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The agrarian economy is the second major source of Nigeria's earning and employs about 70% of Nigerians. Media reports indicate that there have been increases in the cases of attacks by Fulani herdsmen on several farmers in communities. The Fulani herdsmen as were reported, brutally kill the inhabitants of the invaded farming communities, including women and children in various states across the country. The Fulani herdsmen are usually armed with sophisticated weapons when carrying out attacks on their target communities at the time they are defenseless like midnight or on Sundays when they are in their churches, killing people arbitrarily, especially women and children, burning houses and looting properties. States like Benue, Taraba, Nassarawa, Plateau, Kaduna, Katsina, has been in the news as being the worst hit of late, having tasted the overwhelming attacks by the Fulani herdsmen. Other states like Kogi, Delta, Imo, Ebonyi and Enugu have also had some isolated cases of the sporadic attacks by the unrestrained Fulani Herdsmen whose binge for blood has remained unquenching. The brutality and impunity with which the attackers operate without regard for the law and the sanctity of life, coupled with the inability of the Police and other military establishments to defend the victims who are being mercilessly slaughtered in their homeland, is most disturbing. The conflict between the Fulani herdsmen and the farmers usually arise when the Herdsmen overrun community farmland with their cattle and let them graze unrestricted on cultivated and uncultivated land, thereby destroying valuable food and cash crops without recourse to its implication on the farmer. Farming communities have been made to forego their farmlands, abandon their agricultural products of the farms which are the mainstay of the host communities, for the safety of their lives whenever the marauders strike. This is because when the communities try to resist them and request their exit, the Fulani herdsmen will become violent and attack the community sometimes with the aid of some alleged mercenaries from the neighbouring countries like Chad, Niger, Mali, and Cameroon. The most unfortunate aspect of the entire saga is the alleged complicity of the security agencies in Nigeria in protecting the killer herdsmen against the defenseless communities who have been attacked. Conflicts between pastoralists and farmers have been age-long in Nigeria; this is caused by increases in the herd sizes, due to improved conditions of the cattle, compelled the pastoralists to seek for more pastures beyond their geographical limited, unavoidable drought in the northern area and more pressures on the land resources (Bello, 2013). In Nigeria, agriculture employs about 70 percent of its labour force. Smallholders in the country's centre and southern harvest most of the country's tuber and vegetable crops while pastoralists in the north raise most of its grains and livestock. Over 90 percent of pastoralists reportedly are the Fulani, a large ethnic group straddling several W...

Nigeria's image was negative prior the return of democracy in 1999. The major cause of this was the long period of military rule which not only dismantled democratic institutions, but made Nigeria a pariah State as a result of corruption and draconian policies. The protracted military rule led to plethora of sanctions which led to hardship on the populace. The return to democratic governance reinvented the State and ushered in diplomatic shuffles which culminated to the eliminating of the sanctions which eventually readmitted the country into global reckoning. This study reviews Nigeria's image, democracy and foreign policy, 1999-2007, adopting content analysis in the scrutiny of our data and political economy perspectives as a paradigm for our analysis. It recommends effective Executive -Legislative Collaboration as a panacea for achieving effective and stable foreign policy.Keywords: corruption, democracy, image, foreign policy, Nigeria Introduction'Foreign policy', as a concept, is nebulous and defies a generally-acceptable definition (Aluko, 1981). Though different scholars have defined it from different points of view, each of these definitions could be said to have stemmed from, and influenced by, peculiar ideological strands. The concept of foreign policy is of utmost interest and importance to every nation, since, according Dunmoye, Njoku & Alubo, eds. (2007:12), 'it connotes formal decisions/positions of sovereign states towards their counterparts, defined in terms of political, economic, cultural/social and strategic realms of inter-sovereign relationships, bilaterally and or multi-literally.' Foreign policy essentially deals with the relations between sovereign actors in international system. Foreign policy objective therefore can be understood as a range of intended actions as well as set strategies adopted by some sovereign actors with the purpose of influencing the behaviour of other sovereign actors within the international system. Accordingly, Ogwu (2006:6) argues that the ultimate objectives of any foreign policy are to achieve short-range or long-range goals that ensure the superiority of one sovereign national actor over another. That is, foreign policy could be perceived as the pursuit of national interests. The milieu within which foreign policy is contrived and executed could be dichotomized into three main realms; the psychological, the domestic and the external. The psychological realm denotes the mental process of the decision maker(s) and all the factors that shape the conception of the policy. The domestic realm on the other hand is beyond the decision maker(s), but within the territorial bounds of the state. The external realm deals with the international system into which the policy is directed and this could be significantly unpredictable. The interface of the trio therefore is essential in the formulation of foreign policy.The Principal objective of Nigeria's foreign policy is as provided for in Section 19 of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic and others that pr...

Corruption is perhaps the biggest challenge to Nigeria's development and the integrity of the country's fiscal monetary system. Since independence in 1960, corruption has been a destabilizing factor in the country's progress. It however gained pronounced ascendancy during the Second Republic, forcing a greater percentage of the country's population into serious economic hardship leading to the introduction of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). This malignant pandemic has not abetted till date. This paper interrogates corruption and fiscal federalism in Nigeria through an analysis of the federal budgetary process from 1999 to 2016. It adopts the political economy approach as the theoretical framework. The study recommends amongst others that the political elites must rise to the challenges of good governance, by waging wars against corruption through institutional strengthening and patriotism by all citizens.

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