It was a great day for Political Science or, better still, for knowledge production in Nigeria; a big day for Bingham University, Karu, near Abuja for its uncommon boldness in the politics of knowledge in contemporary Nigeria in that stepping out; something memorable for the observably curious enough students of this university that day and a day Nigeria, nay Africa is reminded of the hegemony of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria many decades after the demise of the radical ferment that gave it its distinctive locale in Nigeria’s academic map until recently.
Why not when Prof Bayo Olukoshi who was the lead speaker is an ex-Zaria. Prof Jibrin Ibrahim who compelled the rest of us to contemplate the significance of the Bingham persona is a Zaria product. Ambassador Bulus Lolo after whom a centre was named that day studied Political Science in Zaria. Prof Gani Yoroms, one of the masterminds of the conference itself, went to Zaria. Prof Okello Oculi sighted at the conference didn’t study in Zaria but he taught there for decades. Although Prof Istifanus Zabadi obtained his PhD from the LSE, his take-off point is Zaria. Some of our sisters like Julie Sanda who got appointment into Government without ‘washing’ it went to Zaria. I am not sure but I won’t be surprised if Dr Eunice Ortom attended ABU, Zaria. She was an active presence at the conference, without the crassness of a former First Lady. Many of the lecturers and researchers at the occasion have Zaria epistemic blood in them.
Prof Bayo Olukoshi
Prof Mohammed Salih
The message is that the hegemony of Zaria is basically unchallenged across Nigeria, a narrative implying its own challenge to ABU, Zaria in relation to the possibility of a reenactment and a challenge to the newer universities in terms of not just replicating Zaria of old but transcending it. Transcending Zaria is an imperative because knowledge has moved on far, far beyond what it was when Zaria was reigning. The rest of the world has not been waiting for anyone. There are no details so far to show that the newer universities are raising the stakes higher than Zaria of then or the totality of the first/third generation universities. We pray to be proved wrong in an overwhelming manner. Otherwise, Nigeria’s current disarray will worsen and the society cannot be immunised against the imponderable consequences. We are seeing that already in the current level of insecurity.
But that should not prevent us from anticipating and enjoying the tutorial on the significance of the Bingham persona that Prof Jibo Ibrahim is organising for Prof Zabadi at an impending Fish Joint session. As already mentioned, Zabadi is an LSE product. The joke is that LSE is where International Relations is properly taught or studied. Those who have ever been taught by an LSE product may appreciate this better. They come to International Relations with a certain epistemic authority. It doesn’t matter where one encountered them. What that means is that Zabadi is a big catch for Bingham. But, unlike Jibo, Zabadi is not a student of the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) now better known as Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA). Yet, Zabadi teaches in a SIM university. As the senior trouble maker he is, Jibo has declared that unacceptable and subsequently invited Zabadi to his Fish Joint at which he will fill the gap. The assumption is that the tutorial will accept those of us who are neither in Bingham nor knowledgeable about the protest of that brotherhood in the Church when the Nigerian State took the step that was the subject of that protest which has, sadly for Nigeria, turned prophetic. So, the Jibo tutorial for Zabadi is something to be expected, something that might need to be widened in terms of the audience and perhaps the scope. For, in this case, Prof Zabadi is only a metaphor for the larger Nigeria that needs to come to grip with that story and its significance.
The other side of the Bingham story as told by Jibo is why he should now be excused from the fish cultural fiesta whose Abuja sessions is basically his own creation. He has to be temporally excused from the sessions so that he can go and theorise. Jibo has a number of such revealing bits about this society that they must be compiled, situated and garlanded into a grand narrative. Postmodernism will not frown at a grand narrative from Jibo. Or, an exception can be granted. Theorising is where the legacy lies anyway.
All the panelists except Prof Bayo Olukoshi
Away from high class intellectual jokes, it bears repeating that March 6th, 2925 was a remarkable day. It is not every day that two gentlemen versed on Africa in world politics are on hand to speak to that. There was Professor Mohammed Salih, Professor Emeritus at both The International Institute for Social Studies at The Hague and at Erasmus University, all in Netherland and there was Prof Bayo Olukoshi from the University of Wits in South Africa. It will be an exercise in truncation to attempt summarizing what they said. It is rather best Bingham’s Department of Political Science publishes the two interventions as a standalone text and find a way to circulate them freely so that cost will not deny people access to it but also without giving copyright violators opportunity to deny the university the ownership. While Prof Mohammed Salih’s intervention was read by Prof Zabadi, Bayo Olukoshi was there live, speaking on the crucial theme of cultural pluralism and instability. In a very sophisticated tone, he gave it to cheap agitators of balkanisation of Nigeria on ground of Nigeria’s cultural pluralism, citing that the disintegration of Somalia had made nonsense of cultural homogeneity as a guarantor of stability. Bayo’s speech delivered without any papers before him should not be summarised but read in its complete form by students, by politicians, by researchers and by development partners and intelligence agencies.
At this point, Intervention can only report the panel in which it was involved since the other panels ran concurrently. It would have been interesting to report the panel where Prof Adele Junaid and Prof Okello Oculi were. One of them was surely in the Pan-Africanism panel.
The gist component of the unfolding of the panel on ‘Electoral Crises and Electoral Integrity in Africa’ has already been touched upon in Jibo’s story of the Bingham after whom the university is named. In a way, it makes sense to say that Prof Okey Ibeanu stole the show at this panel because of his problematising advantage. His skills in problematising makes him an extraordinarily piercing political scientist. At a point, he raised the question as to whether we might be using election to resolve a crisis that is not electoral. In other words, crisis of electoral integrity in Nigeria might have very little to do with the electoral but some other social tension in the national community. It is a poser to which an answer can be attempted from several angles but the thought process that took that angle is that of the intellectual’s intellectual.
A creation of the activist Abuja based The Electoral Hub, the was a rich one, with Dr. Okey Ndeche, Dr. Regina Omo-Agege, Barrister Festus Okoye and Prof Okey Ibeanu, all of them members of the policy mill at the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) a few years back; Prof Jibrin Ibrahim who was the Chair, Prof Bayo Olukoshi and Adagbo Onoja from Intervention.
Okey Ibeanu set the ball rolling as soon as Jibo accomplished his Bingham narrative and handed over proceedings to Barrister Festus Okoye. Okoye was a good chairperson except his occasional threat of emperor-style sanction against any violation of his timing regime. Ibeanu’s starting point is the paradox about elections which is a toolkit for resolving who gets into power but which has itself become a site of crisis. His explanation for the paradox is what he calls the crisis of trust: the colonial constitution of the state is such that nobody trusts it. Nor does anyone trust those who organise the elections. Neither do Nigerians even trust themselves when it comes to elections. It is this collapse of trust that explains why election has morphed into the crisis rather than help resolve a different crisis, notwithstanding progress in technical conduct of elections in recent years. His sense of the way out is a rethinking of the entire process at this juncture, particularly the situation whereby INEC could be an establishment run by a carpenter and 12 farmers. He used the expression not to refer to an actuality but to the fact that there is a political side of the crisis of elections in Nigeria: politicians can appoint whoever they want into INEC key positions. This reality is such that INEC may have been run by professor Chairmen in recent decades but nothing stops a carpenter being appointed as INEC Chairman tomorrow. Can Nigerians stop this should it happen?
Panel audience of students, academics and sundry participants
Dr. Okey Ndeche picked up the rhetorical question by concerning himself mainly with election mandate protection. His counterpart, Dr. Regina Omo-Agege got the audience stirring with her theory of Nigeria being a rumour society. Rumours circulate and nobody, as far as she is concerned, interrogate rumours. She is obviously still unhappy being alleged to be bending the rules for Dr Goodluck Jonathan during her time at INEC when, in fact, she was strictly applying the rules. Her sense of the crisis is that Nigeria confronts shortage of patriotism. “We are not nationalists. We only love our tribe, our religion”, she said.
Mr. Onoja took the position that the crisis of electoral integrity cannot be resolved outside of a reconceptualisation of democracy to do away with representation. For him, it is time to burst the discourse of representation because it impoverishes democracy by excluding the people, a position he hinged on a quotation from The Economist which had said long time ago that election has made democracy to be suffering from arrested development. Citing attempts at tinkering with representation during the Babangida regime as demonstrating that there would be nothing new or difficult in constructing and naturalising a new democratic model or model of representation. The publisher put the challenge to the students, adding that if their training in political theory has not prepared them adequately for the task, then attention should be drawn to that.
Prof Bayo Olukoshi entered the conversation to say that, seen from global comparative context, this is, indeed, the moment in world history when the current discourse of democracy has reached its zenith. The decline in turn-out at elections and in party membership has been so drastic. Added to that is decline in trust in political parties to the extent that people have found alternatives in watching soccer or Big Brother (in the case of Nigeria). But he told the story of the exceptionalism of the Indian electoral commission whose practice of agency has pedestalled it to global reckoning. The climax of this was the last warning the commission issued Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister last year for unacceptable use of language. The Prime Minister had to quickly apologise partly because he knew the commission could disqualify him and Heaven will not shake, much less fall. But also partly because the Indian elite will serve as a bulwark against any attempt to deploy emperor-style behaviour against the leadership of the commission should it have had to disqualify the Prime Minister. The Electoral Commission of India is in bed, for example, with Corporate India on many projects. Prof Bayo didn’t say this but it is implied in his details from India: the elite in Nigeria is yet to be an elite, too cozy with cronyism that it is incapable of feeling pains.
It turned out to be a long session but one view must be taken. Prof W. O. Alli, one of the most memorable contributors from the floor stood on the position that it is time to change focus rather than panel beat democracy. “The design of our democratic framework is ruptured”, he said. Earlier on, Prof Jibo had intervened briefly to illustrate the point that representation could be amended or tinkered with. He drew on such attempts by election intellectuals under the Babangida regime to illustrate the point.
This panel, as everyone knows by now, is not over. It has a second session in the Fish Joint seminar. If Intervention is invited, then a report might follow although Intervention is basically on ‘Leave of Absence’. And this report is thus not its resumption of publications but only a concession to the message of the Bingham conference. The ‘godfathers’ do not want any such resumption because they rightly think the editor has a bigger challenge to face than on Intervention at this point. In other words, regular contributors to this platform should still not resume sending materials to the editor. The platform will hopefully find a middle ground on handling those already received. But the website is very much open for readers to feast on.
Congratulations to the authority of Bingham University and its Department of Political Science for pulling such a quality crowd on a substantive issue at a time of incredible material distress in the Nigerian society in general and a season of famished spirit in academia in particular!
