Conflicts in Africa: Meaning, Causes, Impact and Solution

The continent of Africa has been highly susceptible to intra and inter- state wars and conflicts. This has prompted the insinuation that Africa is the home of wars and instability. Most pathetic about these conflagrations is that they have defied any meaningful solution and their negative impacts have retarded growth and development in Africa while an end to them seems obscure. What then are the causes of these unending wars in Africa? How far have they weakened cohesion, unity and the potential development of the African continent? What can we do to overcome this monster? Answers to these questions form the bone of contention of this paper

The Fulani Jihad and its Implication for National Integration and Development in Nigeria

The Fulani Jihad (1804-1810) led by Shehu, Uthman Dan Fodio wassuccessfully prosecuted against the established Hausa dynasty in NorthernNigeria. It led to the emergence of a theocratic state, the Sokoto Caliphate,which was administered largely as a federation, due to its wide expanse anddiverse composition of its people. The causes, management and impact of theJihad as well as important lessons for national integration and developmentin contemporary Nigerian political life form the basic themes of this paper.Key words: Jihad, Integration, Theocracy, National Development, Caliphat

Responses to the 1983 Expulsion of Aliens from Nigeria: A Critique

The Nigerian Government expelled over two million illegal aliens from her territory on 17 January, 1983 for social and economic reasons, majority of whom were West Africans mostly from Ghana. However, her action was greeted with a barrage of criticism by members of the international community at large. This paper attempts a critique of this plethora of criticisms and submits that the Nigerian government of Shehu Shagari acted in conformity with the Nigerian immigration law of 1963 as informed by the exigencies of national interest. Government should therefore be exonerated from all the said criticisms.Keywords: Expulsion, Aliens, Criticisms, Nigeria, Exodu

Exploring the Role of Trade and Migrations in Nigeria-Ghana Relations in the Pre-Colonial and Colonial Periods

Long before Ghana and Nigeria became independent countries in 1957 and 1960 respectively, peoples of both countries have had rewarding contacts. These involved inter-group relations in the political, economic, religious, cultural, administrative and recreational fields of human endeavour. Of these facilitators of inter-group relations, the two most outstanding elements that defined their relations before and during the colonial period were trade and migrations. The basic theme of this paper is therefore to document the nature and form of this trade network facilitated largely by the Hausa’s and Yoruba’s of Nigeria and the Akan peoples of the Gold Coast during the period of this study; and how the booming trade contact and colonial economic policy motivated great inter-state migrations between the two countries during the colonial period. The paper further explores the various motivations for inter-state migrations between the two countries in the pre-colonial and colonial periods.Key words: Trade, Migration, Intergroup relations, Nigeria, Gold Coas

Origin, Nature and Dismantling of Apartheid Policy in the Union of South Africa (1948-1994)

The apartheid policy of racial discrimination and segregation against theblacks in South Africa was officially introduced in 1948 by the all- whitegovernment of Daniel F. Malan. It was abolished in April 1994. While itlasted, blacks in South Africa suffered economic and political subjugationand degradation that were better imagined than real. Resistance by blacks tothe obnoxious policies of the apartheid initially involved protests anddemonstrations between 1912 and 1950’s but became militant between 1960and late 1970’s. This resulted in a number of imprisonments, deaths and lossof property. By the 1980’s however, apartheid began to lose its potency inSouth Africa. Liberal polices introduced by the government of F.W de Klerkbetween 1989 and 1994 as well as growing international condemnation ofthe policy paved way for its eradication. This paper attempts an explorationof the features of apartheid policy in South Africa, the nature of Africanresistance, signs of disintegration of the policy beginning from the early1980’s and factors that led to its final collapse in April 1994.Key Words: Apartheid, segregation, persistence, massacre, Bantustan

A comparative analysis of strategic marketing planning adoption in Nigerian banking and insurance industry

Strategic marketing planning has become key success and survival factor in service organisations because its adoption contributes immensely to the achievement of key success and survival variables such as customer satisfaction, increased market share, improve productivity, financial performance and profitability, etc. The current economic reforms in Nigeria have opened up service organisations to private sector participants in order to reduce considerably service costs and thereby making them more competitive and development oriented. Data for this study were obtained from 589 respondents in selected banking and insurance firms through questionnaire administration. The differences between the two groups with respect to their approaches to strategic marketing planning were examined using ANOVA. The result of the investigation shows that strategic marketing planning is responsible for about 43.6% in the variation of the performance of the selected banks and 32.3% in the variation of the organizational performance of the selected insurance companies. This is an indication that there is significant relationship between strategic marketing planning and performance but that of banks is stronger than insurance companies. The paper recommends that banks and insurance organizations must commit adequate resources into strategic marketing planning activities in order to increase the current level of performance.Key words: strategic marketing planning, service industry,organisational performance, marketing mix, top management commitment

Reproductive Health Issues and Incidence of Some Reproductive Tract Infections among Muslim Women in Purdah In Jos-Nigeria

Candidiasis and Trichomoniasis are the commonest Reproductive Tract Infections (RTIs) amongst women in purdah in the capital city of Jos- Nigeria. Majority of these women (>68%) have primary education as the highest educational qualification and majority of them (>92%) are full time house wives. The study has also revealed that there is a high level (57%) delay in seeking for reproductive health needs , which were only remedied due to persistence of symptoms. This gives us the inference as to the myriad of sequalae that might have resulted in cases of asymptomatic RTIs. The most reproductive health needs of women in purdah are inadequate facilities in clinics/hospitals. This factor as well as other factors such as poor education, unilateral decision making by some men in purdah in matters of reproductive needs, misunderstanding and misinterpretation of the Qu’ran have immensely contributed to the increasing cases of RTIs among these women. These problems can be reduced to the minimum by educating both the men and the women in purdah with the best medium being the radio/television programs.KEY WORDS: Purdah, Reproductive Health, Infection, Women

3D reactive inkjet printing of polydimethylsiloxane

Material jetting is a process whereby liquid material can be deposited onto a substrate to solidify. Through a process of progressive additional layers, this deposition can then be used to produce 3D structures. However, the current material jetting catalogue is limited owing to the constraints on the viscosity of inks that can be deposited. Most inks currently being used are either solvent or photocuring based, with the latter becoming increasingly popular due to increased throughput. Full Reactive Inkjet Printing (FRIJP) is an alternative processing method currently being investigated as a route to widen the material catalogue. FRIJP is the combination, on the substrate, of two reactive components which then react together in contact on the substrate. In this work a two-part polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) ink has been developed, printed individually, and cured. The successful printing of PDMS has been used to fabricate complex 3D geometry for the first time using FRIJP. Through the use of a prepared substrate feature resolutions up to 48 ± 2 μm (X, Y) were possible. Curing analysis has been conducted. It was found that not only does the reaction occur to a similar degree to conventional processes, but that there is no variation in the cured sample when printed at elevated substrate temperatures

MasakhaNER 2.0: Africa-centric Transfer Learning for Named Entity Recognition

African languages are spoken by over a billion people, but are underrepresented in NLP research and development. The challenges impeding progress include the limited availability of annotated datasets, as well as a lack of understanding of the settings where current methods are effective. In this paper, we make progress towards solutions for these challenges, focusing on the task of named entity recognition (NER). We create the largest human-annotated NER dataset for 20 African languages, and we study the behavior of state-of-the-art cross-lingual transfer methods in an Africa-centric setting, demonstrating that the choice of source language significantly affects performance. We show that choosing the best transfer language improves zero-shot F1 scores by an average of 14 points across 20 languages compared to using English. Our results highlight the need for benchmark datasets and models that cover typologically-diverse African languages

MasakhaPOS: Part-of-Speech Tagging for Typologically Diverse African languages

In this paper, we present AfricaPOS, the largest part-of-speech (POS) dataset for 20 typologically diverse African languages. We discuss the challenges in annotating POS for these languages using the universal dependencies (UD) guidelines. We conducted extensive POS baseline experiments using both conditional random field and several multilingual pre-trained language models. We applied various cross-lingual transfer models trained with data available in the UD. Evaluating on the AfricaPOS dataset, we show that choosing the best transfer language(s) in both single-source and multi-source setups greatly improves the POS tagging performance of the target languages, in particular when combined with parameter-fine-tuning methods. Crucially, transferring knowledge from a language that matches the language family and morphosyntactic properties seems to be more effective for POS tagging in unseen languages