States Of West Africa Research Articles

Defining Mass Media’s Threats to National Security

Violence is escalating rapidly, impacting on local communities, sparking dissensions and eventually, further tensions. The mass media, despite being a potent instrument to fighting terrorism and insecurity, also pose their own kind of challenges to national security, given that the mass media themselves sometimes are a form of threat to the security of nations and their peoples. Hinged on the Boomerang Effect theory, this study uses the Narrative Analysis methodology to discuss the role mass media play in the business of human security versus national security. It identifies espionage, propaganda, cultural imperialism, regulatory concerns, editorial manipulations, as well as the Internet as some of the threats. Terrorist groups including Islamic State in Syril, Islamic State in West Africa (ISWA), Boko Haram, Hamas and al-Qaeda use mediatised gadgets, e-mails and encryptions to support their operations. It is therefore recommended that media professionals must ensure systems protection and adequate regulation as well as adhere to their codes of ethics to ensure that they carry out their responsibilities for the ultimate good of society.

Quantitative Outcomes of a One Health Approach to Investigate the First Outbreak of African Swine Fever in the Republic of Sierra Leone

African swine fever (ASF) outbreaks have been reported in Sub-Saharan countries, including West Africa states, but has never been notified in the Republic of Sierra Leone. This is the first report describing field epidemiological and laboratory investigations into the outbreak of fatal pig disease in western rural and urban districts, Freetown. A preliminary finding indicated that pigs exhibited clinical and necropsy signs suggestive of ASF. Serological (ELISA) and molecular (qRT-PCR) methods used to confirm and investigate the outbreak yielded three positive results for the ASF antibody and all negative for Swine flu; thus, confirming ASF as the etiology agent.

The Failed Masculinist State in Africa: A Rejection of Phallic Man

African literature is famous for the depiction of a type of politics that tends to reflect the reality on the ground, spanning a panorama of incompetent leadership to gross political corruption. As a result, writing about politics in Africa tends to be a risky undertaking as many creative writers who criticize political leadership and corrupt practices in their works end up being jailed. Using contemporary African literature to discuss the postcolonial African Political State, this paper explores the nature of the state in West Africa in three novels, Chinua Achebe’s A Man of the People, Anthills of the Savannah and Sembene Ousmane’s Xala. Using the metaphor of an impotent masculinity, this paper argues that the political State in Africa is a failed one. From the dawn of independence to the era of democracy, the political state in Africa has had to grapple with failed leadership, corruption, injustice, the ever-widening gap between the rich and the poor etc., and it appears that these problems are becoming more.

CHRISTIANITY AND NATION BUILDING IN WEST AFRICA (c. 1880 – c.1980)

Given that religion can contribute to the unity and integration of societies as well as to the reinforcement of division within societies, the role of Christianity in the process of nation building in West-Africa is studied. The article describes salient aspects of the relations between the missionaries and the political administrations and European traders, the cultural and political aims of the missionaries and the role of the Independent Churches and societies. It is concluded that the Christian Churches contributed in various ways to the processes of nation-building and nationalism in West-Africa. This section is followed with an account of the relations between the various church formations and the state in West-Africa. The whole article is concluded with some reflection on contemporary tendencies towards measuring the value of a religion in terms of the contribution it can make to national development and movement in the direction of civil religion.

The Rule of Law, Democracy and Competing Paradigms of National Development: Locating the Nexus

National development remains clearly elusive in some regions of the world. And democracy is frequently proposed as the catalyst of development for such locations. This presupposes that development was stunted by the dearth of democracy in these environments. At the heart of the undemocratic tendencies in the affected nation states is the phenomenon of strongmen in government. These genres of leaders usually detest the notion of the Rule of Law, as the very bedrock of development. They candidly although, project national interest as the superior paradigm of progress in these nations, giving rise to the scenario of competing models of national development for such places. This paper is a contribution to the reconciliation of the conflicting issues. Its premises are derived from the disciplines of law, political science and development studies. The work is framed on the experiences of the Nigerian nation state in West Africa.

Gender, Sexuality, and the State in West Africa

Gender, Sexuality, and the State in West Africa

Hinterland Intermodal Freight Flow Optimization for Ports Competition Evidence of West Africa ECOWAS Region

Major problem considered in this study was the intermodal routing problem of regional freight transportation in West Africa ECOWAS (Economic Community Of West Africa States), which can be defined as the problem of determining the freight flow quantity, the transportation mode in each transit corridor while satisfying the freight demand at each West Africa transit country (Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger). The objective was to minimize in land transportation costs. In order to solve optimally and represent the problem, this research employed a linear programming model. The model was solved using Lingo Mathematic Application. The model results showed that port oriented freight logistics in west Africa ECOWAS region do not flow along optimal path and such incur longer time and higher logistics cost than is geographically necessary.

The underlying reasons for the emerging dynamic of regional security cooperation against Boko Haram

ABSTRACTThe persistent violence of Boko Haram in the Lake Chad Basin and beyond between 2011 and 2014 is linked to a variety of reasons: the trouble that had the Nigeria’s national army to contain this group, the lack of cooperation between states directly touched by Boko Haram, the difficult coordination between regional organizations as the Lake Chad Basin is overlapping between the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC) and many other intergovernmental organizations. Faced with the difficult regional cooperation in the area during the above-named period, the atrocities of Boko Haram made at least 30.000 dead, more than 1.6 million refugees and displaced, 4.2 million people facing food insecurity and health problems. However, starting in 2015, there have been a shift in the regional management of the crisis in the Lake Chad Basin. States directly affected by the Boko Haram phenomenon moved forward by pooling their efforts. By using the Regional Security Complex Theory, this paper aim to show that the rise of a new regional leadership stimulated the collective military coalition which led later to the reactivation and gradual deployment of the Multinational Joint Task Force of the Lake Chad Basin. This collective action linked states of West Africa and those of Central Africa region and, sounds like African solutions to African problems.

Israel’s Relations with the Francophone states of West Africa: The Economic and Strategic Imperatives

Israel’s Relations with the Francophone states of West Africa: The Economic and Strategic Imperatives

Legal source, institutional quality and FDI flows in Africa

PurposeThis paper aims to find out how the legal system interacts with other institutions in attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Africa.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use annual panel data of 49 African countries over the period 1980 to 2011, and use the system generalized method of moments (GMM) estimation technique and pooled panel data regression.FindingsThe authors find that the source of a country’s legal system deters FDI inflow as institutions alone cannot bring in the needed quantum of FDI. In terms of trading blocs, it was found that there is negative significant relationship between institutional quality and FDI for South African Development Community (SADC) as well as Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) countries.Practical implicationsFor policy implications, the results suggest that reliance on institutions alone cannot project the continent to attract the needed FDI.Originality/valueEmpiricists have devoted considerable effort to estimating the relationship between institutions and FDI on the African continent, but this paper seeks to ascertain the effect of legal systems and institutional quality within African specific trade and regional blocks.

Does Financial Integration Exist in ECOWAS?

Free movement of goods, capital, and persons have been the long-term strategic goals of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) since its establishment. Notwithstanding, financial integration has become more important in deepening political integration in the region than ever. Assessing how far the Regional Economic Community (REC) has achieved her objective of free movement of capital among the member states. Therefore, this study investigated the existence of financial integration in ECOWAS by employing savings-investment equality, popularly known as Feldstein-Horioka Criterion; a panel data for all the 15 member states was fitted into the specified model. The study found that there is the existence of financial integration in the REC, and that language inhibits financial integration and that the coefficient of language dummy stands at -4.8 percent. However, it found that language inhibition of the financial integration in the REC will gradually disappear over time, as the interactive coefficient of language and time stands at -0.12 percent. This study concludes that a level of financial integration is in existence in the REC. Therefore, the REC is prepared for monetary unification assuming that there will be more substantial trade among the member states.

Impact of Inflation and Unemployment on Economic Growth in Ten (10) Selected Member's States of Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) (2001-2014)

The study set three major objectives which include determine the relationship between economic growth, inflation and unemployment, analyses the effects of inflation in ten (10) selected members of ECOWAS and assess the effects of unemployment in the selected members states. Secondary data obtained from the Member's State National Statistics offices was used for the paper. The study used a model in which inflation and unemployment were the dependent variable and independent variables. The analytical technique used includes Ordinary least square (OLS) technique, F-test. The paper showed that monetary and fiscal policy were effective in the control of the inflation and unemployment since the coefficient of determination (R2 =0.50 or 50% was significant. This was re-confirmed by the F-test value (4.91). The paper recommends a policy redirection to improve output in the ten (10) selected member's states; this will occur by making efforts to increase productivity, which will lead to reduction in unemployment and inflation. To curb the surging rate of unemployment, efforts must be put in place to achieve a labour intensive method of production instead of concentrating on the capital intensive method which will take away jobs that individuals can do. Furthermore, there must be concrete efforts to ensure that the porous borders in the ten (10) selected members states are well managed to increase volume of economic activities among the members' States, which is very pivotal for the reduction of unemployment and inflation; thereby improving the level of local production.

Beyond the American Colonization Society

AbstractThis article offers a critical review of scholarship on black colonization and emigration beyond the United States between the 1770s and the 1850s. In 1816, a group of elite white men founded the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization committed to sending free African Americans outside the bounds of the nation. By 1821, the ACS had secured federal funding for the project and purchased land for the new black colony of Liberia in West Africa. Historians have long disagreed about the aims of the ACS beyond its prejudicial presumption that African Americans did not belong within the nation. This founding debate has obscured the much longer and more diffuse history of colonization thought across the American colonies and the new United States. Well before and after 1816, both black and white activists planned alternative black colonies outside the bounds of the United States in West Africa, Florida, Haiti, Canada, Texas, Mexico, and the American West. This essay briefly reviews the major arguments in the scholarship on the ACS before turning to examine work that has looked beyond Liberia to embrace creative approaches to the scattered field of black colonization and emigration across the Anglo‐Atlantic world. This growing body of scholarship demonstrates ever more forcefully that removal and migration were at the center of conceptions of race, citizenship, and freedom in the early United States.

Relative Deprivation, Identity Politics and the Neo-Biafran Movement in Nigeria: Critical Issues of Nation-Building in a Postcolonial African State

This study examines the linkages between relative deprivation and identity politics in a postcolonial state. It further investigates the relationship among these variables and nation-building challenges in the postcolony. It is a case study of the Nigerian state in West Africa, which typically harbours the attributes of postcoloniality and indeed, large measures of relative deprivation in her sociopolitical and economic affairs. The study is also an interrogation of the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. It has been attempted in the study to offer distinctive explanations over the problematique of nation-building in the postcolonial African state of Nigeria, using relative deprivation, identity politics and the neo-Biafran movement as variables. In framing the study’s theoretical trajectories and in historicizing the background of the research, ample resort has been made to a significant range of qualitative secondary sources. A particularly salient position of the study is that it will actually be difficult to locate on the planet, any group of people whose subsequent generations (in perpetuity) would wear defeat on the war front, as part of their essential identity. Hence, relative deprivation was found to be more fundamental than identity politics in the neo-Biafran agitations in Nigeria. However, the compelling issues were found to squarely border on nation-building complications in the postcolony.

Postcolonial Borderland Legacies of Anglo–French Partition in West Africa

Abstract:More than five decades after independence, Africa still struggles with the legacies of colonial partition. On the territorial frontiers between the postcolonial inheritors of the two major colonial powers, Great Britain and France, the continuing impact of European colonialism remains most acute. On the one hand, the splitting of erstwhile homogeneous ethnic groups into British and French camps gave rise to new national identities; on the other hand, it circumvented any possibility of sovereignty via ethnic solidarity. To date, however, there has been no comprehensive assessment of the ethnic groups that were divided between English- and French-speaking states in West Africa, let alone the African continent writ large. This article joins postcolonial ethnography to the emerging field of comparative borderland studies. It argues that, although norms of state-based identity have been internalized in the Anglophone–Francophone borderlands, indigenous bases of association and behavior continue to define life along the West African frontier in ways that undermine state sovereignty. Although social scientists tend to focus on national- and sub-national-level analyses, and increasingly on the effects of globalization on institutional change, study of the African borderlands highlights the continuing importance of colonial legacies and grassroots-derived research.

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in theNew Negro World, 1940–1944

“We Want to Set the World on Fire”: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the<i>New Negro World</i>, 1940–1944

P27 Transport factor in the spread of Ebola and the building of disaster risk management capacity in West Africa

BackgroundTransportation has been seen as a vital ingredient to developmental process and facilitation of economic growth across the globe be it developed or developing world. The benefits of transportation to the socio-economic development of the world including health cannot be ignored. Transport and health are also been discovered to be interrelated in many areas. Furthermore, it is also observed that modern mode of transportation has allowed and played a significant role in the movement of more people and products to travel around the world at a faster pace while they also open the ways to the interregional and international movement, spread and diffusion of infectious diseases, transfer of health personnel and equipment, provides access and enhanced patronage and utilization of health facilities across the globe. This includes the spread of Ebola virus disease (Ebola or EVD) that started in Guinea, West Africa in March 2014. However, so many people contacted it in Guinea, West Africa and died. As of mid –August, the virus had spread to neighboring Sierra Leone, Liberia and even distant country like Nigeria. As of October 2014, the spread has even gone beyond West Africa to United States of America (USA), Spain, France in Europe to mention a few, with WHO declaring that that infected persons could rise to 20,000 and said that it has used USD 489 million (NZD625 Million) to contain Ebola within six to nine months. Despite this enormous spending by the WHO and the governments of the affected countries, the continuous rapid spread of this virus is of great concern to every peace loving person across the globe and it is seriously spreading in border areas of the countries. The interest for this study is also based on the belief and observation that Ebola is spreading through different ways and means especially in developing countries where population is densely populated, high level of travel characteristics and porous borders among the neighboring nations. It is against this background that this study will examine the place of transportation in the spread of Ebola and the building of disaster risk management in West Africa states. MethodsA preliminary study was conducted by the researcher (s) to find out what are the factors responsible for the fast spread of the disease in West Africa. At the initial stage literatures were reviewed to identify the factors that may likely be responsible for the wide spread of this disease and the factors as ranked by the respondents were analysed. ResultsIt was observed that transportation play a significant role in the spread of the disease as a result of movement of people from one geographical location to another through the various means of transportation. For instance, Ebola came to Nigeria through an infected Liberian that travelled to Nigeria by air who became sick and refused to open up about his health status and he infested the staff of the hospital where he was admitted lending to the spread of the disease in Nigeria. ConclusionsThis paper presented key knowledge factors that were responsible for the wide spread of Ebola in West Africa but the impact of transport cannot be ignored as it ranked very high.

The precolonial state in West Africa: building power in Dahomey

This volume incorporates historical, ethnographic, art historical, and archaeological sources to examine the relationship between the production of space and political order in the West African Kingdom of Dahomey during the tumultuous Atlantic Era. Dahomey, situated in the modern Republic of Benin, emerged in this period as one of the principal agents in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and an exemplar of West African state formation. Drawing from eight years of ethnohistorical and archaeological fieldwork in the Republic of Benin, the central thesis of this volume is that Dahomean kings used spatial tactics to project power and mitigate dissent across their territories. J. Cameron Monroe argues that these tactics enabled kings to economically exploit their subjects and to promote a sense of the historical and natural inevitability of royal power.

Civil Society Organizations and Regional Integration: The ECOWAS Perspective

The central concern of this paper is to examine the interactions of Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and Regional Integration (RI) within the context of the Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS). It will seek to understand the interaction by exploring the traditional characters of CSOs as complementary and supportive agent of the state, and the character of RI as inter-state, intergovernmental, formal and official engagement. The exclusionary nature of regional integration in Africa and West Africa in particular is one of the biggest lacunae in governance and developmental processes over the years. The paper maintains that ECOWAS was conceived and sustained by a civil society arrangement and the construct “new regionalism” is only a restatement of the ideals propagated founders of the Regional Economic Community (REC) and not newness. It also maintains that the wind of democracy blowing across the world and within international institution only lends credence to the foundational philosophy of ECOWAS for equal participation and inclusivity. Indeed, the realms of civil society and regional integration provide policy makers with the opportunity to reevaluate concepts that worked in other climes before their transplantation in addressing local concerns.

Measuring Multi‐Membership in Economic Integration and Its Trade Impact: A Comparative Study of ECOWAS and SADC

AbstractOne of the intriguing aspects of African regional trade agreements (RTAs) is the extent of multi‐membership, where many African countries are members of more than one RTA. Using a gravity model for 25 countries and the years 1980‐2006, we measure the extent of multi‐membership and compare its impact in two major African regional blocs, Economic Community of West Africa States (ECOWAS) and Southern Africa Development Community (SADC). We find that the impact of multi‐membership critically depends on the characteristics of the multi‐membership of regional integration initiatives. We find a positive impact if an additional membership complements the integration process of the original regional integration initiative: overlapping memberships had a much stronger and significant positive effect on bilateral trade within ECOWAS compare with an insignificant impact within the SADC.