April 2011 - Centre for Civil Society - University of KwaZulu-Natal

The destruction of Nigeria’s intellectual tradition was also being played
out in the Nigerian street at the same time. Newspaper and magazine
journalism in the country, while not yet able to match academia in rigour,
was nevertheless rooted in the people and thus able to instantly articulate
their preferences in times of social crisis. But the hard times, in
combination with the greed and short-term vision of newspaper
proprietors, came together to force the brightest and the best to either
look for better pay in the Ponzi-type banks that were now springing up all
over the place or got out of the country altogether.
The new regime of corrupt and self-serving editors unable to meaningfully
analyse the policy platforms of the various political parties has its root in
the ‘great transformation’ that the industry underwent in the wake of the
Babangida cyclone in the late 1980s.
Elsewhere, the indigenous publishing houses and the local branches of
international publishing, unable to walk the tightrope of importing raw
material with scarce foreign exchange and selling their books locally at
prices they knew the now vanishing middle class couldn’t afford, shut shop
one after the other. Where these firms went, city bookshops followed. The
other side of SAP was, of course, corruption in high places. As public
library budgets were routinely embezzled by high officials, weed and
darkness overtook these former citadels of light. Massive flight of
university teachers back to Europe and North America where the bulk of
them had trained in the 1960s and 1970s rounded the circle.
It was this herd-like flight abroad that sounded the death-knell of
progressive politics in Nigeria. Nature, as the trite saying goes, abhors a
vacuum. What Nigeria’s brightest minds vacated, the dim-witted and
grasping quickly filled. That Nigeria’s universities, even the ‘best’ of them,
today are more noted for the large number of Mercedes Benz cars in the
garages of the professors than for the Nobel Prizes they win annually speak
to the caliber of the ‘academics’ who now hold sway in our former centres
of light. Nigerian academics in the West are prospering, but the same
cannot be said of their counterparts at home.
My area of training is the humanities and social sciences - the policy
sciences broadly construed. The last major book produced by a Nigerian
academic living in Nigeria that the world took notice of since 1993, when
Babangida quit, is Claude Ake’s ‘Democracy and Development in Africa’.
So what are the rest of our ‘professors’ in their gilded towers doing?
I too was part of this unthinking ‘African flight’. It was a colossal strategic
error on the part of the Nigerian progressive intellectual class. For it left
unsupported the political re-flowering that the likes of Bamidele Aturu and
the now deceased Ubani Chima were nurturing into being using the
platform of the Democratic Alternative, a broad left of the centre political
party that emerged a year after Babangida fell from power. These days,
the only meaningful progressive politics you get in the country are the
writings of Edwin Madunagu, Jibo Ibrahim and Biodun Jeyifo in the
newspapers. Even so their columns (with the possible exception of Jibo’s)
are still entombed in Marxist straitjackets and are redolent of yesterday’s
ideological battles - battles that the global political left lost in the early
1980s following the rise of neo-liberalism.
Should we then go ahead and call in the undertakers? Is it over and done
with for progressive politics in Nigeria even as the three political parties
that claim the mantle refuse to come together and share a common policy
and political platform? These and related questions will be the subject of