Nigeria’s acting president dissolved the country’s Cabinet today just over a month after taking office.

Former US president George Bush and ex-British Prime Minister Tony Blair joined Nigeria’s elite at a ceremony honouring its political and business establishment, but one winner’s absence highlighted the endemic corruption and other problems plaguing the oil-rich nation.

Nigeria’s parliament empowered Vice President Goodluck Jonathan to run Africa’s most populous nation in place of an ill and absent president, striving for a political end to a crisis that ground the government to a virtual halt and triggered the resumption of an insurgency in the vital oil sector.

THREE top Nigerian militant leaders in the volatile oil hub of the Niger Delta gave up their weapons along with thousands of fighters on Saturday under a government amnesty.

Troop reinforcements on foot and in armoured personnel carriers appeared today to have quelled two days of violence that left hundreds dead in a central Nigerian city.

The top religious official at the main mosque in a riot-hit Nigerian city said the death toll has reached more than 300 people in two days of election-related violence.

Mobs burned homes and places of worship and more than 20 people were killed on a second day of post-election sectarian violence today in the central Nigerian city of Jos.

Climate change, soaring oil prices and possible steps against Zimbabwe were high on the agenda as leaders from the Group of Eight economic powers gathered in Japan for their annual summit.

The Nigerian Defence Ministry has asked 40 top army officials to retire, a Nigerian defence spokesman said today, two months after the country swore in a new president.

Kidnappers snatched a three-year-old British girl from her vehicle as it carried her to school today in Nigeria’s lawless southern oil region, officials said.

Unions in Nigeria have called off their strike aimed at overturning a government fuel-price hike, ending a four-day work stoppage that had closed down most major economic activity in Africa’s biggest oil producer.

A GENERAL strike gripped Nigeria yesterday, posing the first significant test for the country’s new president and putting oil markets on edge over supplies from one of the world’s top crude exporters.

President Olusegun Obasanjo bid farewell to Nigeria, saying Africa’s most-populous nation had grown stronger and more united during his eight years of civilian leadership after years of ruinous military rule.

Gunmen seized four more foreign workers amid a dramatic rise in violence that has rocked Nigeria’s southern petroleum-producing region, oil industry officials said today.