National Security, Religious Anarchism and the Politics of Amnesty in Nigeria

The Nigerian state is caught in the crossfire of national insecurity arising from the insurgency of various rogue groups. The most prominent of these groups, and one whose activities have had far -reaching destabilising effect on the polity, is the Boko Haram sect. The Boko Haram sect, which uses the Taliban - and al-Qaeda-style terrorist tactics of suicide bombing and targeted assassination, is responsible for between 3000 and 4000 deaths since it declared war and engaged in armed insurgency in 2009. The sect has targeted and bombed state institutions, the United Nations building as well as many Christian worship centres in furtherance of its avowed objective of deploying terror to achieve the islamisation of the Nigerian state. Relying on secondary sources of data, the paper interrogates the force theory that underpins Nigeria’s security engineering and contends that the continued insecurity in the polity is a demonstration of its ineffectiveness. The paper also contends that the proposition by the Federal Government to grant amnesty to the Boko Haram sect is not as simplistic as it appears as it transcends the narrow definitional criteria of bartering forgiveness for peace. While the paper is critical of the proposed amnesty programme, it advocates a holistic approach that incorporates other issues that are promotive of justice, morality and ethicalness in the polity

The Economics of Politics vs the Politics of Economics: Nigerian case

Indeed, the recent emphasis on eco-political governance in Nigeria is unique in that it was initiated by external donors (international organizations) and not by domestic leaders under pressure from their own constituencies. Thus, while Nigeria have embraced the market economy and liberalized their policies; issues related to political participation, democracy and institution building have proven harder to tackle. This paper therefore argued that government must devote resources and political will to overcoming the harsh poverty experienced by the majority of Nigerians. In this regard, the emerging participatory e-development and traditional development strategies should not be seen as mutually exclusive but rather complementary (so as to avert the status of a failed state).politics;economics;corruption;economy;Nigeria; e-development;ICT;participation;governance;policies; development;resources;new economy;financialcrisis;poverty; economicmanagement;electoralprocess;technology

Politics in Nigeria:A Discourse of Osita Ezenwanebe’s‘ Giddy Festival’

Politics is a vital aspect of every society. This is due to the fact that the general development of any country is first measured by its level of political development. Good political condition in a nation is a sine qua non to economic growth. A corrupt and unstable political system in any country would have a domino-effect on the country's economic outlook and social lives of the people. The concept of politics itself continued to be interpreted by many political scholars, critics and the masses from different perspectives. Corruption, political assassination, greed, perpetrated not only by politicians but also by the masses are the societal ills that continue to militate against socio-economic and political development in most African countries, particularly Nigeria. Peaceful political transition to the opposition party in Nigeria in recent times has given a different dimension to the country’s political position for other countries in the region to emulate. This paper addresses the concept of politics and presents corruption in Nigerian society from the point of theatre, using Osita Ezenwanebe’s Giddy Festival. The investigation is grounded in sociological theory and the concept of political realism. This paper recommends that politics can be violent-free if all the actors in the game develop selfless qualities of leadership for the benefit of the ruled

United We Stand: How the Election Results Dismiss the Narrative of a Divided #Nigeria

LSE’s Lola Adeyemo looks at the numbers behind the 2015 Nigeria Presidential elections and analyses what it reveals about the Nigerian state. This post is part of our African Elections series

Nigeria's interminable insurgency ? : addressing the Boko Haram crisis

Opportunities to address the Boko Haram crisis have been missed, so the situation has become more entrenched, resulting in a seeming reduction in the policy options available to respond. But there are steps that can be taken, primarily by Nigerian state and non-state actors, but also by Nigeria's neighbours and international partners

Using Dual-Language Books to Preserve Language & Culture in Alaska Native Communities

“Children learn their language on their mother’s lap.” This conventional wisdom from a Cup’ik Elder describes the approach used by many Alaska Native peoples to promote native language acquisition. Presumably, the children learn by listening to stories and tales from a trusted parent or caregiver. However, what happens when the caregiver does not speak the native language? This chapter describes an effort to address this issue while also promoting better educational outcomes by providing access to diverse dual-language books in Alaska Native languages through the use of a digital children’s library. Potential benefits from these efforts include an increase in resources for schools, a revitalization of Indigenous languages, and an increase in access, with hopes that future work will show evidence that using these dual-language books encourage greater parent support and involvement in education, support second language acquisition, and promote a strong sense of identity. Implications and future efforts follow.Ye

A pragma-semiotic analysis of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria

In response to the fuel subsidy removal by the Nigerian government on 1st January 2012, Occupy Nigeria Group, a protest movement, embarked on different mass strike actions and demonstrations including online activism. The civil resistant actions geared towards reversal of petrol pump price increase deployed certain verbal and visual means in portraying the government and its actions. Previous studies on online protest discourse in Nigeria have adopted sociolinguistic and discourse analysis approaches in examining issues of identity and selfdetermination with little attention paid to visual-pragmatic strategies in representing people and their actions. This article, therefore, undertakes a pragma-semiotic investigation of ‘Occupy Nigeria Group’ online posts on the 2012 fuel subsidy removal in Nigeria with a view to examining verbal and visual modes of representing people and their actions in the event. Seventy-two online protest posts purposively sampled from the groups’ page are used to identify and categorize various pragma-semiotic elements and functions in the representations using insights from Mey’s (2001) pragmatic act and Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) multimodal discourse analysis. It is observed that the verbal mode complements the visual in projecting the demands and resistance of the group. The posts which are classified under six semantic fields, namely divine intervention, security consciousness, innovation, exaggeration, defamation and abusive placards have various visual-pragmatic strategies such as prayer, negative labelling, humour, mockery, abuse, passionate and fierce appeal, including photo trick. The strategies correspond to the dominant pragmatic acts such as demonstrative, assertive, suppository, condoling and stipulating. All these acts are presented within the Nigerian sociopolitical and linguistic contex

Climate Change, Migration, and Conflict in Northwest Africa

Examines how climate change affects the number of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa traveling through Nigeria, Niger, Algeria, and Morocco; increased security risks in the region; how these factors exacerbate one another; and intercontinental implications