all over the country indicate a large voter turnout in most of the states and substantial improvements in the arrangements made by the Independent National Electoral Commission for conduct of the elections. The TMG observes that there were cases of electoral violence and numerous reports of electoral fraud in some parts of the country. Since this report is being issued ahead of the final release of all the results from the elections and the receipt and final analysis of all the data from TMG monitors in the field, the TMG will refrain at this stage from making a final determination as to whether the elections were free and fair. Also included in this posting are two reports on the conduct of police during the recent elections held in Nigeria.

You would have to be brave, foolish, or very hungry to eat the fish that God's Time is catching in his net. "I catch up to 1,000 fish sometimes," said God's Time, whose curious name is not uncommon in these parts, as he reached into a jerry can tied to his waist and pulled out a small bream. Environmentalists say there are few ways that the state has failed the people of Nigeria's oil-rich southeast more than the mess that has been made of the ecosystems in one of the world's great patches of mangrove forest.