A rebours du schéma élaboré dans le cadre du Traité d’Abuja signé le 3 juin 1991 par les Etats membres de L’Organisation de l’unité Africaine (OUA), la divergence actuelle des systèmes régionaux africains constitue une dénaturation de l’approche convenue. Ce texte prévoit en effet dans son article 6, la création des Communautés économiques régionales (CER) comme une modalité de l’intégration continentale. A ce titre, huit CER sont aujourd’hui reconnues par l’Union Africaine : la Communauté Economique des Etats de l’Afrique de l’Ouest (CEDEAO) ; la Communauté Economique des Etats de l’Afrique Centrale (CEEAC) ; la Communauté de l’Afrique de l’Est (CAE) ; la Southern Africa Development Community (SADC); l’Autorité Intergouvernementale pour le Développement (IGAD); le Marché Commun de l’Afrique Australe et Orientale (COMESA); l’Union du Maghreb Arabe (UMA); et la Communauté des Etats Sahélo-Sahariens (CEN-SAD). L’établissement de la Communauté économique africaine instituée par le Traité, reste subordonné à la réussite de ces systèmes communautaires régionaux. Toutefois, la multiplication d’autres organisations communautaires sous-régionales - en plus de celles reconnues - d’une part, et la mise en œuvre de programmes et activités similaires dans le domaine économique d’autre part, tendent à compromettre la réalisation du projet africain. Cette situation fait échec au concept de départ qui établit le principe d’une exclusivité régionale à la faveur de la CER reconnue. A cause de chevauchements des objectifs poursuivis, il s’ensuit entre les organisations régionales, des rapports de rivalité plutôt que de complémentarité, aboutissant à la coexistence des systèmes d’intégration concurrents. Les rapports entre les CER et l’Organisation continentale rendent également visibles les insuffisances liées à la coordination du processus projeté. L’Union Africaine ne disposant pas du tout ou pas suffisamment des moyens juridiques lui permettant une intrusion dans la mise en œuvre des programmes communautaires régionaux, l’application des dispositions du Traité d’Abuja par les CER, ne semble pas homogène. La matérialisation des ambitions affichées par les Etats signataires demeure à ce jour conditionnée par la rationalisation de l’intégration envisagée. Cette étude vise à proposer quelques pistes de solutions en ce sens. / In stark contrast to the vision which emerged from the Treaty of Abuja, ratified by the member states of the Organisation of African Unity on the 3rd of June 1991, the present divergence of regional systems in Africa constitutes a serious distortion of the approach that was agreed upon. Indeed, in Article 6, the treaty sets forth the “strengthening of existing regional economic communities” (RECs) as a means of achieving integration on a continental scale. Along these lines, the African Union now recognizes eight RECs: the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), the East African Community (EAC), the Southern African Development Community (SADC), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Arab Maghreb Union (AMU), and the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD). As laid out in the treaty, the establishment of the African Economic Community is entirely dependent upon the success of these regional community systems. At the same time, the increase of other community organisations at the sub-regional level, beyond those officially recognized, on the one hand, and the implementation of similar programmes and activities, on the other hand, tend to endanger the realisation of the African project. This situation flies in the face of the original idea, which was based on the principle of the regional exclusivity of the recognized RECs. As a result of the various overlapping goals that are being pursued by difference organisations, competitive rather than complimentary relations have led to a coexistence of rival systems of integration. The relations between the RECs and the continental organization (the AU) have also made apparent the inadequacy of the coordination procedure that had been envisaged. As the African Union does not have sufficient legal means at its disposal to intervene in the implementation of regional community programmes, the execution of the Treaty of Abuja by the RECs lacks homogeneity. In order to achieve the ambitions declared by those member states who signed the treaty, a rationalisation of the proposed integration is necessary. The present study puts forward several proposals as to how such a rationalisation may be accomplished.

Magister Legum - LLM / The rapid growth in the number of regional trade agreements (RTAs) has led to concern about the weakening of the multilateral trading system. This thesis examines the spread of such agreement and the extent to which they pose a threat to the multilateral system. Regionalism and multilateralism are complimentary as shown in the case study of the East African Community. The current regional trade agreement management rules are weak and ambiguous and possible amendments for these rules are proposed. / South Africa

Wood structural elements are more vulnerable to blast loading due to the inherent brittle nature and low density of the material, as demonstrated by recent significant research efforts on the behaviour of timber elements subjected to the effect of blast loading. These studies showed that wood performs poorly under blast loading. A way of improving this performance is to provide additional ductility or energy absorption capabilities to wooden elements. Recently, there was interest in investigating and developing energy-absorbing connections (EAC) to improve timber assemblies’ ductility and energy absorption capabilities. Although some research effort has been made to investigate the use of EACs to enhance the ductility of reinforced concrete or structural steel members, only limited work is available on this topic about timber elements. The current study aims to systematically investigate the use of various shapes of EACs to be used to enhance the post-peak performance of timber assemblies. Preliminary finite element analysis led to selecting nine steel EACs with varying geometries for further experimental investigation. A total of eighteen specimens were tested statically. In comparison, a total of eighteen specimens were tested dynamically in the shock tube facility of the University of Ottawa to simulate the effects of far-field blast explosions. The experimental results showed that decreasing the leg length or increasing the thickness of EACs manufactured with steel angles and reducing the diameter of EACs manufactured with circular HSS caused an increase in yield load and elastic stiffness while reducing the densification displacement. Connections with angles and a centre weld, and connections with 90-degree arcs from circular HSS, were identified as unsuitable for the application of EACs. The experimental program also showed that EACs manufactured from angles offer a well-defined plateau able to absorb a large quantity of energy, making them particularly suitable for blast mitigation. EACs manufactured from multiple circular HSS were shown to achieve multiple load-displacement plateaus and present an interesting option for systems with multiple failure modes occurring at different levels. SDOF analysis and FEA were conducted to predict the experimental behaviour with some success. The importance of the weld type was also highlighted from both the analytical and experimental results. A methodology for developing idealized load-displacement curves from experimental results of EACs was also proposed and evaluated.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Neural signal processing to decode neural activity has been an active research area in the last few decades. The next generation of advanced multi-electrode neuroprosthetic devices aim to detect a multiplicity of channels from multiple electrodes, making the relatively time-critical processing problem massively parallel and pushing the computational demands beyond the limits of current embedded digital signal processing (DSP) techniques. To overcome these limitations, a new hybrid computational technique was explored, the Extended Analog Computer (EAC). The EAC is a digitally confgurable analog computer that takes advantage of the intrinsic ability of manifolds to solve partial diferential equations (PDEs). They are extremely fast, require little power, and have great potential for mobile computing applications. In this thesis, the EAC architecture and the mechanism of the formation of potential/current manifolds was derived and analyzed to capture its theoretical mode of operation. A new mode of operation, resistance mode, was developed and a method was devised to sample temporal data and allow their use on the EAC. The method was validated by demonstration of the device solving linear diferential equations and linear functions, and implementing arbitrary finite impulse response (FIR) and infinite impulse response (IIR) linear flters. These results were compared to conventional DSP results. A practical application to the neural computing task was further demonstrated by implementing a matched filter with the EAC simulator and the physical prototype to detect single fiber action potential from multiunit data streams derived from recorded raw electroneurograms. Exclusion error (type 1 error) and inclusion error (type 2 error) were calculated to evaluate the detection rate of the matched filter implemented on the EAC. The detection rates were found to be statistically equivalent to that from DSP simulations with exclusion and inclusion errors at 0% and 1%, respectively.

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Magister Legum - LLM

Magister Legum - LLM / South Africa

Firm real time system with Poisson arrival process, iid exponential service times and iid deadlines till the end of service of a job, operated under the First Come First Served (FCFS) scheduling policy is well studied. In this thesis, we present an exact theoretical analysis of a similar (M/M/1 + G queue) system with exact admission control (EAC). We provide an explicit expression for the steady state workload distribution. We use this solution to derive explicit expressions for the loss ratio and the sojourn time distribution. An exact theoretical analysis of the performance of an M/M/1 + G queue with preemptive deadlines till the end of service, operating under the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) scheduling policy, appears to be difficult, and only approximate formulas for the loss ratio are available in the literature. We present in this thesis similar approximate formulas for the loss ratio in the present of an exit control mechanism, which discards a job at the epoch of its getting the server if there is no chance of completing it. We refer to this exit control mechanism as the Early job Discarding Technique (EDT). Monte Carlo simulations of performance indicate that the maximum approximation error is reasonably small for a wide range of arrival rates and mean deadlines. Finally, we compare the loss ratios of the First Come First Served and the Earliest Deadline First scheduling policies with or without admission or exit control mechanism, as well as their counterparts with deterministic deadlines. The results include some formal equalities, inequalities and some counter-examples to establish non-existence of an order. A few relations involving loss ratios are posed as conjectures, and simulation results in support of these are reported. These results lead to a complete picture of dominance and non-dominance relations between pairs of scheduling policies, in terms of loss ratios.

Foreign investments in SADC are regulated by Annex 1 of the SADC Protocol on Finance and Investments (SADC FIP), as well as the laws of SADC Member States. At present, SADC faces the challenge that this regime for the regulation of foreign investments is unstable, unsatisfactory and unpredictable. Furthermore, the state of the rule of law in some SADC Member States is unsatisfactory. This negatively affects the security of foreign investments regulated by this regime. The main reasons for this state of affairs are briefly explained below. The regulatory regime for foreign investments in SADC is unstable, due to recent policy reviews and amendments of key regulatory instruments that have taken place. Major developments in this regard have been the suspension of the SADC Tribunal during 2010, the amendment of the SADC Tribunal Protocol during 2014 to bar natural and legal persons from access to the Tribunal, and the amendment of Annex 1 during 2016 to remove investor access to international investor-state arbitration, better known as investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). The regulation of foreign investments in SADC has been unsatisfactory, among others because some SADC Member States have failed or neglected to harmonise their investment laws with both the 2006 and the 2016 Annex 1. Furthermore, SADC Member States such as Angola, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Malawi, Mauritius, Seychelles, Eswatini, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe have multiple Regional Economic Community (REC) memberships. This places these Member States in a position whereby they have conflicting interests and treaty obligations. Finally, the future of the regime for the regulation of foreign investments in SADC is unpredictable, due to regional integration efforts such as the recent formation of the COMESA-EAC-SADC Tripartite Free Zone (T-FTA) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The T-FTA is entitled to have its investment protocol, while the AfCFTA investment protocol will be negotiated from 2018 until 2020. These developments entail that the 2016 Annex 1 will soon be replaced by an investment protocol at either the T-FTA or AfCFTA levels, thereby ushering a new regime for the regulation of foreign investments in SADC. The unknown nature of the future regulations create uncertainty and instability among foreign investors and host states alike. This study analyses the regulation of foreign investments in terms of Annex 1 and selected laws of SADC Member States. In the end, it makes the three findings mentioned above. In order to address these findings, the study makes four recommendations. The first is that foreign investments in SADC must be regulated at African Union (AU) level, by means of an AfCFTA investment protocol (which incidentally is now the case). Secondly, investor-state disputes must be referred to the courts of a host state, optional ISDS, the African Court of Justice and Human Rights (ACJ&HR) or other agreed forum. Thirdly, an African Justice Scoreboard (AJS) must be established. The AJS will act as a gateway to determine whether an investor-state dispute shall be referred to the courts of a host state, ISDS, the ACJ&HR or other forums. Fourthly, the office of an African Investment Ombud (AIO) must be created. The AIO shall facilitate the early resolution of investor-state disputes, so as to reduce the number of disputes that may end-up in litigation or arbitration. / Mercantile Law / LL. D.