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  • From Lancaster House to Chatham House: When Shall Nigeria be Truly Independent?
  • At 79, Angela Davis is Still Fighting for a Better World
  • Memories of the Old Academia As Plateau State University Awards Prof Elaigwu Honorary Degree
  • University of Mkar Interrogates IMF, World Bank and the Value of the Naira
  • Won’t Methodological Review Boards Threaten Scientific Creativity?
  • My Benin Republic ECOWAS Election Observation Mission (EOM) Experience, Lessons for Nigeria’s 2023 Elections
  • Presidential Candidates in Nigeria’s February 2023 Election to Appear on NIIA Platform
  • What Has This Thoroughfare Got to Do With February 2023 in Nigeria?
  • Reflections on the legacy of the Frankfurt School, 100 Years After
  • Could Prof Armstrong Matiu Adejo Have Died of Heart Attack?
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In Death, Mikhail Gorbachev Turns a Refutation as Well as Confirmation of Marxist Theory of Agency

Posted By: adminon: September 03, 2022In: FlashbackTags: Boris Yelstin, CPSU, Great October Revolution, Lenin, Marxism, Realism, USSRNo CommentsViews:
In Death, Mikhail Gorbachev Turns a Refutation as Well as Confirmation of Marxist Theory of Agency

Until an insider writes on the last 30 years of his life, (1991 – 2021), it would be difficult to know how Mikhail Gorbachev, the last General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet... Read more

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Why Powerful States Lose Asymmetric Wars

Posted By: adminon: April 01, 2022In: World From AfricaTags: Afghanistan, Al-Qaida, Booby traps, Chechnya, Civil defense, Contras, Guerrilla warfare, Ho Chi Ming, LICs, Mujaheddin, Nixon Doctrine, Roadside bombings, Suicide missions, Tora Bora, UNITA, USA, USSR, VietnamNo CommentsViews:
Why Powerful States Lose Asymmetric Wars

A 2021 retiree as a Professor of Political Science from the Richmond University in the United States of America but currently teaching at Fourah Bay College, University of Sierra Leone, the... Read more

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The African World’s Debt to W.E.B. Du Bois

Posted By: adminon: January 19, 2022In: LifeworldTags: Chairman Mao of China, CHINA, Double Consciousness, Dr. Nmandi Azikiwe, Jomo Kenyatta, Nikita Khrushchev of the Soviet Union, Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, USA, USSRNo CommentsViews:
The African World’s Debt to W.E.B. Du Bois

By Ike Okonta I have just finished reading David Levering Lewis’ two-volume biography of the African American intellectual and architect of the American Civil Rights Movement, Dr W.E.B. Du B... Read more

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How Could the Most Successful Ruling Class Fumble Disastrously in Afghanistan?

Posted By: adminon: August 17, 2021In: World From AfricaTags: 'New World', 9/11, Black Lives Matter, CIA, Declinism, Pakistan, Prof Paul Kennedy, Prof Robert Keohane, USSR, ‘City on the Hill’No CommentsViews:
How Could the Most Successful Ruling Class Fumble Disastrously in Afghanistan?

The American ruling class is, by considerable consensus, one if not the most successful ruling class in human history. This assertion rests on two counts. First is constructing and successfu... Read more

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As the Nigerian Left Tackles the National Question

Posted By: adminon: May 10, 2021In: NewsLogTags: Christendom, George Floyd, Internationalism, Islam, Left, Lenin, Marxism, National Question, Nationalism, USSR, ‘Grass to Grace’No CommentsViews:
As the Nigerian Left Tackles the National Question

With just four more days to go, it is not gonna be a long wait before a statement from the Nigerian Left on the national question is made. That is a statement that could reverberate at the h... Read more

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Y Z Yau’s Shara Primary School Campaign as a Debate in When is a Revolution Revolutionary

Posted By: adminon: September 07, 2019In: NewsLogTags: Arab Spring, Boris Yelstin, CPSU, Emancipatory Realism, Gov Umar Ganduje, Marxism, Military Vanguardism, Occupy Movement, Shara Community, SUBEB, Sumaila LGA, USSRNo CommentsViews:
Y Z Yau’s Shara Primary School Campaign as a Debate in When is a Revolution Revolutionary

“Security is a thick signifier” “Like health and status, security is a condition that is not difficult to define; in each case, the starting point should begin in the experiences, imaginings... Read more

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Nigeria Can Refuse to Collapse But There is a Truth Gap Risk

Posted By: adminon: July 16, 2019In: SpectacleTags: genocide, Meta-Bosnia, Prof Adiele Afigbo, Rwanda, USSR, Vladimir Putin, Yugoslavia, ‘Banality of Ethnicity’ thesisNo CommentsViews:
Nigeria Can Refuse to Collapse But There is a Truth Gap Risk

By Adagbo Onoja Nigeria does not have to implode like Somalia or Yugoslavia or Rwanda exactly the way Obasanjo’s latest letter to President Buhari yesterday captured it. In fact, for those w... Read more

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How Benue APC May Have Stumbled on Completely Undercutting Ethnicity

Posted By: adminon: December 09, 2018In: SpectacleTags: IDOMA, Marxists, National Question, NPN, Tiv, USSRNo CommentsViews:
How Benue APC May Have Stumbled on Completely Undercutting Ethnicity

The All Progressives Congress, (APC) in Benue State in central Nigeria appears set to remove ethnicity from the exercise of power in the state. It is not clear if that objective is what Benu... Read more

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Abubakar Momoh and Memories of Reform Fiasco in USSR and China

Posted By: adminon: May 29, 2018In: LifeworldTags: AGOA, Jigawa Talakawa Summit, KGB, TEI, Tiananman Square, USSRNo CommentsViews:
Abubakar Momoh and Memories of Reform Fiasco in USSR and China

It is exactly one year today Prof Abubakar Momoh passed on. There has been a very steady remembrance of him since then, in the past one week and in the coming week. But why? Could that be be... Read more

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Editorial: In the Aftermath of the Procession by Nigerian Catholics

Posted By: adminon: May 23, 2018In: De-EscalationTags: Diversity, USSRNo CommentsViews:
Editorial: In the Aftermath of the Procession by Nigerian Catholics

There is now a distinctly Catholic voice and practice on the insecurity crisis in Nigeria. Until the procession across the country yesterday, this was not the case although individual and group voices of Catholics have been heard, now and then. An emergent Catholics theory and practice in response to contemporary insecurity in Nigeria is a complicated issue because Catholicism, one of the eight civilisations in Huntington’s schema, is about difference/diversity on a global scale and, therefore, an issue in global security to the extent that diversity defines security today.

Nigerian Catholic Bishops with the Pope

Now, the global and the local are indistinguishable in this case because an event that took place in Abuja, the Federal Capital city, Lagos, the commercial capital, symbolic capitals such as Ibadan and Enugu and far flung corners such as Benin, Minna, Uyo, Auchi, Yola, Lokoja, Warri, amongst others, is a serious early warning in national security, more so if it is by a distinct community as the Catholics. This complexity stretches far into faith because, if the voice of the people is the voice of God, then the spread of the procession cannot but be understood as God speaking to Nigeria and its centres of power.

It is interesting and elating that the Catholics have never called for violence, suggesting their interest in inter-subjective approach to threat management which violence would have foreclosed. This analysis is no more an academic claim after yesterday’s procession passed without any slight incidence of violence. Instead, some leaders of the Catholic establishment such as John Cardinal Onaiyekan were calling on Nigerians to transcend ethno-religious fault lines and retrieve Nigeria from drifting into anarchy, anarchy being the ultimate sort of chaos that every human group must work against. And the slogans, all socially critical but emphatically consensual on one Nigeria! All these speak to a contextually radical praxis as far as popular responses to the on-going impasse in Nigeria is concerned.

If the procession is an early warning sign, then the complication can be reduced to a security complication. What is security is, however, always a question of who is securing whom from what. It is not a technical, specialist or objective matter of spies and men under arms. Otherwise, the defunct USSR would not have suffered what the inheritors of the Soviet State came to call “the greatest tragedy of the 20th century” because it had the most proficient spies, commanders and fighter pilots. But the Soviet State, like the Roman Empire before it, collapsed without anyone firing a shot. Both empires collapsed in that manner because all societies in decay are vulnerable to such shocks, shocks which spies, commanders and fighter pilots are never ever able to make sense of because, like beauty, security is in the eye of the beholder. Security is not an objective practice but always one essentialism or the other.

The implication of that as far as yesterday’s procession is concerned is for the Nigerian security establishment to transcend whatever its essentialist hook-up might be and open up the space for a dialogue on the spate of killings. In contemporary times, that is the only approach to conflict management that never fails because it provides space for the feelings of live human beings instead of paradigms and grand narratives produced by powerful people who neither have any experience of what is happening nor are disinterested parties to such crises. It means a better way to resolve the impasse of this magnitude is to allow for inter-discursive engagement with the threat at hand. It is a threat the solution to which must reflect the subjectivity of protest groups, religious and otherwise, in an open process that can re-assure all Nigerians in every corner of the country.

It is no use playing up any particular segment of Christianity and its entry point in a crisis situation but, in this context, the subjectivity of the Catholics has become a key factor, they being the chief mourners of the two priests who were killed as targeted victims in a spate of killings that has generated a siege unknown in the history of the country. That siege is not unconnected with this being the first time the Nigerian State looks incapable of framing a threat to state survival in a way satisfactory to all stakeholders, much less confronting the threat. Yet, it has the monopoly of not only legitimate use of force but even of discourse. The implications of such a state and situation must be frightening to everyone except those reading partisanship to it, either out of false sense of security or a famished threat analysis or just narcissism.

Above all, both those who are Catholics and those who are not and even non Christians listen to Catholicism because, as one of them argued recently, Catholic Humanism has always provided the world with a discourse of ‘security as emancipation’. That was Bishop Mathew Kukah speaking at the First National Conference of the Centre for Peace and Development of the Catholics’ own university – Veritas University, Abuja – in November 2017. It is such a weighty claim that would have been the subject of a lively debate if it had been made when Nigeria were still its ebullient liberal self. But the times are uninviting of such debates basically because security in its various dimensions is on leave in Nigeria. There is no human segment where the Catholics who assert the competence of its social teachings to serve humanity at every turn, before, during and after the Cold War can or should be ignored if peace is to be guaranteed.

It is still possible to really re-define Nigeria in a way which would excite all those who have perished in the current siege in their graves. But such would not come from essentialism. In moments of social impasse, essentialism is necessarily an invitation to more crisis because it is essentialism that created the atmosphere for the impasse in the first case.

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