Nigeria and Cameroon have exchanged three border villages in the second of a series of moves designed to end a territorial dispute that nearly brought the countries to war. Officials from the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said on Wednesday that the green and white striped flag of Nigeria had replaced the green, red and yellow of Cameroon in the villages of Bourha-Wango and Ndabakura, about 200 km south of Lake Chad, on Tuesday.

Kano state in northern Nigeria has ended a 10-month boycott of polio immunisations and ordered its health officials to start vaccinating children again. The move, announced on Monday night, had been long awaited by international health experts who have seen the crippling disease ripple around Africa from the Nigerian hot spot.

Impact for Change and Development, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) took the campaign against child labour to the streets of Abuja recently to drum up support for the eradication of the menace. The campaign, which was staged in a rally made up of civil servants, representatives of United nations Organisations, school children and other distinguished Nigerians was geared towards creating awareness on the ills of using under aged children for domestic labour.

Security forces and armed militiamen have clashed in Port Harcourt, in Nigeria's oil-rich Delta region. Residents say a number of people, including a woman bystander, died in the fighting, which took place in the city's Amadi-Ama district on Tuesday. Nigeria is Africa's biggest oil exporter, but the Niger Delta is one of the most underdeveloped regions of the country and is prone to violence.

The U.S. and British subsidiaries of ABB Ltd., a Swiss equipment-maker, pleaded guilty to paying more than $1 million in illegal bribes to win oil contracts in Nigeria, the Justice Department said Tuesday. ABB Vetco Gray Inc. of Houston and ABB Vetco Gray U.K. Ltd. of Aberdeen, Scotland, disclosed the suspicious payments to the government last year and formally pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston. As part of the deal, each company agreed to pay a fine of $5.25 million.

On 9 July 2004, police in Port Harcourt, Rivers State, southern Nigeria, arrested and detained two news magazine reporters, Lawson Heyford of "The Source" and Okafor Ofiebor of "The News". The journalists were arrested for their alleged association with a man identified as Pastor Joe Alatoru, who had accused two senior police officers of taking bribes from him. Alatoru was also arrested by police.

Efforts to build women's capacity to work in peace-building must link women's practical needs such as access to clean water and microcredit, with strategic needs related to gendered divisions of labour and power, which require confidence building, training in awareness of human rights, and the creation of organisations and networks. This is according to a report from International Alert that documents a participatory needs assessment undertaken in mid-2002 with women involved in peace-building in the Niger Delta region.

Since the election of President Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999 ended 15 years of military rule in Nigeria, at least 10,000 people have been killed and some 800,000 displaced by outbreaks of communal violence across the country. According to government estimates, about 250,000 Nigerians remain displaced today – including up to 60,000 who fled their homes during the latest unrest in Plateau State in May 2004. A safe and conducive environment must be created for IDP return, with emphasis on reconciliation.

On 8 July 2004, police in Kano State, northwestern Nigeria, released Kola Oyelere, the Kano State correspondent for the privately-owned "Nigerian Tribune" newspaper. Oyelere was arrested by police on 4 July on charges of publishing false information.

The International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) is calling for international pressure on the Nigerian government to withdraw a draft anti-union law, which would, amongst other things, deregister the ICFTU-affiliated Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), the main national trade union centre in the country. The proposed law would also impose severe restrictions on the right to strike. The 4 million-member NLC is apparently being targeted following its repeated calls for fair prices of petroleum products. Despite being a major world oil producer, the price of these products is spiralling beyond the means of many Nigerians.

US regulators have requested documents from Technip, the French engineering company, a partner of Halliburton in a controversial multi-billion dollar business deal in Nigeria. The Securities and Exchange Commission has sought the documents from the French company as part of its inquiry into whether TSKJ - a consortium jointly-owned by Technip, Halliburton and two other companies - paid bribes to win a Nigerian construction project.

On 4 July 2004, Kola Oyelere, the Kano State correspondent for the privately-owned "Nigerian Tribune" newspaper, was arrested by police in Kano State, northwestern Nigeria. He was detained, reportedly tortured and subsequently charged with publishing false information by a Kano Chief Magistrate Court on 5 July. Oyelere was charged with publishing false information following the publication of a lead story in the 4 July "Sunday Tribune" titled, "Panic in Kano as Fresh Crisis Looms”.

Oil giant Total has halted its 225,000 barrels a day production in Nigeria, after yet another trade union protest. Total, which had been forced to stop output last Friday, ceased it again on Tuesday after a union dispute over staff supervision.

A Nigerian appeals court has quashed a lower court judgement that nullified the election of a state governor from the ruling party, saying there was inadequate evidence to prove opposition allegations of vote rigging. Announcing the unanimous decision of a panel of five appeal court judges sitting in the central city of Jos, Justice Pius Aderemi said on Monday they were overruling an electoral tribunal judgement which had voided the election of Boni Haruna as governor of Adamawa State in eastern Nigeria.

A Nigerian student said on Friday he had been booted out of a Lagos journalism school after he told the director he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS and would need to miss classes one day a month to get treatment. Fredrick Adegboye, 45, said he planned to take the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ) to court if he was not readmitted by the end of next week.

The World Health Organisation announced it was sending a team of experts to Rogo, in northern Nigeria's Kano state, to investigate a suspected outbreak of new polio cases. Kano state officials halted polio immunizations in the region last year amid fears the vaccine could lead to female sterilization. Local Islamic leaders had also alleged Western countries were using the vaccination campaign to spread HIV and cancer in Nigeria to reduce the Muslim-dominant population.

Figures released in the G8 summit show that Nigerians in the diaspora are sending home $12 billion annually - almost half of the total made by the country's largest export - oil ($30 billion). This follows last year's comments by Ghana's President, John Kufour, who thanked Ghanaians living abroad for sending home $1.3 billion - almost the same figure Ghana earned from its two biggest exports, Gold and Cocoa.

BAOBAB for Women’s Human Rights, in collaboration with CIRDDOC (Civil Resource Development and Documentation Centre), highlighted violations of women’s rights in Nigeria that were viewed by the public as normal or even justifiable abuse. The organization used prominent people - a Nigerian Supreme Court justice, a member of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination (CEDAW) committee in Nigeria, lawyers, and representatives from the National Human Rights Commission - to create a high powered panel of “judges” to draw media attention and hear testimonies by women from many areas of Nigeria. The judges were selected based on their prominence and their concern for women’s rights. The tribunal’s recommendations was instrumental, at both local and national levels, in subsequent attempts to advocate for new laws and for reforms of existing laws related to violence against women.

Clashes between Christians and Muslims in Nigeria’s eastern Adamawa state at the beginning of June displaced at least 2,000 people when their homes were burned to the ground, and killed more than 40, the Nigerian Red Cross told the BBC. The fighting in the predominantly Christian town of Numan was prompted by a long-standing dispute over the reconstruction of a mosque which had been destroyed in earlier communal violence.

The Nigeria Social Forum (NSF) conceived with principles of the World Social Forum(WSF) was inaugurated on 29th May, 2004 in Lagos, Nigeria. The Nigeria Social Forum is a platform for reflective thinking and action. At the inaugural meeting, a charter of principles was adopted, which stipulates among other things: Opposition to globalised neo-liberalism and domination of the world by capital; Building alternatives with the slogan "Another Nigeria is possible"; Pluralism and diversity; Opposition to all authoritarian and reductionist views of the economy and the use of violence as a means of social control by the state; Alternatives to the problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist globalisation and environmental destruction engenders; Creation of links among organizations and movements with a view to increasing their capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization and violence used by the State; Linkage of actions from local level to the national level spiralling into the global agenda to build a new world in solidarity. More documentation is available through the link below.