Recognising the Key Role of Agriculture In Achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2: Challenges And Prospects In Nigeria

The issue of food security has in recent times attracted a lot of scholarly debates in Nigeria. In spite of different methodologies utilised by the governments in addressing the challenge, the issue still persists. Results further revealed that the agricultural sector has not performed palatably in its quest for ensuring sustainable development. Suffice to note that agriculture should be given its rightful place if the country wants to experience development that will be said to be sustainable. In addressing this, the second Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) become handy because of its emphasis on eradicating hunger, which can only be achieved when the role of agriculture is recognised in the nation. It is on this premise that this paper examined the key role of Agriculture in achieving Sustainable Development Goal 2 in Nigeria. This is a conceptual paper that relies on an extensive review of related literature. The findings show that the agriculture sector faces many challenges, making it quite difficult in achieving its main goal which is ensuring an adequate supply of food in all parts of the country. In specificterms, the current insurgency in Northern Nigeria has been one of the major factors which have further destabilised the lopsided agricultural sector in the country. The paper recommended among others that investment in the agricultural sector should be given top priority by the Federal, State and Local Governments so that the continuous dependence on imported products will be reduced, as well as to relieve dependence on the oil sector for economic growth

Survivorship patterns of histopathological variants and molecular subtypes of breast cancer in a teaching hospital in Nigeria

Objective: To study the relationship of histopathological characteristics, molecular subtypes of breast cancer and survival in a low resource setting.Design: Tumours from prospectively ascertained patients newly diagnosed with breast cancer were analyzed. Formalin-fixed and paraffin-embedded sections were constructed into tissue micro-arrays and immunostained with five anti-bodies. Five molecular subtypes were determined.Settings: The study was conducted jointly in the Department of Pathology of University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, Ilorin in Nigeria and at the University of Chicago in the United States.Subjects: The study included a total of 203 histologically confirmed breast cancer patients whose pathological specimens were processed in the Department of Pathology of University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital, Ilorin, Nigeria between January 2003 and December 2007.Results: Mean age at diagnosis was 49.2 (SO ±11.9) years. Median time from symptom onset to cancer diagnosis was six months. Median follow-up time was 8.3 months. Median tumour size at diagnosis was 6cm. The proportion of ER+, PR+, HER2+ tumours were 27%, 16% and 30%, respectively. The most common molecular subtype was basal-like (25.1%) followed by unclassified (24.0%), luminal A (20.5%), HER2+/ER( 19.3%) and luminal B (11.1 %). Luminal A and B had best prognosis while basal-like and unclassified had worst prognosis. ER+ patients had longer duration of symptoms to diagnosis (median 8 months) than ER- patients (5 months) but ER+ patients had smaller tumours (median 5cm) than ER-patients (6cm, p=0.02). Recurrence-free survival was best for stage 1 and worst for stage 4 tumours. About 32.6% of patients had locoregional and/or metastatic recurrence.Conclusions: In consecutive breast cancer cases in Nigeria, almost half of patients were triple negative. Luminal A and B subtypes had best prognosis while triple negative had worst prognosis. The delay in breast cancer diagnosis and higher proportion of late stage of breast cancer underscores need for prompt diagnosis and initiation of treatment, especially hormonal therapy for ER positive patients

Quality Attributes of Heat Treated Cocoyam (Colocasia esculenta) Flour

Cocoyam (Colocasia esculenta), a staple food and a food thickner has a small starch grains and improved digestibility. In view of adding value to cocoyam, this study investigated the effect of different processing methods on the quality of cocoyam flour. In this study, cocoyam samples were given different heat treatments and milled into flour. The moisture content of the flour samples ranged between 7.85% - 18.75%. Protein content was between 3.48% - 12.60%. Loose bulk density ranged between 0.77g/cm3 – 0.83g/cm3 initially and 0.45g/cm3 – 0.56g/cm3 finally. Starch content ranged from 16.06% - 52.84%. The control sample that has no heat treatment has the highest value of overall acceptability. Keywords : Cocoyam, digestibility, heat treatment and value additio

Design, fabrication and evaluation of fish meal pelletizing machine

A 113.1kg/h fish meal pellet processing machine which produced 4mm diameter pellet, with an average length of 6mm was designed and fabricated. Design values of 210 was used for the maximum angle that the hopper wall formed with the vertical in the discharge zone, a critical stress of 1.3kPa of the ground particulate materials, and a density of 2.4521kg/m3 of the particulate materials, were used to obtain a hopper smallest outlet diameter of 12.7cm with a capacity of 24,118cm3 which proved efficient for the pelletizing machine. Two 3-cm diameter shafts carried the speed reduction gears with the perforated disc attached to the roller cutters on one end, while at the other end a 5hp motor was connected to the speed reduction gear by pulleys with diameters of 6cm and 12cm respectively. The speed reduction was 1:5 over a motor speed of 2000rpm. The fish meal pelletizing machine utilized 4kg of ingredients to produce 3.77kg pellets at an efficiency of 94.2%. The percentage loss due to unprocessed ground particulate materials was 5.8%.The moisture content of the fish meal pellets after 7days of drying in open air was 26.5% (wet basis). When tested for floatation, the pellets stayed afloat for 9 days, while the un-dried pellets only remained afloat for 2days. A combination of the weight of the twin roller cutters and the addition of some starch to the ground particulate materials assisted the compacting and gelatinization of pellet formed. This machine will be useful to medium and small scale aquaculture farmers and also reduce the need for foreign sources of fish meal in the aquaculture industry, thus conserving foreign exchange.Keywords: Ground particulate materials; mixing; compacting; gelatinizing; pelletizin

THE NATURE OF E-GOVERNANCE IN PUBLIC SERVICE DELIVERY IN NIGERIA: A THEORETICAL EXPLORATION

The world has become a global village where every nation including Nigeria is striving to attain a high level of electronic governance implementation because of its capacity to bring about appreciable public service delivery. However, there has been so much confusion on the clarifications on what electronic governance is and public service delivery is about, let alone their nature in the public sector. It is to th is end that th is paper examines the nature of electronic governance in public service delivery in Nigeria. Data fo r this paper are obtained from literature review of the subject matter from texts, journal articles and the internet. While the analysis is done in themes. This paper finds out that the adoption and implementation rate of electronic governance in the public organisations are abysmal and thereby affecting the desired public service delivery. Based on these findings , this paper recommends among others that the public sector in Nigeria should endeavour to keep abreast of and embrace innovations which would aid in the speedy adoption and implementation of electronic governance that wi ll enhance public service delivery in Nigeri

ANALYSIS OF THE FACTORS AFFECTING CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC ORGANISATIONS IN NIGERIA

The hallmark of every working organisation the world over, has been the change in how employees are being managed and how services are being delivered to the public since all managers are interested in improving upon the successes of yesterday as well as meeting up with the everyday changing environment. However, with in the context of public organisations in Nigeria, change management has been challenged by a number of factors internally and externally that have come to make such processes difficult if not impossible. This paper analyses the reasons for the difficulties experienced by employees of public organisations in Nigeria with regards to the change process and also proffers strategies on how to overcome the challenges associated with change management in order to achieve employees' commitment and loyalty while improving the way and manner which services are being delivered to the people

DEVELOPMENT OF MICROCONTROLLER - BASED STORAGE CHAMBER FOR WATERMELON FRUITS (CITRULLUS LANATUS) GROWN IN NIGERIA

Watermelon fruits rapidly deteriorate after harvest because of its short shelf life of about 10 days, after which it loses its nutritional value. Hence, the development of a microcontroller based storage chamber for watermelon fruits. The chamber is a combination of the cooling, power supply, microcontroller circuit, and sensors units for controlling the atmospheric parameters. The storage chamber was designed to keep the atmospheric conditions at temperature of 10-15, relative humidity at 90%, oxygen and carbon dioxide concentrations at 2% and 3% respectively. The chamber with an area of 1456cm2 and a height of 41cm was designed to store 20kg of water melon. The cooling unit incorporated a compressor of 0.1hp. An ATmega328P microcontroller programmed in C++ was developed with the Isis Proteus software for the design and simulation. The microcontroller was interfaced with the DHT11 sensor, valves, power supply and a liquid crystal display. Cooling test was carried out on the system and a temperature of 1oC and humidity of 90% was recorded at a time of 55 minutes. An average voltage of 4.07V was measured at the microcontroller interface with the sensor when temperature and humidity level were 12 and 90% respectively. Tests were carried out on the system and the result was a controlled environment characterized by temperature of range 10oC -150C and 90% relative humidity. The relationship between temperature and humidity with time and output voltage respectively were determined using Matlab software. The results showed that the chamber will increase the shelf life of watermelon fruit

DISCONTINUITIES IN EARNINGS DISTRIBUTIONS: EVIDENCE FROM SOUTH AFRICA

There is increasing evidence that earnings management amongst firms creates discontinuity in the earnings distribution. We have verified the evidence of discontinuity in earnings distribution for 246 Johannesburg Securities Exchange listed firms from 2003 to 2018. The assets-scaled income was used as earnings measure to present the empirical histograms; the standardized difference test of significance was utilized to establish the existence of discontinuities at zero. The result shows discontinuities in distributions for earnings level and earnings-change. In addition, except for the unscaled earnings, the evidence supposes that the sample design does not explain the discontinuity in the earnings (earnings change) distributions

LEADERSHIP VS MANAGEMENT: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Past literature reviewed on leadership shows that there is a long-standing debate on whether there is or no difference between leadership and management to the extent that there are two schools of thoughts, which is leadership is different from management, while the other school of thoug ht believes that there is no difference between both concepts. With this in mind , the purpose of this research is to do a comparative analysis between both concepts. This is a conceptual paper that can be classified as a qual itative comparative research, which relies on secondary sources from texts, journal articles and the internet. The paper aims at shedding light on why and how leadership is different from management. The findings of this paper reveal that there is a clear difference between leadership from management