The statement from the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) Secretariat on the meeting goes as follows: Sequel to the conclusion of 7 weeks of rigorous discussion on the 2023 general elections, NPSA is inviting you to attend a meeting on Electoral Reform as the second leg of the programme. The intent is to provide a platform for experts to develop a document on NPSA’s position on how Nigeria’s electoral process could be reformed. The meeting is sponsored by MacArthur Foundation, Abuja. Please click on the link below to join the 2-day meeting as scheduled below”.
Intervention could afford to spend a few hours at the opening session Friday, May 19th, 2023. All the big names in Nigerian Political Science were there except three notable absences and another two of the rising tigers (one from UI and another from LASU). It is possible they attended online as Intervention did.
The threshold has gone down beyond recognition in every other sector of the society that most of those who either experienced the articulation of Nigeria in terms of a ‘manifest destiny’ or were inducted into that wager at some point are up in revolt here and there. This is one plausible lens on the on-going concern with reforming the electoral reform by the NPSA. A stratum of the NPSA is on a revivalist bend, the fulcrum of which would involve them taking a studious look at what the founding presidents of the association have had to say regarding the value frame. Obviously, that is the same thing as saying what have people like Billy Dudley, Claude Ake, Okwudiba Nnoli, Eme Awa, Egite Oyovbaire and many more left as guide in this matter? Beyond what former leaders of the professional association might have said, there are a number of reports and other documents that will attract attention vis-à-vis the way to go. Among them would be the Political Bureau Report; the Babalakin Report; the Uwais Report; the INEC Report of 2011 and of 2015and a few more.
The idea is to explore benefitting from the legacy of the leadership and the system. At the preliminary meeting May 19th, 2023 in Abuja, the essence were spelt out. Those who have the benefit of the intellectual upbringing of Political Scientists will bring their knowledge and skills to bear on interpretation of the legacy in relation to the constants in nation and state building. These constants are variables like elections, democracy, the state and the people. This is thus a about political engineering whose aim is the construction of an equitable society. It is a case for an alternative voice peopled by intellectuals (academics if you like) who have transcended being co-opted and/or silenced.
When you put all these together, it is possible to argue that Nigeria might be in the throes of the equivalence of the Euro-American experience of ‘dissidence scholarship’ in IR in the 1990s. In itself, ‘dissidence scholarship’ was only a metatheoretical revolt. But it also had an articulatory dimension because it said that the theories that guide the engagement with knowledge are also subject of interrogation rather than sacrosanct. The implication is that knowledge must be measured in terms of the sense of responsibility that goes with knowing. So, knowledge that knows but does nothing about an unjust regime or practices or structures of inequality and domination is no knowledge. This is exactly what the NPSA mandarins are saying.
And that position is inherently articulatory, meaning that the notion of an alternative voice can achieve its essence only to the extent that it brings together diverse but not necessarily identical confluences of the degraded to push a particular line of reasoning and action. That is articulatory politics.
Dissidence scholarship hasn’t settled in Nigeria yet, certainly not in Political Science yet. Whether it would still do is open to speculation, given the pace that newer metatheories such as ‘New materialism’ and Quantum social science are gobbling up the space. Interestingly, however, the NPSA dissidence movement will stretch to this dimension. For instance, they are not happy that Political Science is being cut into pieces because of the antique disciplinary chauvinism in Nigeria.
Given where Nigeria should be by now if measured by the standards by which it set out in 1960, it is laughable that today in Nigeria, Economics wants to teach Political Science in its own way. History, Drama, Engineering all want to do so. And this is happening at a time the leading theoretical frameworks have basically closed the boundaries. Discourse theory does not make much difference between geography and literature or between History and Economics. New materialism doesn’t care. Quantum social science is not interested, having come into International Relations (where it seems most developed for now) from Physics.
With the NUC either unaware or careless about this, discipline chauvinism reigns supreme throughout the university system. And unless a sufficiently informed but angry member of the dissidents, for example or someone from the diaspora were to become the next Minister for Education or new boss of the NUC, the nonsense will continue. It is thus great the NPSA mandarins are worried about this reality and the host of problems attendant on the discipline in the university system as a whole. There is nobody who has taught Political Science anywhere in Nigeria in the past few years who will not cry quietly for Nigeria at the end of every lecture. In the first case, more than 75 % of those studying the discipline are doing so because that was nothing else. The content is rudimentary if you are thinking of the Nigerians who should be able to hold their own in an even more competitive world ahead. Of course, those content with abstracting a lone space of excellence and absolutizing such as an adequate counter to this rating of the content would not bulge.
It must be true, indeed, that certainty is foolishness. Literally from nowhere, the NPSA has become a source of reform moves not only on election, democracy and the state but also on what sort of things constitute the kind of Political Science that is contextually meaningful to potential recipients. To the extent that nobody expected NPSA to become the corner stone of any such rethinking a few years ago, this is a remarkable progress. It is perhaps too early but Nigerians should begin to indicate readiness to be grateful to those who have a hand or leg in the new turn.
