Climate change, pastoral migration, resource governance and security: the Grazing Bill solution to farmer-herder conflict in Nigeria

Current local and national demographic trends have deepened the existing and formed new global demographic processes that have received a new historical reasoning that requires deep scientific research taking into account the influence of the multifactorial global dimension of the modern society development.
The purpose of the article is to study the development of global demographic processes and to define the causes of their occurrence, manifestations, implications and prospects for implementation in the first half of the 21st century.
The authors have identified and characterized four global demographic processes, namely population growth, migration, increase of tourism, and change in population structure. It is projected that in the 30’s of the 21st century, the number and growth rates of the world population will reach the objective growth and these dynamics over the next two decades will begin to change in the direction of reducing the growth rates, which will lead to gradual stabilization, and eventually reduce the size of the world population. By the middle of the 21st century, one can observe the preservation of the growth rates of international and domestic migration, the growth of international migration flows from the South to the North and from the East to the West, the strengthening of new economically developed centers of gravity (Canada, Australia and New Zealand), the increase in migration of rural population to cities, as well as urbanization and activation of the metropolises development. The share of international tourists in comparison with the world population will be constantly increasing, and the annual growth rate of the number of international tourists will significantly depend on the world economy and may vary at the several percent level. Permanent change will occur in the age, religious-cultural and socio-economic structure of the population.

This study focused on corporate governance and performance of selected Nigerian multinational firms from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the study focused on the effect of board size, activism and committee activism on return on asset and firm growth rate. Secondary data collected from four multinational firms were analyzed via static panel estimation techniques. While board size and board activism exerted significant negative impact on return on asset, committee activism exerted insignificant impact. The results of the study further showed that board size and board activism exert insignificant negative impact on firm’s growth rate, while committee activism insignificantly spurs firm’s growth rate. Decisively, discoveries from this study reflect that corporate governance has significant negative impact on return on asset, but has insignificant influence on the growth rate of Nigerian multinational firms. Based on these findings, the authors recommended that corporate governance dynamics in firms world over should be reconsidered, such that it gives credence to more than just numbers of persons or meetings held, but the main reasons and deliberations in such meetings. It was also recommended that excessive increase in magnitude or frequency of meetings held by board of directors cum committee should be avoided.

Academic resilience and emotional intelligence are considered important personal resources for furthering students’ academic performance. However, many educational organizations seem to trivialize the performance implications of these constructs in teachings and curriculum. Consequently, it can decrease not just their academic performance but also their employability, as they lack the generic competencies to adapt and survive in a stressful context. Even so, empirical evidence on integrating academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance remains unexplored in the Nigerian university context. Therefore, the study aimed to investigate the linkages between academic resilience, emotional intelligence, and academic performance in Nigeria. The partial least square (PLS) modeling method was utilized for testing the stated hypotheses with data collected from 179 final year undergraduate students in the regular B.Sc. Business Administration and B.Sc. Marketing program at Delta State University, Nigeria. From the PLS results, the study reported that academic resilience was positively related to emotional intelligence (β = 0.125, p = 0.007), academic resilience (β = 0.231, p = 0.000) and emotional intelligence (β = 0.260, p = 0.000) were positively related to academic performance, and emotional resilience mediated the positive relationship between academic resilience and academic performance (β = 0.057, p = 0.005). While academic resilience predicted academic performance, it also predicted emotional intelligence, which affected academic performance significantly and positively.