This writer spent a great deal of a weekend in the company of Professor Richard Joseph of North Western University, who is best known to Nigerians by his celebrated book, 'Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria' published by Cambridge University Press in 1987.An attempt to domesticate the book in Nigeria was made by the author in 1991 when the launch of the Nigerian edition, published by Spectrum, took place at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA) Lagos. That event, about which this writer reported at the time as a senior member of the editorial board of the now defunct Daily Times, is etched in our national political memory by the touching punctuation of the launch by Joseph, breaking down and shedding tears as he considered the bleakness of the Nigerian condition. Recently, when I met Joseph and his wife at a reception organised for them by the Obafemi Awolowo Foundation, (OAF) I was anxious to learn his take on the Nigerian condition, especially in the light of his magnificent study undertaken almost 25 years ago. The ageing scholar as befitting the atmosphere of a dinner organised in his honour, was understandably reticent; he nonetheless, revealed his state of mind about the Nigerian condition when in response to an eloquent after dinner speech, by Dr. Tokunbo Awolowo Dosumu, Executive Director of OAF, he referred to a remark made by his wife, who after journeying on the decrepit Lagos-Ibadan express road exclaimed in anguish that Nigeria does not have to be like this. At that same dinner, I recall, Pat Utomi, well known Professor of Political Economy informing that there's hardly any major road construction embarked upon by the Federal Government since 1999 that has been fully completed.I was to meet Joseph again two days later at the Eko Hotel, venue of an international seminar organised in honour of the acclaimed author by two Nigerian scholars based in the United States, Dr. Wale Adebanwi and Dr. Ebenezer Obadare in conjunction with the Governor of Ekiti State, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, a friend of Joseph.Invited as a discussant to the conference, I was naturally eager to hear what Joseph will have to say of the Nigerian condition. I was not disappointed; as the scholar summarised his thoughts in three postulations namely; the alarmingly widening inequality between the rich and the poor, the imperative of safeguarding democracy, despite its obviously poor showing and finally the crisis of suboptimal performance in every area of Nigerian life. This was no pontificating outsider, but a lover of Nigeria, who had lectured in the Political Science Department of the University of Ibadan in the late 1970s and had taught the likes of Professor Adigun Agbaje, former deputy Vice Chancellor, University of Ibadan, Professor Eghosa Osaghae, Vice Chancellor of Igbinedion University,Professor Mojubaolu Okome of the City University of New York and Professor Kunle Amuwo of the International Crisis Group in Dakar. It was with evident pain, therefore, a little short of his tears of 1991, that Joseph surveyed the ruins that have overtaken a country whose universities for instance were once on a par with the best in the English-speaking world.Nigeria today, with the escalating insecurity in the land, the veritable crisis of governance and unfulfilled expectations, disturbingly high graduate unemployment, galloping inflation, as well as persisting infrastructural crisis, is an abiding illustration, if not prototype of what Joseph had in his path breaking book described as Prebendal politics. This speaks to a system in which a few, employing the politics of identity corner resources that are meant to uplift the status of the entire nation.Indeed, Nigeria's fourth Republic constitutes a staggering consummation in the area of corruption of trends which had only begun to emerge in the politics of the Second Republic.Of course, Nigeria is not the only country bedeviled by geoethnic and religious divisions but it is perhaps one of the few countries in which a rapacious elite consciously employs these divisions as vehicles of primitive accumulation, featuring the politics of brinkmanship in which excluded elite negotiate their re-incorporation into an elaborate spoils system by threatening to bring down the roof on everyone.To take another side of the Nigerian crisis: Has anyone asked the question why seminal books on Nigeria such as that of Joseph are preponderantly written outside of the country. The other day for example, a book entitled; Awolowo and the Making of Remo was launched at the NIIA. The fascinating study is authored by a German scholar based at the University of Birmigham, Dr. Insa Nolte, who interestingly was also present at both the dinner and the seminar. If, as one of the speakers at the conference argued intellectual redemption must precede political redemption, then, the rabid downgrading of intellectual life by the Nigerian political elite and a philistine society must be urgently reversed. Proliferating universities that have no place on the academic map of the globe is not the same as creating the enabling conditions that can facilitate world class intellectual production such as the book by Joseph. Most of the bright talents from our universities have been forced into exodus abroad, or constricted to double as political apparatchiks in a terrifyingly partisan milieu in which all the angels are on one side of the divide and all the devils on the other side.Two decades and a half after Joseph's path breaking book was published; Nigeria has not only regressed on human development and governance indices, but is increasingly courting the politics of violent dissolution as extremists and millenarian movements seize the centre stage, making life nastier and threatening for everyone. There can be no greater comment on the failure of the Nigerian political leadership, to create a roadmap or even sketch out a tentative trail out of the quagmire which constituted the subject of Joseph's study.Olukotun can be reached via ayo-olukotun@yahoo.com
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