By Adagbo Onoja
In every crisis situation, there is a big role for critics. But there is an even bigger role for those who come up with plausible ways out of the crisis. Coming up with plausible ways out of democracy as a conundrum is what the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA) has been surprisingly good in doing, relative to its Others.
That democracy is a conundrum is not an issue any local champion or denialist can create his or her own fuss about. That democracy is on the stretcher across the world is what the world has heard repeatedly from some of its most hard headed political theorists, think tanks, research centres, global civil society platforms and media for decades. I, for one, first heard the phrase ‘the defeat of democracy’ in a Political Science class taught by Professor Jibrin Ibrahim in late 1997.
Back in Nigeria from the global, reservations about democracy are what is heard from a huge chunk of the media, (retiring) judicial operatives, civil society coalitions and accomplished politicians now and then. Even the government of the day is saying so by implication. This is what it does whenever any senior government official appeals for patience as Nuhu Ribadu has just done on the basis that the incumbent inherited a wrecked and wretched estate.
If this is the situation locally and globally, where then is the problem with a headline which runs like this: NPSA Cuts Into Democracy Conundrum With Two Supercharged Seminars? Intervention is, indirectly, reacting to silently loud criticisms of the above headline it cast for a story on the impending NPSA seminar series on democracy. Apart from the fact that headlines and the body of stories are not necessarily in a signifier – signified relationship, nothing has a meaning in itself. The seminar must be connected to a larger background to make sense.
At a very difficult time in Nigeria and across the world, the kind of gathering that the NPSA has put in place needs to be celebrated. But celebrated in a critical sense, in the best traditions of the legacy of Political Science in Nigeria. Memories of the ‘Ibadan School of Political Science’ as well as of memorable debates such as ‘The Responsibility of Political Science’ in Nigeria should, along with memories of recent shake up in global Political Science, starting with Richard Ashley The Poverty of Neorealism down to Speaking the Language of Exile must be part of the journey pack.
It is not to bring any government or any particular person down but to seize control of the discursive condition of emergence of the variant of democracy that can resolve the concerns being expressed in different quarters. Why should this not be a cause for self-congratulation by the NPSA mandarins if President Tinubu himself has been contending that “Nigeria is the candle of hope that will light the way for Africa. And once Africa is illuminated, the world will be a brighter place for all of humanity”.
Those who may be tempted to think that the president was just verbalising it had better perish the thought since neither Tinubu nor anybody else is in a position to determine the meaning of what he or she says. Meaning is not what the speaker or writer decides. That is the job of the audience. The problem is where the audience is not skilful, politically or otherwise, in the politics of meaning. Where that is the case, then a speaker ends up with no liabilities to settle in his/her language game. This is part of the tragedy in Nigeria but something to deal with possibly later.
If the impending NPSA seminars are about promoting discursive constitution of the democratic order – a much different ideal than ‘roofoo’ linguistic missiles – then the session will be incomplete without the presence of high state officials, the entourage from the business community, politicians, popular culture and intellectuals of statecraft (intelligence, state think tanks, the civil service, the military and foreign service). Anything less than that at a massive NPSA outing like this will not be the conversation required to heal a system that everyone is confirming its ill-health. There are no alternatives to a serious conversation as the way out of the democracy as it plays out in Nigeria and this is the least partisan platform to accomplish that depth of jaw jawing that can clear the dangerous cloud of alienation in Nigeria today.
It is time to appreciate that knowledge producers should never look back or tremble before their own powers: the power that comes from the constitutive force of their arsenals: theories, concepts, methods and paradigms.
