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Legal Naturalism advances a clear and convincing case that Marx's theory of law is a form of natural law jurisprudence. It explicates both Marx's writings and the idea of natural law, and makes a forceful contribution to current debates on the foundations of law. Olufemi Taiwo argues that embedded in the corpus of Marxist writing is a plausible, adequate, and coherent legal theory. In this sophisticated, well-written book, he describes Marx's general concept of law, which he calls "legal naturalism." For Marxism, natural law isn't a permanent verity; it refers to the basic law of a given epoch or social formation which is an essential aspect of its mode of production. Capitalist law is thus natural law in a capitalist society and is politically and morally progressive relative to the laws of preceding social formations

The project of my dissertation, "Autobiography", is to answer the question: How can we be free? Many philosophers describe the problem of freedom as arising from the limits of our agential powers, given the existence of other individuals and aspects of the world that might interfere with us. When thinking about it in the first person singular, it can seem that the task of the ethical and political philosopher is to figure out how to wrest freedom for each of us from the clutches of other people and from nature. In attempting to describe our complex social worlds, we may eventually arrive at some reformulation like: How can you and I both be free, at the same time, in the same place? But there is another way of framing the philosophical problem of freedom: how can we be free? When asked from the first person plural rather than the singular, our understanding of the problem of freedom shifts from asking how to rescue the possibility of each individual's freedom from being tampered with by others, to asking how to create the possibility of our collective freedom in the face of various historical forces that separate us from each other, especially those forces that enlist some of us to perpetuate the unfreedom of all of us.In chapter one, I engage with "National Liberation and Culture", an essay by Am�lcar Cabral that characterizes colonialism as a particular kind of historical unfreedom. I argue that the kind of unfreedom Cabral identifies both establishes what political freedom would look like from the first person plural perspective and provides a unified explanation of large-scale collective, individual unfreedom. In chapter 2, I turn to a discussion of conversation as a site of unfreedom in small-scale collectives as an intermediate case between individual and the kinds of collectives that involves nation states and races of people. I discuss how colonialism can meaningfully add to our descriptions of communicative dynamics, particularly how public information is used by differently socially positioned speakers. Finally, in chapter 3, I discuss individual unfreedom in a colonial social context, returning to Cabral's "National Liberation and Culture", providing considerations in favor of reworking foundational concepts in ethical theory and political philosophy like rational agency.

In recent times Africa has been a favourite quarry of American social scientists and humanities scholars. It has served Africanist scholars, mostly white, as a springboard for their eminently successful careers, as objects of study, and as cartographic points to which some of them could lay claim as theirs, trespass on which is often the equivalent of a capital offence in African Studies. Many of us have often been lectured, harangued, sometimes nearly insulted, because we dared to suggest that a subject on which a particular Africanist is "expert," or one that happens to excite her or him has little relevance to the scholarly concerns of African scholars or the lives of Africans! There are variations on this theme: it wasn't so long ago that feminists of different persuasions kept looking to Africa for primal, originary matriarchies.

The study examined the relationship between tax revenue and economic growth in Nigeria. The study adopted a descriptive and historical research design; secondary data for twenty-two years (1994 -2015) were collected from various issues of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) statistical bulletin and annual reports. Tax revenue as an independent variable was measured with Value Added Tax (VAT); Petroleum Profit Tax (PPT); Company Income Tax (CIT) and Custom and Excise Duties (CED) while the dependent variable was Economic Growth (EG) proxied by the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Analysis was performed on data collected using Auto Regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) Regression and other post estimations (Jarque-Bera test; Breusch-Godfrey LM and Ramsey Reset Test) to determine the existence of relationship between the variables. The results of the study showed that VAT and CED had a significant relationships with economic growth (p<0.05), while CIT has negative significant relationship with economic growth (P<0.05). However, PPT had no significant relationship with economic growth. The study concluded that the role of taxation in nation's building is irreplaceable. Taxation remains a strong socio political and economic tool for economic prosperity. It is therefore recommended that government should engage in a complete re-organization of tax administrative machinery to reduce incidence of tax evasion and avoidance to the barest minimum in order to improve tax revenue and bring more people and establishments into the tax net. Also, tax revenue should be judiciously utilized to provide enabling environment for business survival and economic growth in Nigeria.

Public spending on agriculture in Nigeria is exceedingly low. Less than 2 percent of total federal expenditure was allotted to agriculture during 2001 to 2005, far lower than spending in other key sectors such as education, health, and water. This spending contrasts dramatically with the sector's importance in the Nigerian economy and the policy emphasis on diversifying away from oil, and falls well below the 10 percent goal set by African leaders in the 2003 Maputo agreement. Nigeria also falls far behind in agricultural expenditure by international standards, even when accounting for the relationship between agricultural expenditures and national income. The spending that is extant is highly concentrated in a few areas. Three out of 179 programs account for more than 81 percent of federal capital spending, of which nearly three-quarters go to government purchase of agricultural inputs and agricultural outputs alone. The analysis finds that many of the Presidential Initiatives-which differ greatly in target crops, technologies, research, seed multiplication, and distribution-have identical budgetary provisions. This pattern suggests that the needs assessment and costing for these initiatives may have been inadequate, and that decisions may have been based on political considerations rather than economic assessment. Budget execution is also poor. The Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) best practice standard for budget execution is no more than 3 percent discrepancy between budgeted and actual expenditures. In contrast, during the period covered by the study, the Nigerian federal budget execution averaged only 79 percent, meaning 21 percent of the approved budget was never spent. Budget execution at the state and local levels was even less impressive, ranging from 71 percent to 44 percent. However, other sectors showed similar low levels of budget execution, suggesting that the problem is a general one going beyond agriculture. There is an urgent need to improve internal systems for tracking, recording, and disseminating information about public spending in the agriculture sector. Consolidated and up-to-date expenditure data are not available within the Ministry of Agriculture, not even for its own use. Without this information, authorities cannot undertake empirically-based policy analysis, program planning, and impact assessment. There is also a need for clarification of the roles of the three tiers of government in agricultural services delivery. This is important to reduce overlaps and gaps in agricultural interventions and improve efficiency and effectiveness of public investments and service delivery in the sector. Finally, applied research is needed to address critical knowledge gaps in several areas: (i) Spending on fertilizer programs makes up a sizeable portion of overall agricultural spending in Nigeria, yet very little is known about the impact of this spending. (ii) To date, only a small portion of the national grain storage system has been constructed, but if the entire network is completed as planned, the cost will be enormous. Supporting even the current modest level of grain marketing activities is consuming significant amounts of public resources. Is an investment on this order of magnitude desirable? What has been the impact of these investments? (iii) There is a need for an analytical study focusing on the economics of the National Special Program for Food Security (NSPFS). The total cost of NSPFS II is estimated at US$364 million. Detailed financial information about the NSPFS is not publicly available, however, making it difficult to assess whether the considerable investment in NSPFS I generated attractive returns, and whether NSPFS II merits support as currently designed. A rigorous external evaluation is needed to assess the performance of NPSFS and generate information that could be used to make design adjustments. --Authors' Abstract ; Non-PR ; IFPRI1; GRP3 ; DSGD

We investigate the possibility of improving access to interventions among mothers screened positive for post-partum depression (PPD) at National Programme on Immunization (NPI) clinics randomly selected from Lagos and Enugu States in south-western and south-eastern Nigeria respectively. The principle of human centred design was employed by engaging the mothers screened positive for PPD to be part of the decision making regarding their further assessment and intervention services. The study brought intervention services to primary healthcare centre at the NPI clinics. Improvement in willingness to seek interventions was observed among the mothers screened positive for PPD in this study when compared to our observation in a previous report, where mothers diagnosed with PPD were referred and requested to visit a mental health facility closer to their NPI clinics for further assessment and interventions (95.2% versus 33.7%). Interventional services for the mothers diagnosed with PPD also impact positively on the growth parameters of their infants on follow-up. Principle of human centred design improved access to intervention services among the mothers and infants studied. NPI clinics at primary healthcare level would provide appropriate forum for early screening of mothers for PPD and interventions in low-resource setting like Nigeria. There would be improvement in maternal and child health coverage if the Nigerian Government can adapt human centred design principles employed in this study nationwide.