S. F. Folarin

Africa’s Leadership Challenges in the 21st Century: A Nigerian Perspective

Leadership crisis in Africa is often seen from the point of view of the misdemeanor of various political rulers dotting the continental landscape. This paper sees it differently. It explores the fundamental cause of the misleadership parody, ranging from the personal capacity underdevelopment, to socialpsychological and value deficiencies and misunderstandings that need to be addressed for Africa to be repositioned politically.

Nigeria and the Brics: Regional Dynamics in Developing Economies' Studies

The debate on foreign economic relations has stressed the expansion and diversification of trade as well as the need for increased inflow in foreign capital. As a distinct area of international relations and development studies, foreign economic relations have increased the prospect for sustained economic growth and development, especially among emerging economies. Indeed, the competition for markets and resources remains the greatest determinant for friends as well as foes. To this end, the study interrogates the complexities of Nigeria’s foreign economic relations with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) economies, whose development models can arguably serve as prototypes for other emerging economies. It adopts the theories of modernization and underdevelopment/dependency (UDT) to situate the dynamics of these relationships within perspective. The study is based on content analysis and review, drawing attention to the forces and factors that drive these relationships. Findings suggest that failure on the part of the traditional international financial institutions (IMF and World Bank) to meet the growing expectations of these developing economies is singularly responsible for regional re-alignments on their part to maximize the gains of globalization. It concludes that a reevaluation of the policies of the IMF and the World Bank is long overdue, while proposing an introduction of more robust regional economic integration to meet the increasing demands in South-South Cooperation.

The Spatial Economy of Abjection: The Evacuation of Maroko Slum in Nigeria

For several days after it had happened, “all the cover pages of newspapers bore searing images of pain and despair reflected on the faces of residents struggling to come to terms with (the) reality” (ThisDay, July 29, 2006: 11). That reality was the leveling by government bulldozers of an entire community, home to over 300, 000. Maroko, in Lagos state, was part of those areas that Harvey (2000: 152) would describe as a “sea of spreading decay” spatially located by the side of “a patchwork quilt of islands of relative affluence” that struggle to secure themselves against the urban squalor, misery, and poverty that dominate the spatial margin of the city.

The Limits of State Sovereignty : Darfur Crisis and the United Nations:

The genocide in Darfur, Sudan has left over 300,000 dead, thus bringing the death toll in the entire Sudanese conflicts from 1956 to almost 2 million people and the number of displaced persons to over 2 million. The exacerbation of the crisis is traceable to the governments complicity exemplified by its standing order to the United Nations to stay off and evacuate its monitors in what it considered an entirely Sudanese affair that could be resolved without external interference. However, considering the limits of state sovereignty in the modern international system, where membership of the UN, the existence of the Geneva Convention on the Laws of War, Humanitarian Law and other subsisting legal frameworks on war crimes erode absolute sovereignty, the Sudanese government cannot hide under the non-interference in the internal affairs of states clause to prevent the international community from intervention in Darfur. This probably explains the recent approval by the Government of Sudan to finally allow UN-AU troops to jointly restore security, bowing to intense international pressure to do so.