Washington, DC — During a press conference prior to his meeting Wednesday with U.S. President George Bush, Nigeria's President Olusegun Obasanjo read a prepared statement about Charles Taylor, the former Liberian rebel and president, who has been in exile in the Nigerian town of Calabar.
Obasanjo noted that the statement was written prior to Taylor's capture on Nigeria's northeastern border with Cameroon and Chad. He added that he felt "vindicated" that Nigerian border guards in Gamboru had seized Taylor before he could escape the country.
While the meeting with reporters was dominated by questions about Taylor, Obasanjo also said, when asked about the security situation in his country's oil-producing region, that he is confident that a meeting he will convene next week, involving "all stakeholders in that part of the country", will help to ease tension and resolve the crisis.
Responding to another question, Obasanjo called health "very central to the issue of what I call human infrastructure in our country." He said during his first two years in office he had convened summits on Malaria and HIV/Aids and that revisits of both meetings were planned for later this year.
He said the HIV prevalence index in Nigeria has been dropping as a result of the government's efforts to combat Aids. The recently released level for 2005 was 4.4 percent, he said, compared with 5.8 percent four years ago.
The president also spoke about progress in the area of agriculture and said one reason for his visit to the United States was to take part in a press conference in New York, under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, to launch an effort to revive the continent's food producing capacity.
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"In the last three years, agricultural production has been growing at the rate of 7 per cent per annum," he said. Nigeria is now providing grains to drought-affected countries like the Niger Republic, and the World Food Program is buying food from Nigeria for distribution in Chad and Sudan's Darfur area. "These are things that have never happened before," he said.
