Adéwálé Májà-Pearce

The rioting in the Northern, predominantly Muslim city of Kaduna that forced the organisers to withdraw the Miss World competition has brought into question once again the viability of the project called Nigeria. The riots themselves were triggered by a newspaper article suggesting that the Prophet Muhammad would have approved of the presence of the beauty queens, and perhaps chosen a wife or...

Last December, Chief Bola Ige, the Nigerian Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, was assassinated. The political violence that has ensued will culminate in elections next year, when the ostensibly democratic Government of Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired general, hopes to return for a second term. Its chances of success are slim. There have been two previous attempts by civilian Governments...

The last decade has seen the emergence of a new kind of film industry in Nigeria. The results are known as ‘home movies’ – they are shot straight onto video and sold direct to the public. One of the new, independent television stations, MBI, was the first to air a home movie every evening. The slot was so popular that the Government-owned Nigerian Television Authority...

The military should make a clean break from politics to retrieve its fast-vanishing reputation.

We had just reached the outskirts of Lomé when my shared taxi was flagged down at a police checkpoint. One of the Togolese officers asked me for ID. I handed him my Nigerian passport. He looked at it, nodded his head in a way that suggested he had discovered something significant and ordered me to get out. I was perplexed but didn’t think there was any reason to worry. I knew there were periodic security alerts in Togo. General Gnassingbe Eyadéma, in power since 1067, was refusing to bow to popular pressure and quit office. It was for this reason that independent Togolese journalists were regularly detained and their newspapers impounded.