With nearly 50,000 incarcerated on remand, many face years in jail awaiting trial, often on charges for minor offences
In the noisy hallway of Igbosere high court in Lagos on an October Monday morning, people sit on the floor waiting for their cases to be called as lawyers and officials dash between them.
In a faded white shirt, silky joggers and sandals, Tunde Akeem*, 40, is listless, barely listening to his legal counsel.
Continue reading...Government reserves are replacing a way of life that spanned generations but culminated in deadly conflict with farmers
The still of the vast Damau grazing reserve is broken by the gentle noises of Abubakar Umar’s cattle as he herds them a few kilometres from the clusters of brick huts that house his steadily growing community of pastoralists from across northern Nigeria. For many of them, settling here in Kaduna has meant turning their backs on a nomadic way of life that has spanned generations. That lifestyle is increasingly fraught, with tensions over land and water leading to often violent conflict with farmers.
The government-created reserve is an area where they can peacefully feed their livestock. Umar, 60, says: “For over 50 years, since I was a very small boy, we would move for three or four months then wait, then move again for three or four months. That has been the life. And my father too, and his father, for generations and generations.
Continue reading...Investment in infrastructure will underpin a stronger economy, improved security and the country’s fight against corruption
Nigeria has faced challenges for as long as anyone can remember. But one problem Nigerians don’t talk about is our collective inability to acknowledge where progress is being made.
Fixating only on what is not working robs us of the chance to analyse and replicate our successes, and demoralises a populace in dire need of optimism.
Continue reading...The all-women market appoints a ‘mother of wealth’ to pray for their good fortune – and in this recession-hit country the role is more important than ever
Folasade Ojikutu wears a traditional white lace dress for her work at the lagoon dock behind Oluwo market in Epe. The small town is home to one of the largest and most popular fish markets in Lagos – and almost all 300 traders are women. Many are from families who have sold fish here for generations, and Ojikutu, 47, is their “Iya Alaje”, meaning the mother or carrier of wealth.
As she strides past a small waterfront shrine, dozens of women fishing waist-deep in the water chant and hail her, calling out “Aje”- in part a reference to the Yoruba goddess of wealth. Every day, hundreds of people travel, sometimes for hours, to buy fish at Epe market, as it is commonly known, where the spiritual and commercial merge. And the mainly women traders look to Ojikutu– who acts as an intercessor, praying for good fortune, alongside managing affairs at the market.
Continue reading...A surgeon dedicated to his patients, Chike Akunyili was on the frontline of people’s suffering. We must address the problems that drove his killers to pull a trigger just because they could
On the afternoon of 28 September 2021 my father was murdered in broad daylight by Nigeria’s ubiquitous “unknown gunmen”, the name given to unidentified attackers.
His killing, which happened to be on my birthday, was gruesome, cruel and senseless. As he struggled for his life no one helped or comforted him in his hour of need. Worse still, his body was robbed.
Continue reading...In the first in a series on Africa’s most populous state, we look at the effects of widening violence, poverty, crime and corruption as elections approach
A series of overlapping security, political and economic crises has left Nigeria facing its worst instability since the end of the Biafran war in 1970.
With experts warning that large parts of the country are in effect becoming ungovernable, fears that the conflicts in Africa’s most populous state were bleeding over its borders were underlined last week by claims that armed Igbo secessionists in the country’s south-east were now cooperating with militants fighting for an independent state in the anglophone region of neighbouring Cameroon.
Continue reading...My friend the pioneering British-Nigerian lawyer and activist Tunji Fahm, who has died aged 88, was the first black minority-ethnic lawyer to be appointed as a chief officer of a local authority legal department in the UK, in 1974 at Islwyn (borough) district council, south Wales. He became the council’s chief monitoring officer in 1978 and, later, founder of the first legal practice led by black lawyers in Wales.
When Tunji arrived in the UK in 1954 to study law in Cardiff, he was one of the few African students in the university’s law school.
Continue reading...UN study finds streaming services have increased demand for film productions from across the continent, but warns piracy and underinvestment hampering growth
Film industries in Africa could quadruple their revenue to $20bn (£15bn) and create an extra 20m jobs in creative industries, according to a UN report about cinema on the continent.
The booming film industry in Nigeria – Nollywood is the world’s second-largest film industry in terms of output – and Senegal were examples of African countries with defined business models and growing avenues for local film productions, which are increasingly sought after by television and streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+, said the report by the United Nation’s cultural body, Unesco.
Continue reading...The Nobel laureate has produced plays, poems, essays and even inspired a pop duo but he hasn’t written a novel for nearly half a century - until now
At 87, Wole Soyinka is a Nigerian icon. His plays have been performed around the world, his poems anthologised, his novels studied in schools and universities, while his nonfiction writing has been the scourge of many a Nigerian dictator. He was imprisoned for 22 months during the Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s for attempting to broker peace; his activism led him again into exile two decades later during the era of General Sani Abacha, military ruler of Nigeria, when the environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa was hanged.
In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel prize in literature and became the first African laureate, but his status in Nigerian letters was secured long before then. For a generation of young Nigerian writers, his work has been transformative. It has inspired artists, too – in Lagos, many display their skill by painting famous faces, his among them. There was even a musical duo called Soyinka’s Afro.
Continue reading...With poverty deepening, state services are failing to cope with rising rates of addiction
Kola* was in secondary school in Nigeria when he started smoking cigarettes. He soon graduated to cannabis, heroin and eventually to crack cocaine. Access to drugs was easy and he felt the pressure of friends to participate.
In 2002, when he was 39, he was introduced to a private drug rehabilitation centre in Ibadan, in the south-west of the country, where he spent 90 days weaning himself off his addiction.
Continue reading...I first encountered TB Joshua as a teenager, when his preaching captivated my evangelical Christian community in Hampshire. Many of my friends became his ardent disciples and followed him to Lagos. How did he have such a hold over people?
On the second day of TB Joshua’s funeral in Lagos, his disciples took to the stage. A microphone was passed around as more than 60 disciples introduced themselves by name and nationality. They came from 18 different countries, among them Nigeria, South Africa, Indonesia, Mexico, the US and the UK. Some seemed barely out of their teens; others were in late middle age, having spent decades serving Joshua, the millionaire Nigerian pastor and self-proclaimed prophet being laid to rest. A senior Nigerian disciple, recently promoted to prophetess, began her tribute. “How to describe someone so indescribable?” she said. “How to define someone so indefinable? Human and divine?”
Joshua died on 5 June 2021, a few days before his 58th birthday. The news spread on social media, before the Synagogue, Church of All Nations, known as Scoan, made an official announcement. “God has taken His servant Prophet TB Joshua home,” the statement read, “as it should be by divine will.” Over a month later, his funeral under way, there had been no mention of a cause of death.
Continue reading...Covid, climate breakdown, poverty and war threaten return to school after pandemic kept 1.5bn children out of classes
The education of hundreds of millions of children is hanging by a thread as a result of an unprecedented intensity of threats including Covid 19 and the climate crisis, a report warned today.
As classrooms across much of the world prepare to reopen after the summer holidays, a quarter of countries – most of them in sub-Saharan Africa – have school systems that are at extreme or high risk of collapse, according to Save the Children.
Continue reading...After seeing a woman die in childbirth, Liyatu Ayuba stepped in and has now delivered 118 babies in a community cut off from public health services
Having watched a woman and her baby die needlessly after being refused admission to a hospital over a lack of money, Liyatu Ayuba wanted to never let it happen again.
The 62-year-old is one of Nigeria’s nearly 3 million internally displaced people (IDPs) – driven out of their homes by the violence of the Boko Haram Islamist militants. Ayuba fled Gwoza in the north-eastern state of Borno in 2011 with her family. After her husband was killed by Boko Haram and her teenage son badly wounded, she went to the makeshift Durumi 1 IDP camp, in Nigeria’s capital, Abuja, where about 500 families live.
Continue reading...Data analysis highlights the human cost if thousands of overseas projects lose funding
Experts have warned of “devastating” consequences of the UK’s foreign aid cuts after Guardian analysis revealed the UK is cutting funding at a time when major recipient countries are at risk of becoming more politically unstable.
Thousands of activities providing life-saving support are being cut due to the government’s decision to reduce aid spending to 0.5% of gross national income.
Continue reading...Michael Elégbèdé doesn’t just break from western ideas of fine dining, but aims to revive a deeper appreciation of Nigerian food among Nigerians, too
After wine and canapes on a patio overlooking high-rises and greenery in an affluent part of Lagos, 15 guests assemble inside. They sit facing one another across a long dining table, brightly lit by a steel row of low-hanging lights. Nigerian cultural masks and artworks adorn the walls of the restaurant, which evokes a Nigerian home.
The dishes emerge: traditional egusi soup, but with the efo (spinach) crisp amaranth leaves. Grains of gari, or cassava root, typically pounded to make a kind of dough called eba, is instead lightly dusted over it. Unusually, there are croutons. “An egusi crouton,” a guest nods approvingly.
Continue reading...The writer on a stressful commute in Nigeria’s largest city on a day of downpours in 2007
• Read other authors on their memorable urban summers
It had been raining all day the way an old goat pees, in fits and starts, with bleats of sunshine in between. This was a weekday in July 2007, the magical year I moved to Lagos, and only a few months into the nine-to-five that lured me over. The excitement of waking up every day at 5am and catching a jam-packed danfo bus for the two-hour commute had since curdled in my wannabe-writer’s heart. I was standing at Obalende bus stop that afternoon after work, with no bus in sight for the past 40 minutes and rumours of a citywide gridlock swirling around, when the rain started again, a sun shower, proof, they say, that a lion is being born.
Fare hikes were expected on days of heavy traffic, but this time the fare had tripled. Outraged howls rent the air
Continue reading...Damage from pandemic could quash ambitions, exacerbate tensions and deepen repression in parts of continent
Analysts and experts are warning of many years of instability across Africa, possibly leading to wars and political upheavals, as the economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic deepens across the continent.
Though many of the likely consequences are yet to become evident, recent unrest in southern Africa, increased extremist violence in the Sahel and growing instability in parts of west Africa can all be attributed in part to the outbreak, observers say.
Continue reading...Schools in north of country have become prime targets for ‘bandits’ with 1,000 students taken this year
More than 200 schoolchildren remain abducted by armed “bandit” groups in northern Nigeria, among more than 1,000 students taken this year as schools in northern Nigeria have become prime targets.
A startling absence of security and – according to many communities – a reluctance to meaningfully engage armed threats have rapidly turned much of northern Nigeria into a haven for kidnap gangs and a hell for thousands of families. Many of the victims are schoolchildren, with several mass kidnappings this year, mirroring and eclipsing the kidnap of almost 300 Chibok schoolgirls by Boko Haram in 2014.
Continue reading...Girl and someone she says she married during captivity surrendered themselves to military
One abducted girl from the Nigerian town of Chibok has been freed and reunited with her parents seven years after Boko Haram militants kidnapped her and more than 200 of her classmates, Borno state’s governor said on Saturday.
The raid on the school in the north-eastern town one night in April 2014 sparked an international outcry and a viral campaign on social media with the hashtag #bringbackourgirls.
Continue reading...Death toll rises as storms continue to rip through communities, destroying homes and livelihoods
As heavy rains and floods dominate headlines around the world, displaced people and those living in conflict zones are among the worst affected.
Wind and heavy rain from monsoons and typhoons has bombarded much of Asia. There have also been downpours and flash floods in parts of Latin America and Africa.
Continue reading...