As we get ready to jump into the new year; the year 2022, religious leaders and prophets are already warming up for their new year eve messages and new year prophecies where they predict what will happen in the year.
The Ghanaian government have had enough of these so called new year prophecies from religious leaders and they released a newsletter through the police department in a broadcast titled “Ghana Police Service Statement on Communication of Prophecies and their Legal Implications” warning religious leaders to mind their prophecies this coming new year if not the risk facing a jail term of 5 years.
Read the full statement here!
GHANA POLICE SERVICE STATEMENT ON COMMUNICATION OF PROPHECIES AND THEIR LEGAL IMPLICATIONS
As the year 2021 draws to a close, the Ghana Police Service wishes to draw the attention of Ghanaians, especially religious groups, to the fact that whereas we have the right to religion, freedom of worship and free speech, all of these rights are subject to the respect for the rights and freedoms of others according to our laws.
Over the years, communication of prophesies of harm, danger and death, by some religious leaders, have created tension and panic in the Ghanaian society and put the lives of many people in fear and danger.
We want to caution that under Ghanaian law, it is a crime for a person to publish or reproduce a statement, rumour or report which is likely to cause fear and alarm to the public or to disturb the public peace, where that person has no evidence to prove that the statement, rumour or report is true.
It is also a crime for a person, by means of electronic communications service, to knowingly send a communication that is false or misleading and likely to prejudice the efficiency of life saving service or to endanger the safety of any person.
A person found guilty under these laws could be liable to a term of imprisonment of up to five years.
We therefore wish to caution all Ghanaians, especially religious groups and leaders to be measured in their utterances, especially how they communicate prophecies, which may injure the right of others and the public interest.
The Ghana Police Service wishes to place on record that the Police are not against prophecies; we acknowledge that we Ghanaians are a religious people who know, and believe in, the centrality of God in our lives.
The Police wish to assure all religious organizations that we are committed to ensuring maximum security during the 31st December night, end of year services and beyond. There should be no apprehensions therefore about undertaking the various activities. We ask only that everyone keeps within the law and is mindful of the welfare of each other.
We also urge all Ghanaians to observe the COVID-19 protocols religiously so as to protect ourselves, families and friends from this ravaging pandemic.
We also take this opportunity to wish all Ghanaians a Merry Christmas and a happy New Year.
SUPT. ALEXANDER KWAKU OBENG DIRECTOR, PUBLIC AFFAIRS
The moment one acquires a PhD degree, that signifies the end of pursing higher degrees in life. Reaching this stage has several implications for individuals and society in general. For the individuals, it is a signal that they have in-depth knowledge of the areas or fields they researched for a number of years. Society gains when they use their knowledge for solution creation towards solving problems and challenges in all aspects of humanity.
According to various sources, PhD degrees are being pursued most in developed countries, such as the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and others. This does not mean that developing countries are not part of the trend of having people with the degree. For example, the National Bureau of Statistics reported in 2017 that Nigeria has 70, 739 PhD holders. During the second quarter of 2020, the agency reported 76,526 PhD holders. With the recent data (76,526), our analyst notes that it is possible that some of the 17,552 PhD students that were at various universities in 2019 [see Exhibit 1] must have graduated in 2020 and 2021. Expectedly, some of these students will graduate in 2022 and subsequent years.
The rate at which the country is churning out these graduates could be attributed to the increase in the number of academics with PhD degrees and their capacity to supervise the students. This position is better appreciated in 2019 because some years later, the National Universities Commission lamented the poor PhD graduates from the universities. According to the Commission, Nigeria needs to produce good PhD holders because “doctoral research is expected to play critical roles in terms of innovation, creating new relevant knowledge by generating knowledge that is marketable for goods and services converted to goods and service.”
Exhibit 1: Number of PhD students at universities in Nigeria as of 2019 by discipline
This has been the narrative from the agency and others saddled with the responsibility of ensuring quality higher education in Nigeria over the years. Non-governmental organisations and individuals have also expressed their mixed feelings during different fora. Students are not left out in blaming the educational system, which makes it difficult for them and their supervisors to be productive towards the quick and thorough completion of the programme.
From another perspective, based on our analyst’s experience, students have largely been blamed for delays in completing their programmes. Observational analysis shows the majority of PhD students do not have a better understanding of what they want to do during the first and second years of their programme. From selecting a topic or area of specialization to writing a researchable proposal, many students have spent more than 2 years. This challenge is most common among students who are not university lecturers.
Regardless of the blame game, Nigeria requires high-quality PhD holders, not low-quality ones. The length, breadth, and depth of a thesis are prioritized by supervisors, students, and universities in order to produce quality PhD holders. According to our research, most Nigerian colleges have made it a practice in the previous five years to require a thesis to pass a thesis depth test. This indicates that a student must meet the depth of thesis standards after passing the length and breadth assessments in order to receive a PhD. In most situations, the length and breadth tests will be completed collaboratively by the students, their supervisor(s), and other instructors.
The Length
Whether you are pursuing your PhD at a Nigerian or an American university, the length of your thesis will be evaluated based on the number of pages and words written. The required number of pages and words varies from country to country. According to our research, the average page length is between 200 and 300 pages. The average number of words is 80,000. The maximum word count at most UK universities is 80,000. If you want to run your programme in the United States of America, you need to plan for 100,000 words [being expected word count in some schools]. If you need to exceed the maximum word count, you and your supervisor(s) are expected to write the Postgraduate School and justify the reason for the increase, according to our checks.
The Breadth
However, several pages and thousand words are not sufficient to make you a complete PhD holder. Afterall, John Nash produced the shortest PhD thesis in history. His thesis on non-cooperative games has 28 pages with only two references. It is also important to learn a lot about a range of concepts in relation to your chosen area of specialization. This is the breath, which can be achieved through the adoption of mixed methods and theories that are quite different from your field but relevant to the chosen topic.
Doing this has several theoretical and practical implications. For instance, the use of mixed methods will help you collect data from different sources and understand how things work or not in other settings. Using theories from other fields will assist you in getting insights that could be used for solution creation and delivery when the need arises for the people, animals, and objects that were originally considered while formulating the theories.
The Depth
Naturally, depth begins with the first chapter of your thesis. In your background or motivation section, you are expected to walk the readers through general to specific details of what has happened in the area you are working on. Your second chapter, which in most cases is the literature review, shows the extent to which you could be called an expert. This is hinged on the fact that it is the chapter that establishes your understanding of the logic within PhD thesis writing. Failure to present various concepts critically towards forming constructs for your work means your thesis lacks the required depth. Achieving a good depth of thesis does not depend on these alone. Your chapters four and five [for some schools, this is the last chapter] give you the opportunity to acquire more points towards a better depth of thesis. In these chapters, your breath remains the key tool for gaining points.
You need to showcase your understanding of higher-order logic in chapter four by selecting parts of the collected data and presenting them appropriately using an integrative approach. In order to avoid failing the depth of your thesis test several times, you need to pay attention to data analysis, especially the choice of methods of analysis for quantitative data. The era of using simple statistics has absolutely gone for good. The world has shifted to the use of bivariate and multivariate analyses. Not only that, a PhD thesis without concrete contributions to knowledge from the perspective of creating a model quantitatively or narratively [through storytelling] is not deep enough.
Tekedia Institute is honoured to welcome Mr. Anngu Orngu to Tekedia Mini-MBA which begins Feb 7, 2022. Mr. Orngu is the Senior Special Assistant To The Benue State Governor on Student Affairs. In 2022, Tekedia Institute will be training thousands of young people from Benue State on entrepreneurial capitalism and business systems through Tekedia CollegeBoost, a mini-MBA designed for students. Welcome, the Food Basket of the nation.
Connect with us to learn how Tekedia Institute could help the young people of your LGA, state and community. Visit Tekedia Institute school.tekedia.com
Our Faculty members come from respected local and global institutions like Shell, Flutterwave, Microsoft, Coca Cola, MTN, Schlumberger, Access Bank, Jobberman, etc.
The Nigerian police should be called out for the way they abducted Mr. Uche Nwosu. They operated like hoodlums, kidnappers and arm robbers whose sole aim is not to enforce the law but to break the law. The officers involved in that arrest should be punished severely for the unprofessional conduct of the arrest.
No matter whatsoever the offense of Mr. Nwosu is, he is still regarded in law as a suspect, he is presumed in law to be innocent and his constitutional fundamental rights are to be respected and protected until he is found guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction.
The way he was treated by the Nigerian police by whisking him away while shooting several shots into the air like armed robbers or kidnappers with the risk of shooting worshippers who attended the church Mr. Nwosu was abducted from for their Christmas Sunday service.
If Mr. Nwosu can be treated in such a crude manner despite whatever he is suspected to have committed as an offense, Mr. Nwosu, a senior citizen of the state, it shows that nobody is safe in this country, a common man can even be killed and no one will ask questions.
The Nigerian police have a knack for continuous disregard of the rule of law, their professional rules of engagement and enforcement of the law while they are purporting to be enforcing the law. Two wrongs can never make a right; you cannot be a breaking the law whilst in the duty of catching a law breaker, the abduction and the style and manner in which Mr. Nwosu was kidnapped by the Nigerian police is a no no and should be condemned by every well meaning Nigerian despite political affiliations and personal relationships.
Uche Nwosu in handcuffs
The officers that engaged in that arrest should be severely punished and acts like that should never be condoned.
In addition to antitrust scrutiny, the Big Tech is reckoning with increasing workforce revolt that is gradually becoming a threat to their business growth. Amazon, Apple and Facebook have recently had to deal with workers’ fight-back in forms of resignation, attempt to unionize and unusual protests.
These companies have for years kept their workers under total control, that apart from leaks, the companies had had little to nothing to worry about when it comes to employees’ behavior. But there is an evitable shift from the status quo that the companies are inadvertently bending the rules to accept.
On Christmas Eve, a group of Apple workers demanding better working conditions in the company’s stores, staged a walkout.
The walkout had as much as 50 workers who the organizers said they called out of work on Friday, complaining about issues ranging from insufficient paid sick leave and a lack of pandemic hazard pay.
This is coming on the heels of Amazon’s settlement Agreement with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which concedes some measures of unionization rights to the e-commerce giant’s workers.
Amazon workers, who have been in loggerheads with the company over their attempts to unionize, got a reprieve after the settlement allowed them the right to, among other things, organize a union around the company’s facilities, which Amazon previously forbids.
In its share of the employees’ troubles, Facebook has seen more workers challenge the status quo in 2021 than ever before. The bombshell of the year being the leak of concealed findings of the social media’s internal research by Frances Haugen, Facebook’s former product manager. The findings reveal that Facebook knows how much harm it causes but chooses to ignore it – choosing profit over morality. The revelation attracted a senate committee hearing with Haugen’s testimony.
In addition, Facebook has lost a bunch of talents this year. The decision of the employees to leave has been largely attributed to dissatisfaction with happenings in the company.
In August, the #AppleToo hashtag became a trend after the Apple Together worker group organized an online protest. The group which consists of anonymous accounts from current and former Apple employees, made hundreds of tweets alleging instances of verbal abuse, sexual harassment, pay equity issues and other problems at the company.
Janneke Parrish, a former corporate Apple employee who helped support organizers of the walkout, said that while those participating in Friday’s action represent a small fraction of Apple’s 80,000 employees in retail and beyond in the U.S., it is still “significant” to have workers speak out against the behemoth tech company.
“Apple workers are fed up with being unheard,” Parrish said, adding that Friday’s action aims to “make sure people are aware of how retail workers are being treated.”
Last month, Parrish filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) claiming she was fired for helping coworkers share their experiences of sexism and other discrimination at Apple.
Parrish isn’t the only Apple employee who got fired for attempting to challenge the status quo. Ashley Gjøvik, a former Apple product manager, was terminated after attempting to organize workers, sharing stories of sexual harassment. She also filed an NLRB complaint against Apple.
The organizing group, Apple Together, asked people to support workers by boycotting Apple products on Christmas Eve.
Like Apple, Amazon has had growing complaints from its workers since the pandemic began. NLRB’s database shows that more than 75 complaints of unfair practices had been lodged against the Cupertino behemoth.
Google has been on and off the hook.
The firing of workers as a deterrent mechanism is proving not to dampen the spirit of others who have been coming out of the shadows. Though the employees’ fight-back has been largely seen as insignificant, the recent uptick and support from NLRB is indicating that the Big Tech will have a fresh concern to worry about.
