A Factorial Study of Bottlenecks in Nigerian Petroleum Refineries

Bottlenecks in the refineries lead to the disruption of refinery operations which result in production loss and time wastage. Nigerian refineries are four and they have not been able to work optimally as they have failed to produce up to their installed capacity. A lot of factors are contributing to this and are known as bottlenecks. This study was taken so as to identify those bottlenecks in the refineries with a view of making them known so that actions can be taken to tackle them and get Nigerian Refineries move from their pariah states to a welcome state. Kendall’s Coefficient of Concordance (K.C.C) and Principal Component Analysis (P.C.A) which are tools in factor analysis were employed. The K.C.C helped in ranking the identified variables according to their order of importance while the PCA helped to achieve parsimony through factor reduction. The results obtained revealed that the experts ranking of the thirty two scale items were in agreement at an alpha level of 0.01 and the computed coefficient of concordance was 0.51which is substantial. The thirty two scale items were able to be reduced into mere five clusters by PCA. A lone variable cluster which was labeled creatively ‘Government interference’ came up trump and account for most of the challenges being experienced in the Refineries. Other clusters labeled creatively were Eclectic issues, organizational management, Supply Chain Architecture and Personnel Management. The import of this is that government interference needs to be removed if refineries are to work optimally and the remaining four clusters should also be looked at in order to tackle these bottlenecks.

Israel’s Global Perspective

Zionism set out not only to establish a state of the Jews, but also to create a Jewish society, one profoundly different from the ones the immigrants had been born into. The genocide of the Nazis, the abandonment of internationalism by the Soviet Union, and the hostility of Arab nationalism moved Zionism toward a position more concerned with national survival. Israel was forced to abandon a nonaligned status after 1950 and, when diplomatically isolated after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, to cultivate relations with regimes that were considered pariah states, such as South Africa, Chile, and Argentina. The ascendancy of the Israeli Right after 1977 accentuated this approach. The demise of the USSR, the end of the Cold War, and the signing of the Oslo Accords in the 1990s all contributed to the establishment of diplomatic relations with major states such as India and China and Arab neighbors such as Jordan, as well as to unofficial contacts with others such as Cuba. In the twenty-first century many states relegated ideology to a secondary position, assisting Israel’s policy of survivalism.

Unipolarity and the Middle East. By Birthe Hansen. New York: St. Martin's, 2000. 288p. $59.95. War, Institutions and Social Change in the Middle East. Edited by Steven Heydemann. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 372p. $60.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. “Pariah States” and Sanctions in the Middle East: Iraq, Libya, Sudan. By Tim Niblock. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2001. 241p. $49.95.

Scholars of Middle Eastern studies in the last decade often were preoccupied with two major problems. First, the democratization that has spread over most of the globe seems to have missed the Middle East. Second, there appears to be a growing gap between international relations and comparative politics theory, on the one hand, and Middle East studies, on the other. In seeking to explain why, some point to the highly politicized scholarship that can still be found in Middle East studies. Others argue that the theorists simply have not tried hard enough to fit the special nature of the Middle East into their theoretical models, or that Middle Eastern scholars have not tried hard enough to deal with theory. Two of the three books under review, by Hansen and Heydemann, do a great deal to narrow the gap between theory and reality in the Middle East. The book by Niblock is an example of the kind of highly politicized scholarship that is still found too often in Middle Eastern studies.