Lagos, NigeriaLagos is the most populous city in Nigeria, the largest country in Africa. It is the financial heart, the economy of Lagos state being thought to be worth around $33 billion, despite the chronic overcrowding, crumbling infrastructure, and hellish traffic.

The metropolitan area, an estimated 300 square kilometers, is a group of islands endowed with creeks and a lagoon. Lagos is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. It is currently experiencing a population increase of about 275,000 persons per year. Like most cities, there is a huge spectrum of wealth distribution among the people that reside in Lagos. It ranges from the very wealthy to the very poor. Lagos has attracted many young entrepreneurs and families seeking a better life from throughout Nigeria and beyond.

Lagos is the commercial and industrial hub of Nigeria, with a GNP triple that of any other West African country. Much of the financial and commercial business of Lagos and Nigeria as a whole are transacted through the central business district in Lagos Island. This is also where most of the country’s largest banks and financial institutions and headquarters of major corporations, banks and insurance companies are located.

Oil production, which began in the 1950's, increased seven-fold between 1965 and 1973, while world oil prices skyrocketed. By 1978, the metropolitan area accounted for 40% of the external trade of Nigeria, containing 40% of the national skilled population. The world recession in 1981, which caused a sharp fall in oil prices, sent Lagos reeling into debt and runaway inflation that persist at present. As a result, a massive programme of infrastructure and social services expansion came to an abrupt halt.

Lagos is famous throughout West Africa for its music scene. Lagos has given birth to a variety of styles such as the Nigerian-styled hiphop (naija hiphop), highlife, juju, fuji, and Afrobeat.

Energy and water access, sewerage, transportation and housing have all been adversely affected by haphazard development of a geographically disjointed city. Unlike the rest of Nigeria, 90% of the population of Lagos have access to electricity, with the city consuming 45% of the energy of the country. However, 2/3 of residence still live in “informal” neighborhoods and more than 1 million of the city’s poor have been forcibly ejected from their homes in largely unannounced government slum clearances over the past 15 years.

Despite the region's endowment of water, the city suffers from an acute and worsening water supply shortage. And due to inadequate sewerage, much the city's human waste is disposed of by the drainage of rainwater through open ditches that discharge onto the tidal flats. With congested bridges, traffic congestion is a daily problem in Lagos: it takes an average of two to three hours to travel 10-20 kilometres. A high-speed, elevated metro-liner is in the planning stages.

Since 1985, state urban renewal plans have concentrated on upgrading the environment of slum communities by building roads and drainage channels and providing water supply, electricity, schools and health clinics. With cooperation from the citizens, success has been recorded in a number of pilot urban renewal schemes, which focus on building roads and drainage channels and providing water supply, electricity, schools and health clinics.

"City Profiles: Lagos." UN News Center. UN, n.d. Web. 10 Mar. 2014. <http://www.un.org/cyberschoolbus/habitat/profiles/lagos.asp>.

March 8, 2010

Ethnic Violence in Nigeria Kills 500, OfficialsSayBy ADAM NOSSITERDAKAR, Senegal — Officials and human rights groups in Nigeria said Monday that about 500 people had died in weekend ethnic violence near the central city of Jos, considerably more than what had initially been reported.

A government spokesman said Sunday that the dead numbered more than 300. The victims were Christians killed by rampaging Muslim herdsmen, officials and human rights workers said, apparently in reprisal for similar attacks on Muslims in January.

The head of a leading Nigerian rights group, Shehu Sani of the Civil Rights Congress, said in a telephone interview on Monday that his organization had counted 492 bodies, mainly in the village of Dogo Nahawa.

In Abuja, the Nigerian capital, the International Committee of the Red Cross said it could not yet give an estimate of the number of dead as its representatives had not been able to reach all of the villages that were attacked.

The killings took place in Plateau State near the city of Jos, for years a hotbed of ethnic and religious violence near the dividing line between the country’s mainly Christian south and Muslim north.

Hundreds on both sides were killed as recently as January, though the victims this time were Christians, according to the information commissioner for Plateau, Gregory Yenlong, and a local human rights organization.

Many appeared to have been cut down with machetes after being driven from homes set ablaze by attackers in the predawn darkness, said Shamaki Gad Peter of the League for Human Rights, a Nigerian group.

Mr. Yenlong said the attackers were “hoodlums, Fulani herdsmen” — Muslims from a neighboring state, Bauchi, who were going after Christian members of Plateau’s leading ethnic group, the Berom, in the villages of Ratt and Dogo Nahawa.

“They attacked those villages and killed well over 300 people, mostly women, children and the aged,” Mr. Yenlong said. “They killed them unprovoked. Innocent people were massacred.”

Witnesses, including Mr. Peter, spoke of bodies littering the streets of Ratt. One victim was less than 3 months old, he said.

“I’m seeing more than 20 corpses right now, women and children who have been killed,” Mr. Peter said.

“Virtually every house has been burned down. Corpses of people are littered about. They were slaughtered with machetes. I can see the cuts on their head and neck.”

Mr. Peter said the attacks began around 2 a.m. and lasted around four hours.

The attacks come at a time of political crisis in Nigeria. The acting president, Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, was appointed by the National Assembly to rule in the place of President

Umaru Yar’Adua, who is gravely ill. Mr. Jonathan sent troops to Jos in January to quell the violence, but his authority in the country is uncertain.

One man who was present during the attacks said the killers began firing guns, then poured gasoline on the roofs in Ratt.

“We saw the Fulani coming, and they started shooting,” said the man, Yohanna Kudu. “They used machetes to kill our women and children. Some of the children were burned inside the houses.”

He added, “We thought the military would protect us.”

An Islamist insurgency in the north comes on top of another in the Delta

VIOLENCE has often disfigured religion in Nigeria. Usually, it has been a matter of bloody confrontation between Muslims and Christians in the middle of the country, where the largely Muslim north rubs up against the mainly Christian south. This week, however, Nigeria experienced its most serious outbreak of another kind of religious violence, provoked by Islamic fundamentalists who take their inspiration from the Taliban of Afghanistan. At least 180 people were killed in five days of clashes between militants and the police.

The fighting started on July 26th in Bauchi state after the police arrested several suspected leaders of an Islamist sect called Boko Haram, a local Hausa term that means “education is prohibited”. In particular, the group is against Western education and influence. It wants to impose a pure Muslim caliphate on Nigeria. In retaliation for the arrest of their leaders, militants went on the rampage in several northern states, attacking the police with anything that came to hand, from machetes to bows and poison arrows.

The police fought back, killing, so they claimed, 39 militants in Bauchi. Fierce fighting took place in Maiduguri, capital of Borno state, where the sect has its headquarters. On July 28th the army was called in to shell the compound where the sect’s leader, Muhammad Yusuf, has been based. As well as killing scores of Boko Haram fighters, the police arrested hundreds of suspected members of the group.

The “Black Taliban”, as such groups are dubbed in Nigeria’s northern states, have carried out isolated attacks for several years. This time the violence has been more widespread and prolonged. Muslim sharia law was introduced in 12 northern states after general elections in 1999, but the states’ Muslim rulers have usually been cautious in applying it. This has prompted the militants to demand a more extreme form of Islamist rule and for sharia to be extended to the whole of Nigeria.

This week’s violence in the north comes on top of unceasing violence in the southern Niger Delta region, where an insurgency by militants demanding a bigger share of the country’s oil wealth continues to disrupt oil exports. By some estimates, Nigeria now exports only half of what it should: Angola has taken over as sub-Saharan Africa’s biggest producer.

Despite floating various well-meaning plans to pacify the Delta, the government has failed to stop the region’s unrest. The fall in tax revenues, as a result of illegal bunkering and the sabotage of pipelines, means that Mr Yar’Adua has even less chance of tackling his country’s other problems, such as a chronic lack of electricity. The insurgency in the Delta has thrived on the back of dire poverty and high unemployment in what should be a relatively wealthy region, were it not so poorly governed. Some fear the Islamist militants in the north may profit from the same lack of

opportunities, which saps the morale of young Nigerians and makes so many of them prey to extremists.

What is behind Nigeria fuel protests? By Stephanie Busari, CNNupdated 10:37 AM EST, Fri January 13, 2012

(CNN) -- Nigeria, Africa's largest oil producer, ended oil subsidies on New Year's Day that had kept gasoline prices artificially low. The cost of a liter of gasoline shot up from 65 naira (40 cents) to at least 141 naira (86 cents) virtually overnight.

Furious Nigerians have since taken to the streets, staging 'Occupy Nigeria' protests and mass demonstrations across the country. Police have responded forcefully with many arrests. At least one person has died amid the unrest.

What is the background to the decision?The government is attempting to deregulate the oil sector in the country and believes subsidizing consumption of oil is a drain on public finances that will prove unsustainable in the long term. Many argue that the only people the subsidy benefited were fuel importers. The government says the move will save the Treasury more than 1 trillion naira ($6.13 billion) in 2012.

Reuben Abati, spokesman for President Goodluck Jonathan, told CNN the money saved from removing the subsidy will help to improve public amenities and build much-needed infrastructure in a country with poor roads, lack of power and non-functioning refineries.

Why has it caused such an outcry?Nigerians are angry because they believe the government has introduced the plan without any regard to how it will affect the cost of living in the country. They say they are already experiencing undue hardship as a result of the move, which they say has already affected the cost of transport, food, medicine, rent and school fees.

"The government cannot tell how many businesses will be ruined or even how many people will die," Feyi Fawehinmi, an accountant and analyst, told CNN. "The impact will be so wide-ranging. There should have been a plan to remove this in a sensible way, not in this crude manner," he said.

Many Nigerians see the subsidy, which gives them the cheapest gas price in the region, as the only benefit of being an oil producing country. Nigerians routinely have to buy generators to provide power and supporters of the subsidies say some may be left in the dark because they simply cannot afford fuel costs

Is there an economic case for the removal? Those who support ending the subsidy removal say the move is long overdue because of simple economics. They argue that Nigerians have been paying N65 (40 cents) per liter for at least five years,

while petrol prices have risen significantly elsewhere in the world, which means the government foots the bill when worldwide oil prices go up.They also say that the only people who get any real benefit from the subsidy are those involved in importing oil. The Nigerian oil traders import refined gasoline, claim the subsidy and then sell it on at a higher rate to neighboring countries.

What will happen next? Mass unrest and instability in the country is expected over the next few days, with citizens calling for a return to the cheap prices. So far, the government has refused but has announced the "immediate distribution of 1600 mass transit buses to major cities."Labor union leaders have called for national strikes and protests that they hope will lead to a mass shutdown across the country.

States in Nigeria

Between 1962 and 1992, the Federal system comprised 3 Regions (1960), 4 Regions (1963), 12 States (1967), 19 States (1976), 21 States (1987) and since 1991, 30 States.

The Local Governments have also increased from 299 in 1970 to 301 (1979); and then to 781 (1981) before they reverted again to 301 (1984) and increased first to 449 (1987), 500 (1991) and to 589. As can be seen.....the Constituent units in the Nigerian federation had been tinkered with eleven times either at the State or Local Government level. With the increasing number of units, and, with what there is to be shared not varying much, greater pressure is put on available resources; hence the "national cake" is fragmented among many units.

Management of Oil Revenue …The current formula is: Federal Government 52.68%; states 26.72%; and local governments 20. 60%.

Currently, the management of oil revenue derivation is in the hands of governors of the oil producing states with little or no input from local communities in the management of such funds.

* State allocations are based on 5 criteria: equality (equal shares per state), population, social development, land mass, and revenue generation.

**The derivation formula refers to the percentage of the revenue oil producing states retain from taxes on oil and other natural resources produced in the state. World Bank

Oil revenue sharing formulaYear

Federal State* Loca

lSpecial Projects

Derivation Formula**

1958 40% 60% 0% 0% 50%

1968 80% 20% 0% 0% 10%

1977 75% 22% 3% 0% 10%

1982 55% 32.5

% 10% 2.5% 10%

1989 50% 24% 15% 11% 10%

1995 48.5% 24% 20% 7.5% 13%

2001 48.5% 24% 20% 7.5% 13%