The Trump administration is expanding the reach of its controversial travel ban to six additional countries.
The United States will stop issuing visas that offer a path to residency to nationals from Eritrea, Kyrgyzstan, Nigeria, Sudan, Myanmar and Tanzania, said Chad Wolf, the acting secretary of homeland security, in a conference call on Friday.
Continue reading...Frederick Forsyth (Buried for 50 years: Britain’s shameful role in Biafra, Journal, 21 January) arrived in Biafra shortly after I was evacuated in June 1967 at the start of the war, just 15 miles north of Nsukka, where I was working as a university lecturer.
No account of the Biafran war should ignore its origins in a mainly Igbo military coup in January 1966, a coup in which three Nigerian political leaders were assassinated (none of them Igbo). Among them was a man who, by popular accounts, was a modest and good politician: the prime minister, Tafawa Balewa.
Continue reading...Investment in health and education and an end to early marriage could transform Africa’s most populous country
If you want a window on the condition of children in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, there is no better vantage point than the Katanga health centre in the impoverished northern state of Jigawa.
In a hut that passes for a nutrition clinic, a group of 25 women wait with their children. Tiny bodies bearing the hallmarks of acute malnutrition – distended stomachs and twig-thin limbs – are lifted into a weighing harness and their arms measured to check for signs of wasting. Ali, who has just reached his first birthday, weighs only 5kg – the average age of a two-month-old in the UK. His mother is 14.
Continue reading...Venezuela also in top five as IRC’s David Miliband warns of devastating impact from war, floods, droughts and disease
Yemen has topped an annual watchlist of countries most likely to face humanitarian catastrophe in 2020, for the second year running.
Continued fighting, economic collapse and weak governance mean that more than 24 million Yemenis – about 80% of the population – will be in need of humanitarian assistance this year, according to analysis by the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which found that another five years of conflict could cost $29bn (£22bn).
Continue reading...As a failing electric grid further burdens the creaking health system, doctors continue to seek opportunities abroad
The waiting rooms at the Ifako Ijaiye hospital in Lagos are overcrowded with patients waiting to see doctors. Often people have to stand outside.
“It is now like this every day. We have to come early and pick numbers before we can meet the doctors. Even though the doctors try to see everybody, it has got worse,” says Oluchi Ezegbo, a market trader from Okearo, in nearby Ogun state.
Continue reading...From uptempo romance to feelgood dance, politically spicy rap and crowdpleasing pop, the biggest tracks across Africa last year went big on cross-continental appeal
Continue reading...All 47 men deny offence of same-sex displays of affection, which carries 10-year jail term
Forty-seven men went on trial in Nigeria on Wednesday for public displays of affection with members of the same sex, an offence that carries a 10-year jail term in the country.
The men were among 57 arrested in a police raid on a hotel in the impoverished Egbeda district of the commercial capital, Lagos, in 2018. They pleaded innocent at a hearing last month.
Continue reading...Repentance, reparation and remedy for the terrible damage done to the people of Bayelsa state in Nigeria is long overdue
• John Sentamu is the archbishop of York
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights begins: “All human beings … should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” It is now widely acknowledged that human rights cannot be enjoyed without a safe, clean and healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment is enshrined in more than 100 constitutions all over the world because human and environmental rights are intertwined.
However, despite the endorsement of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, oil companies exploiting irreplaceable resources in the Niger Delta are callously flouting fundamental human rights. That is the conclusion I have been forced to draw from my work as chair of the Bayelsa State Oil and Environmental Commission (BSOEC).
Continue reading...Bayelsa state once offered rich pickings for farmers and fisherman. Then oil companies arrived and wrought an environmental catastrophe
• All photographs by Arteh Odjidja, whose work features in the exhibition Rise for Bayelsa, which runs in London until 20 December 2019
Almost every day, Udengs Eradiri is informed of another oil spill in Bayelsa state, in the Niger Delta. Most of the time, little or nothing is done to clean up the mess, says Eradiri, the state’s commissioner for the environment.
“You just need to take a tour to understand the magnitude of the environmental abuse,” he adds. “[Bayelsa] used to be green, you could go to farm or fish. We used to have very impressive harvests. You would spend just an hour in the water and you have a lot of fish.”
Continue reading...Organisers of competition students travelled to attend demand their return to Nigeria
The organisers of an international student sports competition have called for two Nigerian table tennis players to be returned to their own country after Croatian police wrongly deported them to a Bosnian refugee camp.
Abia Uchenna Alexandro and Eboh Kenneth Chinedu, students at the Federal University of Technology Owerri in Nigeria, arrived in Zagreb on 12 November, on their way to participate in the fifth World InterUniversities Championships, held this year in Pula, Croatia.
Continue reading...New cases of highly infectious disease that should be ‘consigned to the history books’ reported in Nigeria, the DRC, CAR and Angola
New cases of polio linked to the oral vaccine have been reported in four African countries and more children are now being paralysed by vaccine-derived viruses than those infected by viruses in the wild, according to global health numbers.
The World Health Organization (WHO) and partners identified nine new cases caused by the vaccine in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central African Republic and Angola last week. Along with seven other African countries with outbreaks, cases have also been reported in Asia. In Afghanistan and Pakistan polio remains endemic, and in Pakistan officials have been accused of covering up vaccine-related cases.
Continue reading...Benin bronze statue at Jesus College to be repatriated after 1897 theft by British forces
A bronze cockerel taken by British colonial forces and donated to Jesus College Cambridge is to be returned to Nigeria in an unprecedented step that adds momentum to the growing repatriations movement.
The Okukor, described by the college as a “royal ancestral heirloom”, will be one of the first Benin bronzes to be returned to Nigeria by a major British institution since the punitive expedition in 1897 when thousands of bronzes were stolen from Benin City by British forces.
Continue reading...Publicly accessible list will allow schools and hospitals to conduct background checks
Campaigners have hailed the launch of Nigeria’s first sex offender register as a vital step towards tackling reported cases of sexual abuse, which are rising across the country.
The publicly accessible onlineregister of people prosecuted for sexual violence since 2015 will allow public bodies and police authorities to conduct background checks and identify repeat offenders.
Continue reading...Activists warn muzzling of press under President Buhari could herald return to dark days of military rule
Fisayo Soyombo was eating an evening snack in Lagos in late October when a colleague called to warn him about a plan hatched by Nigerian government officials at a clandestine meeting to arrest him.
Hours earlier, the second in a three-part undercover series by the Abuja-based investigative journalist on corruption in Nigeria’s criminal justice system had been published.
Continue reading...Human Rights Watch said people were chained and faced physical and sexual violence in both state and religious centres
Nigeria has been urged to end all forms of abuse in state-run mental health institutions as well as religious healing centres.
In a report published on Monday Human Rights Watch (HRW) said thousands of Nigerians with mental health conditions face prolonged detention, chaining, physical and sexual violence or forced treatment, including electroshock therapy.
Continue reading...Bumi Thomas, whose sister got citizenship, wins appeal against removal from UK
Two Windrush sisters who describe themselves as inseparable are celebrating after a judge ruled that one of them should not be sent back to Nigeria.
Bumi Thomas, 36, was at risk of removal from the UK and at one point was given 14 days to leave, while her sister Kemi, 38, was not because of their different dates of birth.
Continue reading...Our two-year study shows the lake has been stable since the 1990s. Costly ‘solutions’ shift focus from the complex causes of the region’s deadly crisis
Lake Chad is a hydrological miracle – a life-giving, freshwater lake in the Sahara desert. But the region around the lake has been engulfed in a violent crisis for more than a decade, which has left nearly 10 million people in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.
Military crackdowns on insurgent groups such as Boko Haram have failed to end the violence. Bringing durable peace to the region requires unpicking a Gordian knot of many interlinked factors: poverty, sectarian mistrust, political marginalisation and corruption. The risks posed by the climate crisis to the rainfall-dependent livelihoods of the people of Lake Chad are an important strand of this challenge.
Continue reading...Photographer Robin Hinsch travelled to the Niger delta, visiting the gas flaring sites, artisanal refineries, and meeting the communities living in the hugely polluted environments caused by the oil industry
Covering 70,000 sq km (27,000 sq miles) of wetlands, the Niger delta was formed primarily by sediment deposition. It is home to more than 30 million people and 40 different ethnic groups, making up 7.5% of Nigeria’s total land mass.
Continue reading...Five years after she last saw her daughter, Yana Galang fears the world has forgotten a tragedy that splintered families and is now the subject of an award-winning documentary
Last week, Yana Galang left her small farm in Borno state, Nigeria, in the care of seven of her eight children and travelled by bus and train for the first time to the capital, Lagos. From there, she became the first member of her family ever to board a plane, and came to New York.
The mother of one of the 112 Nigerian schoolgirls of Chibok still missing after being abducted by Boko Haram in 2014 came to the city during the UN general assembly, on a mission to remind the world that – five years on – their children still have not been brought home.
Continue reading...Tributes paid to the inspirational Nigerian campaigner and writer, who was hit by a car outside his home in Port Harcourt
A leading activist, journalist and writer who fought for the environmental rights of Nigerians in one of the most polluted places on earth has died after being hit by a car.
Friends and colleagues of Patrick Naagbanton described him as highly respected in the Niger Delta, Africa’s most important oil-producing region. They said his death, and the absence of his work holding the government, companies and individuals with interests in the region to account, would leave an enormous hole.
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