There is something really intriguing and fascinating about having a wonderful friend of yours grow into the septuagenarian circle. And this is even more crucial when that colleague has a history of stubborn ideological inclination that has kept him in shape as a scholar of note within Nigeria’s combustible intellectual firmament. From our mutual commitment to the political science scholarship and different approaches to the understanding of the Nigerian nation-building project, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim—Jibo to all of us—and I have become intellectual partners in progress. Both of us keep investing our intellectual and scholarly resources in the ongoing commitment to the understanding of the task of making the Nigerian state, on the one hand, more meaningful from the perspective of scholarship, and on the other hand, more citizen-friendly in terms of its capacity to leverage advocacy and discourse to achieve good governance.
Jibo is one academic that one can really say has kept up a coherent ideological trajectory since he emerged in the heydays of the radical Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement as a key figure in the Nigerian Marxist circle. And yet it would seem that Jibo has made a critical shift away from the Marxist ideological framework that enabled his intellectual stature in the 1970s and 1980s. This shift says a lot about the current ideological state of the postcolonial Nigerian society. Professor Ibrahim was educated at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and in the virile Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at a time when the university campuses in Nigeria constituted the hotbeds of ideological theorizing and mobilization; when scholars from Bala Usman to Mokwugo Okoye and Eskor Toyo to Molara Ogundipe-Leslie to Patrick Wilmot to Bala Takaya, and from Claude Ake to Edwin Madunagu to Bade Onimode to Akin Oyebode rallied round Marxism as the pathway to radical intellectual traditions. For these intellectuals, Marxism provided the ideological commitments to reflect on the possibility of a progressive framework through which Nigeria could be re-visioned as a postcolonial state.
I do not know whether there is still any coherence to the concept of the Nigerian Left—a body of progressives that are connected by the collective Marxian ideological framework for rethinking the dynamics of the Nigerian developmental and national manifestations. And my reason is not far-fetched. It would seem that the depth and extent of the Nigerian postcolonial predicament, the reach and strength of the neoliberal capitalist hegemony, and the fluctuating fortunes of Marxism have outstripped the capacity of the Nigerian Left to keep up their intellectual mapping of the relationship between ideology and reality. Indeed, it would seem that the Nigerian Left has become so fragmented as to be incapable of mustering the coherence required to push a progressive front. And this could also be because the fortunes of Marxism keep shifting conservative Marxism to Antonio Gramsci, and from the neo-Marxism of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School to the post-Marxism of Chantal Mouse and Ernesto Laclau, and from Samir Amin to Immanuel Wallerstein.
Maybe the fundamental issue in keeping Marxism relevant to the Nigerian postcolonial predicament would be how theoretically congruent Marxism and postcolonialism are. How, for instance, is Marxism’s Eurocentric foundation to be squared with the anti-Eurocentric stance in that animate postcolonial scholarship? Maybe this significant tension to get the utmost from an ideological position without any intellectual baggage is what led to the subtle shift of Jibo away from Marxism—or specifically activist Marxism—towards a more resilient and contextually malleable paradigm that enables the facilitation of radical politics within a space like Nigeria. For Jibo, the political end should justify the ideological means. He believes there must be a better way than doctrinaire Marxism to achieve radical politics that will reorient democracy and democratic governance on behalf of Nigerians.
This is where Jibo and I share many seminal platforms. The first critical platform is the political science scholarship in Nigeria. While I was the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Communication Technology in 2015, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim was asked to deliver the keynote paper at the 60th anniversary celebration lecture of the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan. I was to be the chairman of the occasion. Jibo regrettably could not make the occasion. And the Department prevailed on me to take his place as the guest lecturer. In that lecture, titled “The Legitimacy of Political Science Scholarship in Nigeria,” I made the pungent argument that Nigeria’s postcolonial predicaments since independence have thrown series of debilitating unresolved challenges to query the relevance of political science scholarship in the country. Insurgency, corruption, youth unemployment, insecurity, dysfunctional federalism cum constitutional order, misgovernance, bad leadership—the list is endless—raise the critical question of the role of the Nigerian political scientists in the articulation of frameworks or paradigms of understanding and resolutions for redressing the Nigerian state and redesigning democratic governance.
These are not strange questions for me to ask as I have been a theorist and practitioner of public administration scholarship since I became a public servant many years ago. On resuming at the Presidency first in 1988, and much later in 1992, I was nudged by mentors to take on the additional task of studying the civil service as a means of understanding the dynamics of its dysfunction and the possible paths towards its institutional redemption. It was not too long for me to determine that the (mis)fortunes of the civil service system are tied in with those of the Nigerian state. My search for paradigms of institutional reform in Nigeria inevitably took me to expressing concerns for all forms of institutional reformative transformation, including those that affects political science scholarship. In that same lecture, I lamented not just the invisibility of Nigerian political scientists in the critical matters of the state, but also the ailing of the Nigerian Political Science Association (NPSA), a reality that has since significantly improved.
However, one political scientist that constitutes the exception in my lamentation is Professor Ibrahim. He is not just the political scientist par excellence since he completed his doctoral dissertation at the University of Bordeaux in 1990. He has become the lone ranger in the fight to deepen democracy through civil society activism. Civil society for him was the continuation of the struggles for progressive politics by another mean. It was simply the other side of the same coin in the fight to entrench radical politics that put people on the front burner of government’s policy decisions. I would say, on his behalf, that civil society engagement is closer to realizing the objective of democratic reforms than academic Marxism that leans more on the theoretical than the practical. But that is not to say, as most scholars believe, tragically, that theory and practice are disjointed. As a development expert, civil service engagement allows for a cogent involvement with the public policy processes in ways that pushes the boundaries of policy participation and ideological influence. Civil society allows Professor Jibrin Ibrahim to keep democratic and policy discourses at the level of ideological fundamental, without the baggage of Marxism.
And this brings me to the second seminal platform that connect me with Jibo. When I had to also make the critical decision to continue my reform advocacy by other means; at the point when I had to painfully exit the civil service as a critical insider, the establishment of the Ibadan School of Government and Public Policy (ISGPP) in 2016 was a most viable institutional platform that permits the articulation of my insider’s perspectives from the outside. And that “outside” allows me to deploy the critical significance of kindred intellectual, activist and advocate spirits in the task of making Nigeria work better for democracy and development. One of such is Jibo, of course! At the inauguration of ISGPP and in one defining piece in his celebrated column in the Premium Times, Jibo was enthusiastic about the determination of the School to return the discourse on government back to the table. According to him, “I welcome the idea, after twenty-seven years of discourse on that elusive and nebulous World Bank concept of GOVERNANCE, let’s get back to the essentials and start studying what ‘government’ actually does when it governs.”
This fundamental discursive element connects with, say, Jibo’s presence in journalism. The fight to raise the bar of fundamental issues that impacts the issues of political emancipation and democratic liberation cannot be limited to the pages of books and monographs. It must be delivered in digestible soundbites that an average Nigerian can understand and relate with. Indeed, the journalistic space further allows Professor Jibrin Ibrahim to bring the challenges of fixing the Nigerian state right into the context of the Nigerian masses and the need for them to also weigh into the determination of their destiny. And this speaks critically to the emergence of the post-truth social media. If democracy must be deepened through civil society vigilance, then Nigerian scholars, intellectuals and advocates need to mediate the tight rope between traditional journalism and the new media, plus the dangers of challenging social facts.
Professor Jibrin Ibrahim is a critical septuagenarian, the type of intellectual who never stops fighting, who is never slowed down by age, who keeps pushing the boundaries of what they believe. We can only pray that your dream for the Nigerian masses may be realize just in time.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa Chairman, Federal Civil Service
Commission, Abuja
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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