By Adagbo Onoja
It is not bookishness to be excited about the leadership transition at the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA). As every new leadership necessarily seeks legitimation by trying to bring something new to the table, there is a chance that this too will raise the stakes beyond where its predecessor left off.
There is something more potent in that transition in that the NPSA can be the nation’s deliverer in so far as knowledge delineates reality through its control of the conceptual toolkit. While it is true that no discipline can claim monopoly of the deployment of the conceptual toolkit, the discipline of Political Science is privileged in relation to the realm over which it presides in the dispensation of knowledge.
It is not discipline chauvinism to list such terms as authority, power, legitimacy, terrorism, the state, power relations, antagonism (in its ontological rather than in the ontic sense which our brothers in Peace and Conflict Studies preside over), violence, diplomacy, militarism, leadership, populism, ideology (a shared item though) and so on as having resided more in Political Science than elsewhere. Even now that Ferdinand de Saussure has, through his relational ontology, actually rubbished the existing compartmentalization of knowledge, this contention is still basically valid, particularly in most African countries.
In a country enveloped in violence, a state in decay and variegated layers of antagonism as Nigeria of today, the leadership transition in NPSA has near equal significance with a presidential election. Why not for a discipline which is the domain of all and more of the concepts above? And why not if nobody challenges the claim that knowledge implies power and vice-versa?
No academic is confused about the kind of power knowledge implies. No one confuses that power with the power that comes from being elected into a political office. When knowledge is associated with power, it is basically the power that comes from Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’ or discourse.
There is a tendency in our clime to escape the complexity of the discourse – power nexus by quickly classifying it as postmodernism even when no postmodernism is involved in the linkage at all. That escapist trick has robbed Nigeria of the benefits of knowledge translating to power and the associated emancipatory outcomes from the huge Political Science knowledge base spread across over 200 universities.
With a new leadership, the NPSA has the best opportunity now to begin to burst this tendency. Neither NPSA nor Nigeria has anything to lose from doing so. Saussure whose brilliance brought semiotics and a discipline such as Political Science into one was a structuralist till death. He probably never heard anything called postmodernism and even if he did, it was not the object of his research. Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, about the only communist with no moral, ethical or ideological blemish throughout his life had nothing to do with postmodernism. Yet, his game changing intervention in Marxism came through language which was his discipline. What this means is for the new NPSA leadership to resist being confused by those very comfortable with spreading fuzzy ideas.
The unique and embarrassing level of Nigeria’s underdevelopment means that leadership at any level must seek to raise the stakes. This cannot happen in Political Science if the current epistemological grounding is not cracked. It is to bare to sustain any breakthrough in agenda setting. We should not forget that our International Relations scholarship was once dismissed as a story telling genre. The NPSA conference at which this happened must be the one in Port Harcourt in 1983 or Ilorin in 1985 or so. The scholar who delivered the verdict is still very much alive. So much have happened in terms of progress since then but there is no harm whatsoever in looking back and taking on board such comments with a view to saying, okay, what is the situation today? For whatever reasons, this doesn’t appear to be happening. Yet, there can be no breakthrough here and there without that orientation.
The point is that Nigeria is experiencing its worst moment in nationhood. Political scientists have a role in the process of overcoming the mess and ensuring recovery. They have more instruments of power than any other contenders. The point is the mastery of those instruments in the way that their use of it will bring the nation to attention. It is possible that this is the realisation which made the elders of the discipline or whichever sets of actors which might have worked out the transition the way it went. Whether this is true or not, an NPSA leadership with secretariat at UI has all it takes – memory, heritage, big name, legacy or whatever else – to step out beyond settled boundaries, break barriers and inaugurate a new era in NPSA politics.
Some of the elders and not so elders who wrote some of the hair-raising journal articles in the late 1970s and 1980s might be very active anymore, most of them are still around and powerfully connected to make things happen behind the scenes. Let NPSA be that singular source of a banner of hope for Nigeria at its most unexciting moment so far!
