By Adagbo Onoja
Saturday March 21st, 2025 happened to be the 85th and 86th birthday anniversary of two Nigerians who are eminent in different ways. One is Justice James Ogebe, a retired Justice of the Supreme Court while the other is Prof Okwudiba Nnoli.
Intervention was not at Justice Ogebe’s birthday but received a pre-birthday briefing that activated the journalistic antennae in his direction. Justice Ogebe is well known as a generational statement. In other words, people like him, Obadiah Tebu, Prof Ochapa Onazi or Justice Acheme Anyebe and many of them in that generation spoke to one word: incorruptible. They were not just incorruptible but unbothered by the consequences.
Justice Ogebe, for instance, was not late in arriving at the Supreme Court for nothing. When the Buhari regime swept into power in late 1983 and was jailing politicians they labelled as corrupt for hundred years, some judges refused to give their blessing to such an experimentation in a signature campaign long before signature campaign became a feature of counter-terrorism after 9/11. But there were judges who didn’t mind. Such judges were compensated.
A particular judge who was compensated presented a peculiar test of faith in God: both he and Ogebe worshipped in one church. But Ogebe eased the tension for the people around them when he said: This man is my brother. I am happy he got it”
The above story line compels two lines of action for admirers of Justice Ogebe and/or people like him all over Nigeria. The first is the imperative for all of us to read his autobiography for a sharper mastery of the facts of the matter as he presented them. The second is to problematise what we read. When it comes to problematising that generation, I scale down from the national to the ethnic level, meaning Idoma land from where Justice Ogebe hails.
It is a foregone issue that no member of that generation will change. If Justice Anyebe were to come back from the world of the dead and be made Chief Justice of Nigeria even today, nothing will change in how he approaches the job. But mentioning Anyebe or Ogebe is perhaps going too far. It is understood that Justice Ejembi Eko was also a replica of that generation. For sure, there are people with strength of character in that direction all over Nigeria. The question is why does Idomaland have an unfair share of them? As far as the sociology of corruption is concerned, this is an important question rather than one that could be guilty of essentialism. It is a phenomenon in need of more serious explanation, especially at a time “when our value system has suffered a shipwreck”. And I am not the only one raising this question. In fact, the above quotation is the voice of a rank professor of Political Science in every regard.
I now move over to Prof Okwudiba Nnoli whom one is knowing better from proof reading Prof Hassan Saliu’s rich tribute to him just published in Intervention. The key point of interest about Nnoli in this piece is the contrast between what the literati has been able to do with Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and what political scientists have not been able to do with Nnoli’s Ethnic politics in Nigeria. The literati have kept TFA on the agenda, celebrating it at important turns. Even as the 50th anniversary of Ethnic politics in Nigeria advances in 2028, it doesn’t look like anything will change. Political Science has found safe landing in the Festschrift than dig deeper. And now Festschrift is all over the place, even for those who have made no remarkable contribution to the discipline.
Without the political scientists making enough show of it, Nigeria itself has not gained from the knowledge/power benefit that should accrue from it. Yet, it is a major text not just in Marxist perspective of the theme but also in postcolonial and now decolonial points of departure in managing ethnicity.
Unfortunately, the book does not have that presence on the reading lists in Nigerian universities. Where it appears, most of the students have no perspectives to situate it. And the students are not to blame when we have not had the extensions or critiques to the book from those Prof Nnoli has directly supervised or even those who became his students from a distance.
Surely, we have heard about rural ethnicity from Prof Sam Egwu but Egwu is not a good example of Prof Nnoli’s student in ethnicity. Except if Prof Nnoli wasn’t teaching ethnicity as much as he was teaching IRs course units, there should be more than an Egwu or Prof Osaghae who brought back-in the question of the elite character of ethnic mobilisation and even the thesis of colonial invention of ethnicity.
Ethnic politics in Nigeria is the flagship of Nnoli’s scholarship. It is the text the world expected or was entitled to expect its extension, a task that direct beneficiaries of Nnoli are best positioned to lead the rest of us. A simple example. When Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe released Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, it had no methodological framework because Laclau had/has no regard for methodology. Today, his students have developed a distinctive framework for empirical research in tandem with the ontological grounding of post-Marxism.
It is not clear what might have happened as it is Prof Okey Ibeanu who has the stature to have moved ethnic politics in Nigeria somewhere else by now. Somehow, Ibeanu has not done that. Is it possible he or some others have done that but we are not aware of that?
In those days, Prof Okello Oculi would say that Nnoli approached ethnicity with a Marxist club. That was his own way of saying the text came out from a Marxist view of looking at things. What was great about that?
Has Nigeria fully mobilised this book?
First, it took courage to do that around the late 1970s when the text was published. It was at the height of Marxist ascendancy. The orthodox position was the view of ethnicity as a secondary contradiction. Nnoli went beyond that by tracking the phenomenon to an originary point, with examples of deft deployment of it to devastating effects. Who knows if it is not from Nnoli’s book that Ronald Munck came up with the stupidity (well, he didn’t use that language) of dismissing something like ethnicity for which people were dying. So, Nnoli was an endorsement of Marxism on ethnicity but at the same time a critique of it.
Nnoli’s more significant score in that text is where it could be said that he anticipated the implosion of the USSR, given the centrality of ethnicity that appeared to foreground that set back. It has been in that great unfolding that the world has seen the hottest epistemological exchange in the post-Cold War as occurred between David Campbell and Colin Wight. Campbell triggered a methodological controversy by dismissing about eleven or so texts (books, essays, etc) on the Bosnian War for giving ethnicity a central place in the explanation of the war. He contests their analysis, saying the analyses suffered from the ‘banality of ethnicity’ in an emplotted narrativisation of the violent conflict. In other words, it was the emplotment rather than any set of facts which led to the central place the different authors gave to ethnicity, making them incapable of developing a more nuanced reading of the mobilisation of ethnicity in all of that.
Colin Wight, the major voice who took up Campbell wondered why Campbell was quoting from the texts to argue his position either in defence or attack of his own position if facts do not count in analysis. It was such a hot debate, hotter, in my view, than the clash over ‘endism’ between Samuel Huntington and Francis Fukuyama. It is not clear why that clash did not explode. It is difficult to put it beyond the image of each of the two figures involved: while Fukuyama was seen as trying to foist a Hegel on the world with his ‘end of history’ thesis, Huntington for providing a manifesto for division, hatred and unending violence, exactly what happened after 9/11 and the way they are wrecking places like Nigeria with all manner of insurgencies. So astonishing that these debates have not echoed in Nigeria, led by Nnoli’s students, direct and indirect ones. Or are these texts there but not to everyone’s awareness?
And if those debates didn’t register around here vis-à-vis updating ethnic politics in Nigeria, then how might we expect application of much more sophisticated and problematic lenses such as fantasy in Lacanian psychoanalysis, for example. Given the extent to which ethnicity challenges the possibility of democracy in Nigeria, it is assumed it should benefit from all theoretical angles.
Perhaps there are individuals that can shed light on some of these unclear areas. People say casually here and there nowadays that, like many other things, Nigeria has lost it as far as the university idea is concerned. Is it pride and patriotism that makes it difficult for some of us to accept this position? No academic needs more than publishing Nnoli’s ethnic politics in Nigeria to enter permanent stardom but, once published, any particular text must receive further nourishment and updating. That doesn’t seem to have happened to this particular text. Or, has it?
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