Nigeria

At Government House in Port Harcourt last week, waiters scurried around pouring bottles of Cristal champagne as a white jacketed crooner sang Frank Sinatra's 'My way' in honour...

The shooting dead of a Nigerian driver and kidnapping of six Russians from their compound in Ikot Abasi, Akwa Ibom, looks like an escalation in a complex feud...

The gulf between the aspirations of the new political team under President-elect Umaru Musa Yar'Adua and the consequences of last month's disastrous elections is widening dangerously. Many around...

Mallam Nasir el-Rufai's student friends called him 'Giant'; he stands some five foot seven inches tall. These days he is more commonly known as 'Bulldozer', because of his...

Time is pressing President-elect Umaru Yar'Adua ahead of the planned inauguration on 29 May. By then, he will have to put together his government transition team from the...

Bayelsa State's head of security, Bola Igali, barked orders into his mobile phone. 'We have a security situation developing,' he told Africa Confidential, breaking off the interview. Shooting...

Emmanuel Uduaghan, the winner of the heavily disputed governorship elections in Delta State, will have a critical economic and political role in the coming months. He is the...

Failing a cataclysmic reversal in the next week, President Olusegun Obasanjo's governing People's Democratic Party is likely to chalk up another victory at the state and federal elections...

Opposition to the governing People's Democratic Party (PDP) is split between 24 different parties, most of which cannot even dream of winning a governorship, much less the Presidency.

We examine the main contestants and predict the probable winners of the elections