By Adagbo ONOJA
No book contains its own meaning. At best, an author’s intention (which we cannot establish anyway) may coincide with the dominant reception of a particular book and the book becomes a great text or a hopeless one for that moment until it is either re-interpreted differently or there is a sudden need for the book for whatever reason(s). The dependency of the meaning of any texts (an individual, a building, an event, an office, an institution, etc) on its unending re-interpretation is what makes crucial an event such as a book presentation because it allows the brains behind a particular book the only other opportunity to influence how the book is constructed.
Book presentation in action
In this case, the authors and publishers of Electoral Management Bodies in Nigeria Since 1958 were extraordinarily lucky from the point of view of the quality of attendance and the crack nature of the flow of ideas. It meant that this public presentation of a book did not fall into the category of what media scholars call ‘false events’ that most book presentations turn out to be. Rather, it was a forum for ideas, with a good turn out of a small, emergent but critical intellectuals and practitioners of election management in Nigeria.
On this occasion, they were led by the inspiring, unarguable signifier of that cell, Prof Adele Jinadu. Jinadu is one of the few who says it as he sees it in a largely dilapidated Nigeria. Prof Itanibi Alemika, the University of Pennsylvania trained Criminologist at the University of Jos was there although he didn’t talk today. There was the Soviet trained Prof W. O. Alli who is still highly agitated about Nigerian condition at 70+ and there was Prof Abubakar Sulaiman, the Director-General of the National Institute for Legislative and Democratic Studies (NILDS), Abuja and Prof Abiodun Adeniyi from Baze University, Abuja. Prof Abdullahi Zuru, a former Vice-Chancellor who led the squad from the Independent National Electoral Commission made up of three immediate past National Commissioners viz Prof Okey Ibeanu whom I would say stole the day, Barrister Festus Okoye – the only former leader of the old NANS who ended up garnering experience at an INEC type institution and Hajiya Amina Zakari who looked a complete contrast of her own share of national controversy.
Prof Zuru represented INEC Chairman, Mahmood Yakubu said to be held up in Benin where what an INEC staffer described as an organised flood has swept away INEC structures just a few months before an off-cycle gubernatorial election in September. Stakeholders such as Prince Adebayo Balogun, Chairman of the House Committee on Electoral Matters; Hon Ayuba Wandai Usman, National Vice-Chairman of the Forum of State Independent Electoral Commission (FOSIECON); Alhaji Yusuf Dantalle, National Chairman of Inter-Party Advisory Council were there. Of course, there were Dr. Bakut Bakut, an ex-DG of state think tank -Institute of Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR), activists such as Comrade John Odah, Jaiye Gaskiya and Dr. Husseini Abdu.
Many of the who was who @ the event
A gathering constituted by such an evidently combustible combination of civil society activists, researchers, retired but active professors, crack stakeholders and a bunch of INEC ex-operatives could not but be an event to watch. It did not disappoint although it came as a friendly fire rather than a wolf warrior of any conviction. But it was a fascinating and powerful synthesis of the conversation into a very sobering a critique, irrespective of whether one sees it from a purely academic gaze or from the perspective of the everyday.
It is the sort of intervention that would have plunged Nigeria into an involving debate if it were when Nigeria was Nigeria. Pummeled by a succession of nasty encounters with dislocation for over a decade, Nigeria is most unlikely to be piqued by it into a national scale debate over what may look too esoteric for the survival minded Nigerian in the age of a hydra-headed cost of living crisis ever. Otherwise, the structure – agency debate in the social sciences was the debate both within academia as well as the larger society that remains unresolved to this moment even as the ‘discursive turn’ has buried it for now. But the ‘discursive turn’ only buried it. It didn’t resolve the debate.
So, Prof Okey Ibeanu was touching the tail of the tiger by insisting that what is missing in the searchlight on the electoral management body in Nigeria is the one – sidedness of that searchlight. By one sidedness, he means the concentration of the searchlight on INEC, for example, as a structure or as an artery of the society with its governance process, its rule systems etc, thereby leaving untouched the agency factor or the intellectual, ideological and psycho-dynamic discretionary exercise of authority in running the place. In other words, the debate on EMBs and elections in Nigeria hardly put the human agency on the weighing machine. We have yet to grab Michael Ani, Maurice Iwu, Attahiru Jega, Mahmoud Yakubu, Ovie-Whiskey, Humphrey Nwosu, Ema Awa and the heads of INEC at the next lower level and assess them in terms of how knowledgeable each of them was; what carriage each brought to the job because, according to Prof Ibeanu, “before a person walks up to you to offer you money, the person will calculate whether N50, 000 can buy you or whether all the money he has cannot buy you” and courage. Courage is needed because, as Ibeanu puts it, some polling units are in Evil Forests in Nigeria while others are in some people’s bedrooms.
Prof Adele Jinadu launched the intellectual assault on the EMBs factor earlier in his review to be featured in part 2 of this piece
Agency must be brought into the study of EMBs, he insists, referencing the interview of a former governor which he categorized as a ‘Durkheimian confession”. A newly appointed Commissioner of Police goes to report in his duty post and the first thing he does is a courtesy call on the governor and to whom he cleverly surrenders his responsibility by indicating how he (the Commissioner of Police) is yet to get an accommodation, a car, an office and all that. In Ibeanu’s assessment, the Commissioner of Police has simply or, by implication, put him or herself at the service of the governor as far as security is concerned. The confession applies by and large to the INEC operative at the structural level and hence the imperative of auditing the individual because, while the people at the top in Abuja think or are thought are the ones conducting the election, something else is happening. He concludes with the wager that “different individuals can produce different outcomes”
It is in the sense of his case for applying the structure-agency debate to the assessment of EMBs in Nigeria that Prof Ibeanu brought fire to the event. Social science was almost born with this debate but it was never resolved. Critical constructivist came nearest to resolving the debate by arguing that structure and agency are co-constitutive. Before they could even make themselves very clear, the linguistic/discursive turn displaced them by arguing that both structure and agency are constituted by discourse along with norms, convention, culture, identity and just about any other object.
Discourse analysts broadly argue that society itself is not possible without discourse because it is discourse that sets the boundaries of what is permissible or not permissible. That’s why presidents, prime ministers and other powerful elements cannot do certain things even as powerful as they are because, at any one point, there are boundaries they cannot cross. They cannot cross such boundaries not because anybody can ask them to kneel down but because they will simply be crossing the red line by current understanding of that behaviour. Since there is a blow back for crossing such a red line, courtesy of what post-Marxists call radical contingency, most powerful people discipline themselves against crossing such normative boundaries.
Should assessing the role of EMBs remain with the structure or even start with agency?
So, when Prof Ibeanu said non-application of structure-agency paradigm is missing in the rating of INEC, for example, he was either saying the structure – agency paradigm is still alive, a claim on which discourse analysts could come after him or he was saying that Nigerian critics were not looking at agency from a discourse perspective, a claim the traditional Marxists will come after him because classical Marxists do not believe in agency. As far as they are concerned, Marx has said all there is to be said and Marx’s judgment is that structure is the winner. “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please” is the first line of the received wisdom in which Marx gave to history the determinative force. But what is history for Marx? It is all about class struggle within the capitalist structure. So, Marx’s judgment followed by most structuralists is that structure determines what happens.
In the immediate post-Cold War, radical constructivists acknowledged structure but argued that man is not a prisoner of structure. They illustrated the contention with what individuals such as Gorbachev and Mandela did by bending the system to their own individual will. This is not agreeable to post-positivists generally who would say that Mandela and Gorbachev were not good cases of agency at work because Gorbachev, for example, was responding to criticisms of Stalinism. In other words, there was the discursive condition of emergence of what he did,
There are scholars, particularly Charlotte Epstein at the University of Copenhagen, who question the China Wall between idealism and materialism. Her view cannot be dismissed because she is one of the few who have read both Hegel and Marx in their original languages. Moreover, 21st century protagonists of discourse analysis tend to support her by arguing that all major strands of philosophy in the 20th century – structuralism, phenomenology and analytic philosophy – have been all about discourse: the claim that language is all that we have left since it is not possible to have unmediated access to truth.
The long and short of it is that the multiple controversies around the structure and agency debate makes Prof Ibeanu’s criticism of discourse of EMBs a courageous move. It implies readiness to stand up for theory in a theory dead society. It expands the gaze in the social and scholarly engagement on election management in a country with an impossible electoral history, from colonial to military rule to powerful and manipulative presidents since 1999, with the possible exception of Umaru YarÁdua.
So, what did the speakers before Prof Ibeanu say that warranted Ibeanu’s synthesis? That is exactly the stuff that will come in the concluding part of this reporting. There, we will take Prof Adele Jinadu’s equally provocative review of the book and all that followed at the Friday, May 31st, 2024 event in Abuja.
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