Population In Nigeria Research Articles

African Responses to Christian Mission Education

Missionary domination of African education is a dying phenomenon. Today's church-affiliated institutions in Africa, while still mindful of their proselytizing duties, subordinate their religious messages to the rigors of academic preparation. The realities of contemporary African nation-building preclude any other course. Just as increasing nationalistic impulses and socio-economic considerations during the 19th century forced European politicians to recognize that education of their youth was too important to be left to the various confessions, so increasingly are African leaders coming to a similar conclusion. The shift from denominational to state control of the educational system is well advanced in many nations. In 1942, 97% of Nigeria's student population was enrolled in missionary schools; today missionary education has been banned in the East Central State of Nigeria—the heartland of the highly Christianized Ibos—and is steadily declining with the strengthening of the Local Education Authorities in other areas of Nigeria (Coleman, 1958: 113). As recently as 1950, missionary schools accounted for 97% of the total enrollment in Ghanaian schools; twelve years later the government assumed the responsibility tor the payment of salaries of all teachers, irrespective of the type of school in which they taught (Anim, 1966: 189). In an attempt to remove the school issue from the arena of sectarian politics the government of Uganda abolished the posts of mission school supervisors in 1963, placing their functions in the hands of secular authorities (Hindmarsh, 1966: 145). In 1945 there were 5,360 mission-run schools for Africans in South Africa and only 230 state-sponsored schools;

System Simulation and Policy-Making for Economic Development

The problems of planning for economic develop ment arise from the interplay of the political, social, and economic subsystems of a developing country. These problems are characterized by the uncer tainty necessarily inherent in any process of plan ning for the future — uncertainty arising both from the quantity and quality of available data and from the difficulties of forecasting how a large-scale system of complex interactive and feedback relation ships will respond to policy inputs. In this paper, generalized system simulation is offered as an ap proach to dealing with these problems. It is a flexi ble, iterative, problem-investigating process that includes problem formulation, mathematical modeling, model testing and refinement, and appli cation of the model to solve problems — all in close consultation with decision-makers. As an illus tration, an overview will be given of a policy- oriented system simulation model of the Nigerian economy. The model consists of two detailed re gional agricultural submodels, an aggregated na tional nonagricultural submodel, and components which model Nigeria's population and the inter- regional trade in food. Finally, I shall outline how the generalized system simulation approach could be implemented within the development-planning and policy-making process.

Is There a Case for Biafra?

N i L_rIGERIA has joined the Congo (Kinshasa) as the sick man of Africa. The high hopes of 1960-62 became the forebodings of 1964-65; now there seems little to feel but sickness of heart at the death of one's friends and despair at the end of a dream. This article is written on the assumption that by the time it appears Biafra may have been reconquered; it seeks, therefore, to examine the issues involved in tihe secession land civil war, and to speculate about the future course of events. It has been repeated almost ad nauseam that the new states of Africa are the geographical products of the arbitrary division of Africa between the Powers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Nevertheless, it is essential to point out the unique character of the Nigeria which was one of these products. Its area alone-almost 357,000 square miles, even after the loss of the Southern Cameroons to the Cameroun Republic-makes it unusual in West Africa; much more so its population, which by 1966 may have been as high as 57 million and was certainly not lower than 47 million. This is a substantial figure by world standards; by those of Africa it put Nigeria in a class by itself, more than twice as big as Ethiopia, its nearest rival, seven times the size of Ghana.1 Nigeria's land area and population also provide an immediate contrast with the Congo's huge area of 905,000 square miles and its sparse 15 million people. In terms of its human resources, then, Nigeria seems uniquely well-endowed, even though its population density varies considerably, with almost half the total occupying the southern fifth of the country, and densities in some Ibo areas being three times the overall average and among the highest in rural Africa.