The most outstanding sight in the tiny fishing village of Batan in southern Nigeria, is a 10-metre-high flame that burns continuously from a vertical pipe at the edge of one of the many facilities the Shell oil company has in the Niger Delta.

Nigeria’s Vice-President Atiku Abubakar has described as reprehensible the massacre of scores of civilians and the sacking of their villages by soldiers in central region Benue State.

This week the Media Monitoring Project focuses its attention on the media coverage of the visit by the Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group to Zimbabwe to assess the progress being made towards the implementation of the conditions set out in the Abuja agreement signed in the Nigerian capital on September 6th between Britain and Zimbabwe. The government-controlled media launched a propaganda blitz promoting government’s insistence that it is complying with the terms of the Abuja Agreement.

Human Rights Watch urged Bush to raise concerns about the recent massacre by soldiers in Benue State, Central Nigeria at his meeting with President Obasanjo on 2 November to discuss anti-terrorism measures.

In the last edition of KFSN we ran an item on The NOMA Children's Hospital in Northern Nigeria, but failed to mention the source of the report: Dateline Health Nigeria No. 57, 2001, available at: . We apologise for failing to credit the source, and we will endeavour in the future to always credit our sources, without which we could not put this newsletter together.

In what appeared as his first public reaction to last week's reprisal killings by soldiers in Benue State, President Olusegun Obasanjo yesterday stated that anybody who kills a Nigerian soldier should be ready for the consequences because such people would be inviting disaster on themselves.

Islamic Sharia law will come into effect on Friday in northern Kaduna State despite opposition by Christians there, news organisations reported on Monday. State Governor Ahmed Makarfi, who made the announcement in a state-wide broadcast on Friday, said that the Islamic legal code would only be applicable in areas where there was a Muslim majority, BBC reported.

Up to 300,000 people are currently displaced in Nigeria's central region as a result of communal clashes and recent attacks launched against several communities by the army, local officials said.

Human Rights Watch today condemned the massacre of more than 100 civilians by Nigerian soldiers in several villages in Benue State, apparently carried out as revenge for the killing of 19 soldiers earlier this month.

The Executive Director of Transparency International (TI), Mr. Miguel Schloss, has rated President Olusegun Obasanjo's anti-graft campaign low.

An opinion piece in the Daily Trust based in Abuja, argues that "phony amendments" to the constitution of the Nigeria Union of Journalists are to blame for recent developments that "have tended to portray the union as one huge bunch of jokers and mediocrities."

UNICEF is in the process of updating the UNICEF Directory of NGOs in Nigeria. In this respect, UNICEF has commissioned CASSAD to identify and categorize all viable and credible NGOs operating in all development sectors in all the regions of Nigeria, with a view to facilitate access to them for development purposes. The exercise will: Identify, assess and classify all NGOs in Nigeria; Keep a record of all viable and credible NGOs; create an NGO database, and produce a revised and updated Directory of NGOs in Nigeria for wide dissemination. All NGOs, operating in Nigeria, are hereby invited to provide information on themselves by completing and returning the NGO Profile Questionnaire. Deadline 22 November 2001.

The concerns are widespread and infectious. Most Nigerian students of this generation hate or fear mathematics and science subjects. Failure rate in mathematics and sciences is on a steep increase. Few female students offer science subjects unless they are made compulsory. There is acute shortage of science and mathematics teachers, lack of instructional materials, laboratory equipment and training facilities as well as an insufficiency of classrooms.

Worried by the negative image created for African countires by the prevalence of corruption and poverty, President Olusegun Obasanjo has called for a collective war "against this hydra-headed monster".

Nigeria is to conduct an immunisation campaign between 20 and 26 October in order to contain the incidence of wild polio virus in the country, officials said on Thursday.

Public Enterprises have in the past year cost the economy a total sum of $600 billion, being sum of $400 billion in funding to the sector and $200 billion in income withheld and un-remitted to the Federal purse.

Nigeria has won a significant victory in the high court in its efforts to recover more than $1bn of stolen money laundered through London banks by the family of its late military ruler Sani Abacha.

The NOMA Children Hospital located in the Rungin Sambo area of Sokoto, Northern Nigeria is bringing succour to many impoverished children from Sokoto, Kebbi, Taraba and such far flung states like Bauchi, Jigawa and Borno States, suffering from the devastating disease known as NOMA or Cancrum Oris.

A 30-year old woman, Safiya Hussaini Tungar-Tudu was sentenced to death by stoning by the upper Sharia court Gwadabawa for committing adultery.

The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) has indicted its members for the rising level of corruption in the country, saying that lawyers have not done enough to fight corruption in Nigeria.