Nigeria

Niger

Nigerian group, Socialist Labour, released a statement on August 1, in response to the coup in the neighbouring country of Niger and the threat of foreign military intervention including by Nigeria.

Nnimmo Bassey

Ahead of the COP27 climate meeting in Egypt, the Breaking Green podcast spoke to Nigerian environmentalist Nnimmo Bassey.

The jury is still out on how the #EndSARS rebellion will pan out, writes Baba Aye. But whichever way it goes, Nigeria will not be the same again.

The #EndSARS protests in Nigeria have opened up new possibilities for resistance by the Nigerian working class and peasantry against neoliberalism and brutal state violence, writes Shawn Hattingh.

Black Lives Matter leaders have expressed strong support for Nigerian students and working people in their #EndSARS protests against state violence, reports Malik Miah.

Adam Mayer’s book on Marxist currents in Nigeria is what it says on the cover — a rich history of Marxist and revolutionary thought and struggles that are little known outside the West African nation.

Sixty million people are on the run worldwide, most from countries in the global South. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) says one third of the refugees originate from Africa.

Wars, human rights violations, political instability, discrimination, poverty and the consequences of climate change and natural disasters are often named as causes for flight. But there is also ecocide — the destruction of livelihoods through the ruthless exploitation of raw materials and the subsidy politics of industrialised countries in the West.

Tens of thousands of Nigerian fisherpeople and farmers were given the green light to sue energy giant Shell in a British court on March 2 for a series of destructive oil spills in the Niger Delta over the past decade. The action, brought by London-based law firm Leigh Day on behalf of Nigeria’s Ogale and Bille communities, alleges that decades of uncleaned oil spills have polluted fishing waters and contaminated farming land. As well as a compensation package, both groups want the Anglo-Dutch oil company to clean up the land devastated by the spills.
On November 10, it was 20 years since Ken Saro-Wiwa, president of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), and eight other Ogoni leaders were hanged by Nigaria's military dictatorship in Nigeria. Known as the Ogoni Nine, their crime was demanding a share of the proceeds of oil exploitation. The Niger Delta covers a huge area of some 27,000 square miles on Nigeria’s southern coast. Once almost all tropical rainforest, it has one of the highest levels of biodiversity on earth and is home to 31 million people. Ogoniland comprises 400 square miles in the eastern delta.

The fishing community of Baga, by Lake Chad in Borno state, Nigeria, was under siege by armed Islamic fundamentalist group Boko Haram for a week at the start of January, writes Baba Aye. Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan, who condemned the “dastardly terrorist attack” against Charlie Hebdo cartoonists within hours of the tragic event in Paris, did not say a word about this tragedy.

As the deadly disease Ebola spreads throughout West Africa, some in the West have been engaging in fear-mongering and racism. Others are seeing this deadly outbreak as a golden chance to profit off desperation. But the high death toll is caused by the intersection of Ebola and poverty. Ebola is a hemorrhagic fever with symptoms that include headache, vomiting and diarrhoea, as well as the signature symptoms of internal and external bleeding. It is caused by a virus that is spread through contact with fluids such as saliva, urine, blood and semen.
More than 270 female secondary students were kidnapped on April 14 as they sat matriculation exams in the north-east Nigerian town of Chibok. The kidnappers were members of a religious cult that calls itself Jama‘at Ahl as-Sunnah lid-da‘wa wal-Jihad — Arabic for Congregation of the People of Tradition for Proselytism and Jihad. The group is more commonly known by its Hausa nickname, Boko Haram, which translate — very loosely — as “Western education is filthy”, although this is not a name that the group itself uses.