Academia in Nigeria has lost Prof Alex Gboyega, a leading scholar in Public Administration at the University of Ibadan before his retirement. He was 76 years old at death Wednesday morning, (January 12th, 2022).
Typical of academics in his generation, he was highly published. A peep at ResearchGate, for instance, shows his imprints in that wise.
Only his colleagues and perhaps former students can make any authoritative statements as to which of his numerous publications would be rated his best or definitive of his scholarship. As is usual, deciding which of them was paradigm shifting would be a contentious issue. While some colleagues would point at a particular essay, another set would say it is a different one. Intervention could not lay a hand on any comprehensive listing of his works immediately beyond some eight listed on ResearchGate. He was certainly a leading scholar, particularly in Local Government Studies.
Snippets from stories of his death shows that he attended the University of Ghana where he obviously did his undergraduate studies before tying it up at the University of Ibadan in the mid-1970s when Political Science could be said to have been at its best not only at Nigeria’s premier university but also across the country. He rose to become Head of the Department of Political Science at the university.
The year 2022 has opened with the death of prominent Nigerians, among them Alhaji Bashir Tofa, one of the two presidential candidates in the annulled June 12th, 1993 presidential election in Nigeria; Chief Ernest Shonekan, the business mogul who headed the Interim Government that followed the June 1993 crisis; Otunba Chris Alao-Akala, a former Governor of Oyo State and Prof Chu Okongwu, a former Minister of Finance under the Babangida regime.
