Gearing up for battle with environmental foes

Losing about 50 metres to the Atlantic Ocean and some two kilometres to the Sahara Desert annually, Nigeria is faced with a creeping environmental disaster that has caught the attention of its government. President Olusegun Obasanjo was in Lagos on Monday to visit the city's beach front, where the ocean has advanced by more than a kilometre in the past two years. The sea is now poised just a few steps from the main street and posh residences of the rich suburb of Victoria Island. Obasanjo pledged to make urgent efforts to deal with the problem in Lagos and in other areas threatened by coastal erosion. Last week he was in the north-eastern state of Gombe to launch a tree-planting campaign which, he said, was imperative to verturn what for now appears to be a losing battle with deforestation. The government plans to plant 4,000 hectares of trees by the end of next year, he said. See Item: irin-english-1401, titled 'NIGERIA: IRIN Special Report on environmental challenges' Obasanjo speaks on violence Obasanjo suggested on Tuesday during a visit to the northern town of Kano that there were other forces behind the recent social unrest there, news organisations reported. He said he could not understand the definition of the fighting as an ethnic clash. "An ethnic clash between whom? We have Sudanese Kano, Niger Republic Kano, Malian Kano, Chadian Kano etc," 'The Guardian' quoted him as saying. Obasanjo was visiting Kano as part of a tour of areas affected by recent unrest, reportedly between Nigeria's two biggest ethnic groups, the Hausas, the majority of whom live in the north, and the Yorubas, who live mainly in the south. Fighting broke out there two weeks ago, just days after clashes between Hausas and Yorubas in the southern town of Shagamu led to the death of more than 70 people, the BBC said. The fighting in Kano is widely believed to have started when local Hausas decided to seek revenge for the attacks on the Hausa minority in Shagamu. During a visit to Shagamu on Monday, Obasanjo said the ethnic unrest had been orchestrated by opponents of the new civilian government. He did not identify those he suspected, but said the perpetrators would be prosecuted, the BBC reported. In an interview broadcast on state television, Obasanjo said that local leaders in both towns had told him that the fighting was not done by indigenes, according to AFP. Obasanjo defends allowances Meanwhile Obasanjo has defended his government in the controversy surrounding the allowances approved for members of the national assembly, saying the stipends had been decided by the last military regime before it left office in May. AFP quoted Obasanjo as saying in a television interview on Tuesday that the money was earmarked by the former government to allow the furnishing of parliamentarians' homes and his government would not be "revisiting it." He said that he had told the parliamentarians it was not personal money and should be spent properly, with written guarantees to that effect. Each of the 109 federal senators is to receive 3.5 million naira (US $33,600) while the 360 members of the House of Representatives are to get 2.5 million naira (US $24,000) per person, about 800 times the monthly minimum wage of 3000 naira (US $29). Hundreds of trade unionists demonstrated on Tuesday against the size of the allowances.