This essay discusses the contours of what I call a new instrumental turn in Nigerian historical scholarship. It argues that the historical discipline in Nigeria is experiencing a new instrumental turn, which finds expression in several new features of academic history writing, teaching, and programming. Some aspects of this trend hearken back to the original instrumental history of the pioneers of Nigerian and African nationalist history; others represent something new, being responses to novel twenty-first-century anxieties and imperatives of nation-building, development, and the place of humanities knowledge in those aspirations. Unlike old conceptions of instrumentality, this new turn signals a more explicit agenda of problem-solving through historical research. It also entails a rather formulaic embrace of proposals for solutions to problems identified in or through historical research.

Animal welfare awareness (AWA) during transportation and in markets is a critical concern in livestock production, influencing the health of animals and other outcomes for stakeholders. Nevertheless, it remains understudied in many developing regions. This study investigates the level of awareness and practices regarding animal welfare during and after transportation among primary stakeholders — sellers, drivers, and buyers — in three livestock markets in Nigeria: Achida, Ikorodu Sabo, and Amansea. A structured survey focusing on the stakeholders’ familiarity with the concept of animal welfare, the Five Freedoms, the Animal Diseases (Control) Act, and encounters with veterinary control posts was conducted across the selected markets between February and July 2024. Furthermore, stakeholders were also questioned about barriers to improving practices. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were performed to explore associations between the dichotomised awareness of animal welfare and key variables. A significant association between AWA and market location was revealed, but not with occupation. Further analysis showed that dichotomised awareness of Veterinary Control Posts (VCPs) and the Animal Diseases (Control) Act had significant negative associations with AWA, suggesting complex relationships between legal knowledge and familiarity with the concept of animal welfare. Additionally, transport-related mortality was reported by 70.7% of respondents, with overcrowding and sickness identified as primary causes. However, significant barriers, including economic constraints and a lack of authority to mandate standards, were the leading challenges often faced by stakeholders. The findings underscore the need for targeted interventions and policy reforms, including increased enforcement.

African newspapers have been the subject of scrutiny from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. However, comparably little attention has been paid to the early visual archives produced by these presses. This essay mines the pages of West African Pilot and other newspapers to explore the genesis of the practice and profession of press photography in Lagos, Nigeria. Over the course of three defining historical moments, press photographs became a record and consequence of the ways that professional, legal, and political contours of visual freedoms were defined in an increasingly anti-colonial city and nation-state.

The growing burden of mental, neurological and substance use (MNS) disorders in low-resource settings has prompted efforts to integrate mental health into primary health care (PHC). This study evaluated the implementation and outcomes of a large-scale mhGAP training initiative under the Mental Health in Primary Care (MeHPriC) program in Lagos State, Nigeria. A total of 852 PHC workers from 57 facilities completed a 5-day mhGAP training and a 1-day refresher session. Using a pre-post mixed-methods design, we assessed changes in knowledge, stigma, clinical practice and self-efficacy, with follow-up at five months. Quantitative findings revealed significant improvements in knowledge and attitudes, with enhanced clinical practice reported by 69.1% of participants. Supervision, knowledge gains and self-efficacy emerged as predictors of improved practice. Qualitative data, analyzed using the Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research (CFIR), highlighted increased confidence, reduced stigma and the enabling role of supervision and peer support, alongside persistent barriers such as medication stock-outs and limited referral networks. The study offers robust evidence for the effectiveness of task-sharing approaches when supported by contextual adaptation and system-level readiness. The MeHPriC model demonstrates that government-led mhGAP scale-up in PHC is both feasible and impactful, offering a replicable pathway for mental health integration in other LMICs.

In January 2019, Nigeria enacted the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act, which provides for a joint legal framework for both competition and consumer protection. This article examines the theoretical and practical rationale for integrating competition and consumer protection, recognizing that, while related, the two may pursue distinct goals and operate under different principles. It provides a lens to review the issues an African country faces following integration, especially in the broader normative discussion of the goals of competition law. Although there is literature investigating the integration of consumer protection and competition, there is still nothing that examines the place of consumer protection in the wider theoretical context of competition for developing countries, particularly how they balance efficiency with other goals of competition. The article also offers the first academic review of the five-year practice of competition law and its application in Nigeria.

In many developing countries, law students face challenges in accessing authoritative legal resources, including statutes, case law, and journal articles, due to the high costs of subscription-based databases such as LexisNexis, HeinOnline, and Westlaw. In Nigeria, additional subscription online resources are available, including LawPavilion, Legalpedia, and Compulaw. These platforms are all rich in content and currency; however, they are often unaffordable for both law students and law libraries. To overcome these challenges, there are many initiatives and movements administered by government institutions, universities, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provide access to both primary and secondary sources of law. Included in the latter group are the Legal Information Institutes (LIIs), Google Scholar, the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), and Justia. This paper examines the role of free legal databases as an alternative for law students and how these freely accessible platforms can support the access gaps that subscription-based legal research tools have often created. The study is conceptual in nature, with reliance on existing literature and analysis of freely available legal information resources to support legal education.

Plant-soil microbial interactions play a central role in maintaining biodiversity and coexistence in terrestrial ecosystems. However, to what extent plant-soil feedbacks (PSFs) operate in tropical Afromontane forests remains unclear. In this study, we conducted a PSF shade house experiment using six tree species exhibiting diverse life-history strategies and abundances in a sub-tropical montane forest in Nigeria. Seedlings were grown under controlled conditions in sterilised soil with or without soil inoculum collected under mature trees of each of the six species. We assessed whether conspecific tree seedlings’ performance was altered in comparison to heterospecific seedlings when grown in the soil of their adult trees. Seedling growth did not significantly differ between inocula from conspecific and heterospecific adults in five of the six species tested, indicating no evidence of PSFs. In Garcinia smeathmannii, we found a significant increase in seedling growth when grown in conspecific soil inocula. Given that no PSFs were observed in five out of six species, our study suggests that PSFs may play a limited role in the performance of some species in this Afromontane ecosystem. Nonetheless, the facilitative interaction noted in Garcinia smeathmannii indicates a nuanced ecological dynamic worth further exploration.

There has been recurrent agitation for external self-determination by most of the South-East people of modern Nigeria through the secessionist group the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). This agitation reached crisis point in 2015 with military action which escalated into a violent confrontation, in which the IPOB claimed some of their members were killed. The IPOB’s request for external self-determination fell on deaf ears, however, the counter-claim being that Nigerian territorial integrity cannot be compromised. This article examines the right to self-determination under international law and in the African system, as well as the types of this right that have been identified by scholars and whether the IPOB’s call can be justified. It argues that the type of self-determination sought by the IPOB and the manner in which they seek it may not be attainable under international law, except through a consensus-based process between the Nigerian government and the South-East people of Nigeria.

The application by states of economic principles in education has not produced good results in access to education in low-income and less-developed countries. This prompted UNESCO to designate countries with substantial problems of access to education and illiteracy as the E-9 countries, which include Nigeria. Nigeria’s status as an E-9 country indicates the existence of considerable problems in education, and where necessary, statistical evidence will be used to elucidate Nigeria’s E-9 status. This article argues that the nature of the laws and policy mechanisms that control education in Nigeria suggests that the country seems to be responding to the contemporaneous demands of global programmes of action in education that are predicated on economic principles and driven by the tides of globalization instead of to the requirements of international human rights law.

Excessive consumption of energy drinks poses significant risks, including the development of various non-communicable diseases. This trend is driven by a combination of the desire to remain alert and the strategic use of catchy advertising slogans by manufacturers, particularly targeting young adolescents. Unlike tobacco products, which are similarly linked to such diseases, Nigeria lacks legislation requiring energy drink manufacturers to warn consumers about potential adverse health effects. This paper argues that the absence of such regulation constitutes a violation of the right to health in Nigeria. It concludes by advocating for the Nigerian government to enact laws mandating energy drink manufacturers to include clear health warnings on their products.

Debates on dedollarizing and internationalizing China’s currency, the renminbi (RMB), often focus on state-led initiatives such as bilateral currency swaps and Central Bank Digital Currencies while overlooking the role of entrepreneurs utilizing US dollar (USD) alternatives. Ethnographic fieldwork with Nigerian importers of Chinese goods reveals how parallel payment currencies and channels—informal naira-RMB transfers and illicit cryptocurrency transactions—are just as essential in the Global South to decenter US dominance: its currency, institutions, and authority. Analyzing formal monetary policies and local money practices, Liu shows how Nigerian importers cultivate multicurrency fluency, which is vital in an incipient era of political and economic multipolarity.

Reproductive health indicators in many developing countries including Nigeria are poor, and this is due to the less-than-optimum utilization of reproductive healthcare that has been linked to numerous factors including the educational attainment of women and their partners. In societies like Nigeria, marriage is nearly universal and upheld by patriarchal practices, while education is one of the determining factors for the choice of partner in the marriage market, as it also influences household power dynamics. Despite the plethora of studies investigating the link between education and utilization of these services, there is a paucity of research examining educational assortative mating (EAM) and its link to reproductive healthcare utilization. Hence, this study investigated EAM and explored its association with reproductive healthcare utilization from the perspective of family systems theory. Data from the 2018 Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey (n = 19,950) was analysed with frequencies presented and binary logistic regression models fitted. The result showed that high-education (34%) and low-education (46%) homogamy are the most prevalent types of EAM, while 40% of the partnered women reported facility delivery, 11% used modern contraceptives and 20% reported 8+ antenatal care visits. The multivariate analysis showed that compared to women in hypergamy, women in both high-education homogamy and hypogamy are more likely to deliver at a health facility but women in low-education are less likely. Women in both high-education homogamy and hypogamy are more likely, but those in low-education homogamy are less likely to use modern contraceptives. For antenatal care, only women in high-education homogamy are more likely to have 8 or more visits during pregnancy compared to women in hypergamy, while women in low-education homogamy and hypogamy are less likely. These findings provide evidence of the importance of an indicator of social stratification for important family decisions like healthcare utilization.

Millions of young girls in Nigeria have continued to suffer the negative consequences of early marriage such as discontinuation of education and restricting them from achieving their full potential. Successive Nigerian governments have therefore deployed different strategies over the years to mitigate the practice, particularly in the northern part of the country. This study analysed the changes in the pattern of child marriage across space-time in Nigeria using a dataset obtained from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey conducted between 2003 and 2018 at a consecutive interval of 5 years. A Bayesian spatio-temporal random effect model with inference based on integrated nested laplace approximation was considered. Whereas the findings demonstrate a reduction in the practice of child marriage over time everywhere in the country, the prevalence remains highest in States such as Kogi, Niger, Federal Capital Territory Abuja, Taraba, and Kaduna, all in the northern part of the country despite the policies, program and interventions by international organisations, Child Right Acts, and Non-governmental organisations. Over the fifteen years, only slight changes were recorded in the Southwest region. Furthermore, higher levels of education, urban residency, household wealth, being a Yoruba, or belonging to a Christian religious group were found to lower the chances of child marriage. State-specific strategic planning would be useful in deploying suitable local solutions to reduce child marriage in Nigeria.