Nigeria’s quest for alternative clean energy through biofuels: an assessment

Nigeria is rich in renewable energy resources, including diverse biomasses. However, this enormous endowment in renewable energy resources has not played any significant role in the country’s energy mix. Nigeria is majorly reliant on its non-renewable sources to meet its energy needs. In pursuit of its commitment to transit to alternative clean energy, Nigeria developed the biofuels policy document in 2007. The major aspiration of the policy is to harness the country’s biomass potentials and deploy same to meeting Nigeria’s energy needs. This paper assesses the state of the biofuels sector vis-à-vis the stated aspirations of the Nigerian state as captured in the biofuels policy document. In doing so, this paper uses primary data generated from key informant interviews and augmented with secondary data. It finds a disconnect between the aspirations of the biofuels policy document and the actual state of the biofuels sector. In other words, the biofuels sector has no discernible contribution to Nigeria’s energy mix. The recommendation of this paper is in the realm of rejigging the biofuels policy in order to extract greater government commitment in evolving national capacity for biofuels development

Re-Appraising Women to Women Discrimination towards Attaining Gender Equality

Gender critics have deployed patriarchy as the major source of the challenges faced by women in Nigeria. This perception has only narrowed gender discourse to male chauvinism. There is therefore an urgent need to interrogate patriarchy alongside other challenges encountered by women in Nigeria. The notion of gender bias by men against women is not new and men are usually the main perpetrator while often not considering the existence of the situation the other way round. This study posits that challenges of women raging from discrimination, widowhood rites, polygamy, inheritance rights, divorce, to almost all other areas of life are directly or indirectly also caused by other women. It is already a challenging world with men holding sway in virtually all fields of human endeavours and women do not have to make things even more challenging for one another. The objectives of the study were to locate the challenges encountered by women by their contemporaries in selected literary texts and society and proffer ways to confront and overcome these challenges. The study recommends love, unity, support, and collaboration which engender peaceful co-existence and social emancipation among women and are also necessary for a balanced society and the sustainable development of the nation

Re-Appraising Women to Women Discrimination Towards Attaining Gender Equality

Gender critics have deployed patriarchy as the major source of the challenges faced by women in Nigeria. This perception has only narrowed gender discourse to male chauvinism. There is therefore an urgent need to interrogate patriarchy alongside other challenges encountered by women in Nigeria. The notion of gender bias by men against women is not new and men are usually the main perpetrator while often not considering the existence of the situation the other way round. This study posits that challenges of women raging from discrimination, widowhood rites, polygamy, inheritance rights, and divorce, to almost all other areas of life are directly or indirectly also caused by other women. It is already a challenging world with men holding sway in virtually all fields of human endeavours and women do not have to make things even more challenging for one another. The objectives of the study were to locate the challenges encountered by women by their contemporaries in selected literary texts and society and proffer ways to confront and overcome these challenges. The study recommends love, unity, support, and collaboration which engender peaceful co-existence and social emancipation among women and are also necessary for a balanced society and the sustainable development of the nation

Binary logit analysis of social-economic variables and youth participation in agriculture

On a large scale albeit due to conflicts, climate change, acts of terrorism in Sub-Sahara Africa and some other peculiar factors the oddities of food shortage and hunger keep rising in recent years; making it an issue of global concern. To ameliorate the situation, successive governments in Nigeria have invested tremendously in agriculture but to no avail. Making the situation worse is the fact that young people that would have embraced technology in farming are seemingly not seeing desired results; hence they abstain and prefer to seek new ways of sustenance. The general opinion is that youths of this prefer white collar jobs to farming. It is in view of the above reasons that this study chose to investigate factors that could motivate Nigerian youths into agriculture. Hence, we decided to use frequencies, percentage counts, and binary logit to analyse data. Findings are that youths’ involvement in agriculture is over 90%. Age, marital status, and level of education all play some role in who participates in agriculture. The results show that publicity of government pro-youths’ agro-allied programmes and the availability of fertile land would more than all the other tested factors influence youths’ involvement in agriculture. Hence, the government is better informed to properly channel public fund

INVESTIGATIVE STUDY OF THE EFFECTS OF CERTAIN ADDITIVES ON SOME SELECTED REFRACTORY PROPERTIES OF ANT-HILL CLAY FOR FURNACE LINING

The choice of appropriate locally sourced refractory materials for lining of locally produced furnaces has remained a major concern in which numerous efforts has been put in place to enhance the performance of the local contents of furnace lining materials. This study investigates the effects of certain additives such as Pulverized Glass Wastes (PGW) and Bentonite on some selected refractory properties of ant-hill clay. 100% finely-ground ant-hill clay, clean water and proportionate amount of Bentonite and PGW were manually mixed, consolidated and oven-dried at 110 oC for a period of 8 hours at varying additives percentages. Compressive strength, apparent porosity, permeability, filtration rate, thermal conductivity and bulk density were experimentally determined... The results showed that the compressive strength, bulk density and thermal conductivity of Ant-hill clay increased significantly on addition of additives while there was corresponding decrease in the values of the filtration rate, apparent porosity and permeability. These values were enhanced by Bentonite and pulverised glass waste additions to the Ant-hill clay. The test results for the compressive strength, thermal conductivity, filtration rate, apparent porosity, bulk density and permeability of no-additive clay samples are 156.4 N/m2 , 0.0028 W/m2K, 0.0041cm3 /s, 0.0009 %, 6.3 g/cm3 and 0.0012 cm/s, respectively. However, the sample-mix consisting 100% ant-hill clay with 80% PGW and 20% Bentonite produced 333.4 N/m2 , 0.0032 W/m2K, 0.0037 cm3 /s, 0.00018 %, 9.5 g/cm3 and 0.0015 cm/s as optimum values for the compressive strength, thermal conductivity, filtration rate, apparent porosity, bulk density and permeability, respectively. Therefore, 80%PGW/20%Bentonite additives gave the optimum results for the production of refractory clay blocks for furnace linin

An Assessment of the Impact of Foreign Direct Investment on Industrial Performance in Nigeria

Foreign Direct Investment has an impact on various aspects of the economy. This study beamed its searchlight on the impact of foreign direct investment on industrial performance. It specifically focused on the manufacturing subsector of the Nigerian economy from 1981 to 2021. The data used in the study were sourced from the World Bank Development Indicator which includes; manufacturing output, foreign direct investment, interest rate, exchange rate and inflation rate. The variables were subjected to unit root tests in other to ascertain their level of integration. However, the result indicates a mixed order of integration which informs the decision to adopt the ARDL method as the best technique of estimation. The results of this study showed that foreign direct investment exerts a negative and significant impact on manufacturing output in Nigeria in the long run. Conversely, the impact of foreign direct investment on manufacturing output is weak and positive on manufacturing output in the short run. This indicates that FDI can only contribute to the manufacturing subsector in the short run. The long-run results state a Negative significant impact of the inflation rate on the manufacturing sector of Nigeria. In the long run, disequilibrium in manufacturing output is adjusted at the speed of 34.4%. The pairwise Granger causality analysis reveals that there is no causal relationship between FDI and the Manufacturing sector. The study therefore recommends that Nigeria should focus on foreign direct investment that has an immediate impact on the manufacturing subsector, and also, any FDI with close substitute should be discouraged using fiscal policy that is, to discourage the inflow of FDI to the manufacturing subsector except for those with essential FDI with the nature to induce manufacturing subsector in the short ru