By writing on Julie Sanda, the second time a woman would be featured in his series, the first being Prof Marietu Tenuche, NPSA President, Hassan Saliu, has struck at the women question in Nigerian Political Science. Unlike at the global level where women have simply seized the driver’s seat, especially in global IRs – Carol Coon, Cynthia Enloe, Ann Tickner, Lene Hansen, Jutta Weldes, Karin Fierke, Laura Shepherd, Charlotte Epstein, Vivienne Jabri, Joan Sharp, Gurminder Bhambra, Jenny Edkins, Inana Hamati-Ataya and Elinor Ostrom – the only woman Nobel prize winner from Political Science so far – this is not the case in Nigeria yet.
Julie Sanda of the Nat Defence College, Abuja
Prof Tenuche
Is it that women are being blocked in Nigerian Political Science by patriarchal hegemony or that their publications are there but we are not reading enough or is it the case that they, collectively, just haven’t found their voice? Julie Sanda, for example, should be Nigeria’s replica of Carol Coon who wrote “sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals” which has remained a classic of participant observer research technique. Sanda has been in the midst of defense intellectuals for years aside from having been to Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington University in Washington DC.
Irene Pogoson in Ibadan has also interacted here and there within Nigeria and more, especially in think tanking. She has done quite a lot of publications in IRs but which are more sensitive to the scholarly remit than grand policy projection. In other words, our sisters in political science have not been as forthcoming as their counterparts in Literature in particular.
They have to because the multiplicity of roles women play in social life makes any realm of the social to be incomplete when the women angle is missing. This is crucial, notwithstanding the emergent phenomenon of family destroying identity feminism in Nigeria.
So, who gets the women members of the discipline to be heard loud and clear through scholarly interventions that bear the mark of that positionality? Over to the NPSA establishment or to the Federal Government of Nigeria?
