Adopting International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in Africa: benefits, prospects and challenges

This paper presents the findings of an empirical study on the benefits, prospects and challenges of adoption of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) in some African countries. A questionnaire was administered to gather data from respondents made up of users and preparers of accounting information using the Twitter social network. The objective was to find out the perception of users and preparers about what the benefits, prospects and challenges of IFRS adoption are in African countries. The results of the study indicate that IFRS adoption in Africa will have the potential to be beneficial to a wide range of stakeholders. The benefits notwithstanding, there are however, a number of challenges to be faced in the process of adoption of the new standard including the ethical environment in Africa. The study recommends among others that a rigorous IFRS capacity building programme should be embarked upon by all regulatory bodies, firms and training institutions in order to provide the needed manpower for IFRS implementation, monitoring and compliance

Linking Accounting/Auditing Environment and the Remittances of Africans in Diaspora

This paper investigates empirically the link between the inflow of Diasporas remittances and the environment of accounting/auditing in 10 African countries. The result using Spearman’s rank correlation indicates the existence of a positive relationship (correlation coefficient rs is 0.36), but the strength of the relationship is weak (significant level of 0.05). The quality of accounting and auditing as represented by their environment is a stimulus that could enhance the inflow of Diasporas remittances. The study therefore recommends that African countries should strategically and proactively refocus attention on developing accounting/auditing environment in order to attract reasonable volume of remittances

Re-examining the Wagner's law versus Keynesian hypothesis: evidence from Nigeria

This study investigates the Keynesian and Wagnerian views on public expenditure and economic growth in Nigeria using annual secondary data spanning from 1980 to 2011 obtained from the Central bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletins. The Augmented Dickey-Fuller (ADF), Johansen Cointegration and Granger Causality econometric methodologies were used in this study. The Johansen Cointegration test revealed the presence of a long-run cointegrated relationship between government expenditure (capital expenditure and recurrent expenditure) and economic growth (GDP) in Nigeria. The Granger Causality test found no mutual correlation between government expenditure (capital expenditure and recurrent expenditure) and economic growth (GDP) using the benchmark of 5% level of statistical significance. The findings of this study therefore indicate the non-existence of both Wagner's Law and Keynesian Hypothesis on public expenditure and economic growth in Nigeria during the period under review

Predicting mortality in Hepatitis-C patients using an artificial neural network

We have developed an artificial neural network that is capable of predicting whether a patient suffering from the hepatitis-C virus is likely to live or die. With test data, the system achieved 70% accuracy in determining when apatient would live and 60% accurate in determining when a patient would die. It is hoped that with further work, the accuracy of the system will be considerably improved

Oil and Security in Nigeria: The Niger Delta Crisis

This paper examines oil and security in Nigeria, with special reference to the crisis-ravaged Niger Delta. Its focus on the Niger Delta and its festering crisis stems from that region’s critical importance to Nigeria. As the nation’s treasure base, the Niger Delta provides over 80 percent of government revenues, 95 percent of export receipts, and 90 percent of foreign exchange earnings. Also, the bulk of Nigeria’s bio-diversity and some of her best human resources are derived from the Niger Delta. This paper posits that beyond the well-known threats to the security of the Nigerian state, the lingering crisis in the country’s oilproducingareas is a grave threat to human security in that region. Since poverty,environment and food security are key to national security, the ruthless exploitation and destruction of the natural environment upon which the inhabitants of the Niger Delta depend for their livelihood and sustenance pose major threats to human security in that region and, by implication, to the Nigerian state. The paper suggests that to resolve the crisis, government policy on petroleum should be more inclusive, taking into consideration the peculiar problems and needs ofthe oil-producing areas, as well as those of the Nigerian state and the oil industry itself

Understanding Spark System Performance for Image Processing in a Heterogeneous Commodity Cluster

In recent years, Apache Spark has seen a widespread adoption in industries and institutions due to its cache mechanism for faster Big Data analytics. However, the speed advantage Spark provides, especially in a heterogeneous cluster environment, is not obtainable out-of-the-box; it requires the right combination of configuration parameters from the myriads of parameters provided by Spark developers. Recognizing this challenge, this thesis undertakes a study to provide insight on Spark performance particularly, regarding the impact of choice parameter settings. These are parameters that are critical to fast job completion and effective utilization of resources. To this end, the study focuses on two specific example applications namely, flowerCounter and imageClustering, for processing still image datasets of Canola plants collected during the Summer of 2016 from selected plot fields using timelapse cameras in a heterogeneous Spark-clustered environments. These applications were of initial interest to the Plant Phenotyping and Imaging Research Centre (P2IRC) at the University of Saskatchewan. The P2IRC is responsible for developing systems that will aid fast analysis of large-scale seed breeding to ensure global food security. The flowerCounter application estimates the count of flowers from the images while the imageClustering application clusters images based on physical plant attributes. Two clusters are used for the experiments: a 12-node and 3-node cluster (including a master node), with Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) as the storage medium for the image datasets. Experiments with the two case study applications demonstrate that increasing the number of tasks does not always speed-up job processing due to increased communication overheads. Findings from other experiments show that numerous tasks with one core per executor and small allocated memory limits parallelism within an executor and result in inefficient use of cluster resources. Executors with large CPU and memory, on the other hand, do not speed-up analytics due to processing delays and threads concurrency. Further experimental results indicate that application processing time depends on input data storage in conjunction with locality levels and executor run time is largely dominated by the disk I/O time especially, the read time cost. With respect to horizontal node scaling, Spark scales with increasing homogeneous computing nodes but the speed-up degrades with heterogeneous nodes. Finally, this study shows that the effectiveness of speculative tasks execution in mitigating the impact of slow nodes varies for the applications

Lecturers’ Awareness and Readiness towards the Adoption of Open Educational Resources for Teaching in Tertiary Institutions in Niger State, Nigeria

This study investigated attitudes and self-efficacy towards the utilization of interactive whiteboards (IWB) among university lecturers in North Central, Nigeria. A descriptive survey research design was employed for the study and 315 participants were selected through a multi-stage sampling technique. Four research questions and two null hypotheses guided the study and a 20-item questionnaire was used as an instrument for data collection. The questionnaire was subjected to both validation and reliability checks. Data obtained from the administration of the research instrument were analysed using descriptive statistics of Mean and Standard Deviation for research questions and inferential statistics of z-test for research hypotheses. A decision rule was set, in which a mean score of 2.5 and above was considered agreed, while a mean score below 2.5 was considered disagreed. Findings revealed that lecturers’ attitudes and self-efficacy towards the utilization of interactive whiteboards (IWB) were positive with a mean score of 3.02 and 2.70 out of possible 4.0. Also, gender as a moderating variable had an influence on lecturers’ attitude and self-efficacy towards utilization of interactive whiteboard. Based on these findings, it was recommended among others that lecturers in tertiary institutions should be encouraged to adopt Interactive Whiteboard in order to enhance their teaching. This can be achieved through the provision of enabling work environment that supports the use of information and communication technology in the teaching and learning process

EXAMINING THE EFFECTS OF COASTLINE ON PROPERTY VALUES IN VICTORIA ISLAND

The impacts of coastal region cannot be over emphasized, as this tends to benefit and impact residents, property owners, tourists, businesses, local authority and state governments. Developers, private investors, and individuals may be affected as controls impact growth in the area. Therefore this study examined the effects of coastline on property values in Victoria Island. Data was collected using questionnaire administered on Estate Surveyors and Valuers managing properties in Victoria Island. A total of 55 questionnaire was retrieved from the 90 administered giving a return of 61.11%. The study revealed that rental values of residential properties are on the increase from N1.5million in 2011 to N4.5million in 2015, duplexes increased form N2.5million in 2011 to N5.5million in 2015. Also, the rental value of detached buildings jumped from N2.5miion in 2011 to N6.2million in 2015 while that of bungalows moved from N1.5million in 2011 to N5.8million in 2015. Equally, the rental values of office (commercial) properties are on annual increase. The study indentified sea level rise (96.4%), ocean currents (87.3%) and population density (61.8%) as the main factors affecting property values in the coastline region of Victoria Island. The main challenges faced along the coastline in the study area are water logging (96.4%), land erosion (90.9%), spatial expansion (87.3%) and flooding (65.5%). Finally, the study further revealed that, in spite of the challenges, there are still some benefits derivable along the coastline of Victoria Island and these benefits include economic benefits (92.7%), socio-cultural (96.4%) and health benefits (60.0%). The study concluded that despite all the challenges, property values in coastline region of Victoria Island are always on the increas

Role of Corporate Governance in the Financial Crisis; Evidence from Nigerian Banks

Accessing problems from the perceived causes usually leads to a relief or solution. This paper examines corporate governance and the Nigerian financial crisis which was majorly characterised by poor credit risk management, with the aim to determine the relationship that exists between corporate governance and credit risk management. Secondary data were gathered from 19 listed Nigerian banks for a 5 year period between 2005 and 2009; the postconsolidation to financial sector crash in Nigeria. Corporate governance is measured by statutory committee, committee independence, board size, board composition, executive duality and directors’ interest; while credit risk management is measured by non–performing loans ratio, loan loss provision, and loan to deposit ratio. The data were analysed by Ordinary least square panel data analysis. Findings revealed that banks with good corporate governance have better credit risk management. Results of the hypotheses tests revealed that there is a significant relationship between corporate governance and the credit risk management variables: non–performing loans ratio; loan loss provision; and loans to deposits ratio. This paper recommends that directors of banks should ensure compliance with corporate governance policies for a more thorough administration of the financial syste