By Segun Ayobolu

 

Nigeria is today confronted with an existential crisis of multidimensional proportions. Not only are her peace and stability gravely imperiled but her continuous existence as a cohesive territorial entity faces severe stresses and strains. Even as the situation degenerates daily, both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) are preoccupied with ruinous inanities and flimsy distractions. Yet, this is at a time when all hands should be on deck and focused on redirecting the ship of state away from an imminent disastrous shipwreck and back to a saner and safer course. The grave security crisis, which has made the entire country a veritable killing field as a result of religious extremism, intolerance and violence; communal clashes, banditry, kidnapping, rape, cattle rustling, herdsmen terrorism among others has whittled into insignificance the President Muhammadu administration’s modest accomplishments on the socioeconomic terrain.

Yet, as the vast majority of Nigerians endure the pains and pangs of hunger, joblessness, avoidable diseases, homelessness and other indices of poverty, individuals, tendencies and factions within the APC are preoccupied with the 2023 general elections. They are embroiled in energy-sapping intrigues and maneuvers to seize control of the party structures at all levels so as to place them in a vantage position to fly the party’s flag for various offices come 2023. Thus, rather than being focused and exerting all efforts at confronting and transcending the current socioeconomic, political and security crises, the APC does not even have a stable leadership presently. It is being run by the Extra-Ordinary National Caretaker and Convention Planning Committee headed by Yobe State governor, Mr. Mai Mala Buni, which is currently superintending what it describes as a membership registration and revalidation exercise.

If as is being speculated the party is unable to hold its congresses and National Convention in June as previously scheduled, it means that members of the APC, including public office holders at all levels, will continue to be distracted by preparations for the intra-party elections with no definitive dates in mind as regards when they will hold. Unfortunately, the opposition PDP is no less distracted and faced with serious internal organizational schisms arising from conflicting interests with respect to the 2023 elections.  Rather than learn from its calamitous loss in the 2015 elections and its defeat again n 2019, the PDP is obsessively preoccupied with returning to power in 2023 without undertaking the necessary task of rejuvenating itself organizationally, ideologically and morally.

Hence some of its governors are warring against each other while others are in bitter conflict with the Prince Uche Secondus-led National Working Committee (NWC) of the party. The PDP has so far been unable to play the role of an effective, credible and productive opposition, which offers an attractive alternative programmatic agenda to the policy direction of the ruling party. Even from the example of states governed by the PDP, there is no indication that, if the party returns to power at the centre in 2023, it will offer better governance than it did during its earlier 16 years in office.

For both the APC and the PDP, the preoccupation appears to be with where the next President will come from rather than on how power will be utilized to rescue the country from the humiliating grip of protracted underdevelopment. True, where the next President comes from is important given the geo-ethnic and religious realities of Nigeria but even more critical, perhaps, is the socio-economic agenda of political parties and their capability to productively utilize power to achieve accelerated national development. Neither the APC nor the PDP, in my view, has demonstrated any inclination towards the seriousness of purpose, discipline and hard work necessary for charting a new, purposive, result-oriented policy direction for the country.

It is against this background that the convening this week in Abuja of 30 groups representing labour, civil society, peasants, farmers, students, academia and other interests across the country to chart an alternative policy discourse and praxis for Nigeria is welcome. Out of this summit was born a new organization, ‘The Peoples’ Alternative Movement’, which intends to metamorphose into a mass workers and laboring peoples’ political party. A statement signed on behalf of the new organization by Professor Toye Olorode, Mr. Femi Falana (SAN) and comrade Jaiye Gaskiya, indicated that its purpose is to work towards “wrestling the country from the grip of a rainbow coalition of dishonest, corrupt and reactionary politicians currently driving the country to a shipwreck through mass corruption and exploitation of the primordial fault lines for personal fortune”.

In a refreshing departure from the prevalent discourse of divisive ethno-religious rhetoric, the emergent group promised to “replace despair with hope by uniting the working people and the masses beyond the narrow prism of ethnicity and religion with the hope of attaining a new Nigerian renaissance”. This, the movement plans to achieve through “a socialist ideology tailored to transform the neo-colonial Nigerian economy” that will lead to the building “of a new country based on justice, equity and protection of the dignity of mankind irrespective of ethnicity, faith or creed. We shall make Nigeria great again and put the country back on her status as the giant of Africa”.

The prime motivation of the movement is portrayed by its lamentation that Nigeria today is characterized by “extreme poverty, arms proliferation, religious intolerance, the rise of hate and ethnic nationalism” and consequently “moving towards social upheavals, due to exploitation of the people, greed and avarice of a spineless political class that has reached its wits end”.  Does the group not sound utopian and its goals unrealizable given the sordid realities of contemporary Nigerian politics? To that poser, I would refer the reader to the declaration by the late political economist, Paul Baran, that “But each idea not yet realized curiously resembles a utopia; one would never do anything if one thought that nothing is possible except that which exists”.

But have attempts to form a third force to confront both the PDP and APC not floundered in the past? Reference here can be made to the effort by former President Olusegun Obasanjo before the 2019 election, which came to nothing or the coalition of presidential aspirants – Dr Oby Ezekwesili, Omoyele Sowore, Fela Durotoye, George Moghalu etc – which also failed abysmally. These were based on personalities or such amorphous and concretely meaningless factors as age. This emergent movement is based on ideology and a concrete socioeconomic agenda. Others would say that efforts by such progressive, mass oriented groups failed to make an impact when they sought to organize politically in the past. They can learn from past errors and aim at succeeding this time around. The point is that an ideologically focused and disciplined group should be encouraged to challenge the sheer complacency, ineptitude and arrogance of the current dominant parties.

In a lecture he delivered to commemorate fifty years of Nigeria’s independence in 2010 at the University of Lagos, the renowned political scientist, Professor Okwudiba Nnoli, denounced what he described as “the tyranny of petty bourgeois discourse in post-colonial Nigeria”. He pointed out that the dominant discourse in Nigeria has focused almost solely on issues such as revenue allocation, federalism, religion, military rule, Creation of states, federal character, ethno-regional conflicts and zoning among others.

According to him, “Hence one never hears of any discussion of how to modernize production that is based on local Nigerian need and traditional consumption pattern. No questions are asked about the lack of improvement in the implements like the hoes used by the vast majority in spite of the tremendous strides in science and technology since these instruments were used by our great, great grandfathers. Similarly, the vast majority of our people live in the same type of houses as their great, great grandfathers in spite of advances in architecture and building technology”.

Professor Nnoli asks further, “Is it not the responsibility of politics and the state to assist the people in the rural areas and elsewhere in the country to apply science, technology and creativity in the production of food to satisfy their needs and traditional consumption habits at increasing levels of modernity using local and, therefore, available resources; construction of shelters for self and family, using local and, therefore, available resources; and the creation of modern health products, again using local and, therefore, affordable resources? How to carry out all these tasks certainly deserves political discussion”.

These questions posed by Professor Nnoli go right to the root of Nigeria’s protracted crisis of poverty and underdevelopment. If the emergent ‘Peoples Alternative Political Movement’ helps tilt public debate towards such alternative, problem-solving discourse, it would profit the polity immensely. The path ahead of the movement is indeed a tasking and arduous one demanding hard, backbreaking work as well as immense organizational capacity. One can only wish them well.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

IN the concluding part of the first installment of this piece, last week, we illustrated and buttressed Professor Samuel Egwu’s nuanced class analysis of politicized ethnicity, democracy and development in Nigeria by reference to the ongoing herdsmen-farmers clashes in large swathes of the country, which has become the single most easily combustible issue in contemporary Nigeria. The extent to which this problem has worsened since the emergence of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2015 is vividly demonstrated by the assassination attempt on the governor of Benue state, Mr. Samuel Ortom, during the week and the arbitrary and unilateral recent declarations of Biafra and Oduduwa republics in the South-East and South-West by the likes of ex-Niger Delta militant, Asari Dokubo, and emergent South-West insurrectionist, Sunday Igboho, respectively.

Unfortunately, these instinctual and emotive separatist eruptions have attracted not insubstantial appeal in parts of the country as largely pauperized, unemployed and long-suffering segments of the population see the emergence of such idealized and romanticized republics as the gateway to their much desired Eldorado and life more abundant. It is a testimony to the strong emotive appeal of the ethno-regional pull that even highly educated and articulate individuals support these separatist agitations rather than transcend superficial analyses of the Nigerian crisis and shine the light of their intellect on dissecting and proffering concrete solutions to the challenges of democracy, federalism and development in this dispensation.

How come, for example, as we pointed out last week, that there are hardly any political organizations and civil society groups following in the footsteps of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, (ASUU), in educating herders, peasant farmers and millions of other underclass Nigerians that they are all victims of the gross misrule of the various ethno-regional factions of the ruling class? Is it not obvious that the latter is responsible for the mass poverty in which millions of Nigerians live across horizontal ethno-regional divides in sharp contradistinction to the wealth and obscene opulence of a microscopic minority again comprising of the elite from various ethnic, cultural and religious groups?

Ever since Professor Egwu delivered this lecture in 2015, the challenges of insecurity in particular have worsened throughout the country. This has distracted attention from some of the impressive strides the President Muhammadu Buhari administration has made in redressing the country’s huge infrastructure deficit especially in the acceleration of work on key road and rail projects, diversification of the economy and massive social intervention programmes to transfer resources to the most vulnerable sections of the populace despite unanticipated severe declines in oil revenues and the economic disruptions occasioned by the Coronavirus pandemic.

The legacy of the administration will surely depend, substantially, on its ability to summon the requisite will to implement solutions that even tendencies and interests within the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) have proffered to stem the multidimensional crises of the Nigerian state and the current dangerous degeneration of the polity from vulnerable fragility to outright failure. What we have on our hands, in my view, is not a problem, fundamentally, of the constitution or the failings of democratic practice. It is a challenge which is well within the capacity of the ruling party to meaningfully address and this it should make haste to do in its own interest particularly as the 2023 elections approach. For instance, the APC committee on constitutional reform headed by governor Nasir’el-Rufai of Kaduna state has not only recommended radical re-federalization of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), and the creation of decentralized state police commands to meet the peculiarities of sub-national units of government, it has also suggested several measures to devolve greater powers, responsibilities and resources to the states including control of mineral resources within the latter’s sphere of jurisdiction.

The Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) as well as several other influential individuals and interest groups across the country have supported these proposals.  It should, therefore, not be difficult for the governors, National Assembly members and members of the various Houses of Assembly to work in harmony and with a sense of urgency to effect the necessary constitutional amendments to actualize these recommendations. What is at stake is the very survival of the polity. If Nigeria unravels under its watch, the responsibility for the monumental disaster will lie on the APC and its leader, President Muhammadu Buhari. The only way for the party to regain its credibility and rescue its legacy is to find a way back to its constitutional pact with the people and utilize the remainder of its tenure to actualize its neglected federalist agenda.

Luckily, it has the requisite legislative majority to achieve this.

But should the current security and socio-political challenges justify calls either for the outright scrapping of the extant constitution and the adoption of a completely new governing instrument or the reconstitution of the country into separate, independent republics? This column has consistently answered this question in the negative. As Professor Egwu notes in this inaugural lecture, there has been commendable progress in the procedural aspects of democracy in Nigeria since 1999. The country has witnessed uninterrupted civilian, democratic governance during this period. The ‘electoral authoritarianism’, which desecrated the 2003 and 2007 general elections, was rolled back with significantly more credible and transparent elections in 2011 and 2015. Similarly, the 2015 elections diminished the capacity of incumbents from crippling the opposition electorally.

Other indications of the progress of ‘procedural democracy’ in this dispensation, the lecturer notes, include evident institutional growth of the legislature especially at the national level and the emergence of a robust and increasingly mobilized civil society “which plays to a large extent the role of manufacturing moral consent for governance, serves as rallying point in demanding for accountable governance, respect for constitutional terms of office, the reform of the constitution and setting the governance agenda for the whole society”. He nevertheless points out that the legislature still has a long way to go in exercising stronger oversight capacity over the executive, the electoral commission must still aspire to greater structural independence while the judiciary is still weak particularly at the lower levels and widely perceived as being prone to corruption.

Yet, these institutional deficits, it is implicit in his submission, can only be addressed through continued democratic practice and unceasing improvements rather than wholesale discontinuation with current institutional structures and political processes. Thus, his submission that “But democracy is a long haul, and is open to reversal if democratic institutions are not strong enough to sustain its tempo. It is even more so in the Nigerian context where democratization has proceeded without democrats. It is the realization that democracy is a process that makes the notion of democratization useful when relating to the experiences of new democracies”.

In sharp contrast to the progress made in the sphere of procedural democracy, Professor Egwu argues, is the negligible impact of electoral democracy in promoting the substantive welfare and wellbeing of the masses of the Nigerian people in the socioeconomic realm. As he put it, “The rising levels of unemployment and poverty for an economy said to be the largest in Africa and amongst the fastest growing economies in the world leave much to be said about Nigeria’s progress in the realm of substantive democracy. The failure of democracy in this regard has thrown up forces that can undermine the entrenchment of democratic values and cultures as evident in the rise of insurgency, protracted ethno-religious violence and the swelling of a reserved army of the unemployed that is often recruited as private soldiers to prosecute election war”.

At the root of the fragility and poverty of substantive democracy in post-1999 Nigeria, he submits is the perpetuation of the post-colonial political economy, a legacy of the colonial model of development, defined by “a state-led approach to capitalist modernization; a dependent strategy, which a emphasized a significant role for foreign capital (even at the height of oil boom); a heavily import-dependent, import substitution industrialization strategy; and a philosophy of development which excluded most ordinary people”.

An insightful aspect of the lecture with instructive insights for national politics is his depiction of what he describes as the collapse at the University of Jos “of national and patriotic platforms that united people across ethnic and regional divide, and united them around the vision of a great country and a great university”. He continued: “But it was the collapse of the left at the University of Jos, a local manifestation of a national crisis that became even more traumatic. Again, not peculiar to the University of Jos, was what turned out to be the consequence of the vacuum created by the departure of popular nationalist platforms – the takeover of university politics by ethno-regional platforms and movements”.

The lesson for Nigeria is evident. When patriotic, progressive, nationalist organizations such as the labour movement, radical academic unions, civil society groups and political parties vacate the political space and fail to enlighten, mobilize and organize the masses of the people for meaningful political intervention through the democratic process, personal, ethno-regional, religious and other primordial agendas take centre-stage and any alternative discourse of a transformational socio-economic agenda is marginalized and demobilized.

By Segun Ayobolu

 

 

If we take as an instance the current prevalent destructive invasion of forests, farmlands and rural communities in many parts of Yoruba land by nomadic herdsmen and the seeming lukewarm response of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration to the situation, will it not be appropriate to explicate Nigeria’s current socio-economic and political travails from the prism of ethnicity? In the 1960s and 1970s the modernization theory paradigm, then dominant in the social sciences, sought to explain the multidimensional crises of instability and disorder in most of the new post-colonial African polities with reference to the coexistence of plural ethnic groups within artificially defined boundaries, which was the legacy of colonialism.

This ethnic framework for analyzing and situating the challenges of socio-economic and political underdevelopment in Africa, including Nigeria, was, however, soon widely seen as inadequate as many scholars began to utilize socio-economic categories such as class in seeking to understand and proffer solutions to the problems of these societies. It would, however, appear that the ethnic explanatory schema has gained the ascendancy once more in the popular imagination. Seek ye first the kingdom of ethno-regional restructuring and all things shall be added unto you seems to be the prevalent conventional wisdom.

I listened to a social media post a few days ago in which a distinguished and accomplished Yoruba Professor of history adumbrated passionately and brilliantly about the urgent necessity for the creation of an Oduduwa republic. This, for him, and for a large number of those who belong to this school of thought, is the ultimate solution not just to the security challenge posed by strange, crude and arrogant herdsmen ravaging Yoruba territory with impunity but also to the socio-economic challenges of underdevelopment.

Indeed, the easiest route to popular acclaim in different parts of the country today is to become an ethnic champion. This week, for instance, Ex-Niger Delta militant, Alhaji Mujahid Asari Dokubo, reportedly declared a new “Biafra de facto customary government” and listed multiple communities throughout the South-East and South-South geo-political zones as being parts of his new dream sovereign entity. It is instructive that several groups such as the South-South Elders Forum (SEF), Ikwerre Peoples Congress (IPC), Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF), Ibibio Youth Council (IYC) Worldwide and Order of Egbesu Brotherhood all promptly dissociated themselves from Dokubo’s Biafra.

Advocates of a Biafra or Oduduwa Republic assume that there is unanimity of opinion among the Igbo or Yoruba for the creation of such entities. Such assumption may be misleading. They do not appear to take into account the millions of Igbo or Yoruba, for instance, who were born and have lived outside their ethnic territories for generations. How about those indissolubly bound together by inter-ethnic marriages, shared religious beliefs across regions or whose businesses and economic fortunes are tied to territories where they are not indigenes?

In his first press conference after his release from prison, which held at Ikenne on 4th August 1966, the indefatigable and unbending federalist, Chief Obafemi Awolowo said with characteristic perspicacity, “In concrete terms, it is my firm belief that until we provide (1) full employment, (2) free education from primary to university level and (3) health services for all our citizens, the problem of unity will continue to plague us. And in this connection I hasten to predict that the breaking up of Nigeria into a number of sovereign states will not only do permanent damage to the reputation of contemporary Nigerian leaders, but will usher in terrible disasters which will bedevil us and many generations to come”. These words remain as true as ever.

Delivering the 72nd in the series of inaugural lectures of the University of Jos on Thursday, July 9, 2015, the noted Marxist political scientist, Professor Samuel Egwu, focused on ethnicity and the problem this phenomenon poses for political stability and development in Nigeria. Titled ‘Technology of Power and Dramaturgy of Politics: Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic’, the lecture situates ethnicity within the context of Nigeria’s dependent and underdeveloped political economy, an over-centralized and distorted federal structure, fragile political institutions, feeble civil society and the emergence of what he calls ‘uncivil’ associational groups that utilize and manipulate ethnicity in ways that undermine democracy and national cohesion.

Although Professor Egwu identifies with the Marxist perception and deconstruction of ethnicity as a form of “false consciousness”, which plays an “essentially obscurantist role in the social process”, he disagrees with “the mechanical interpretation of the materialist method and the “economic reductionism” of many Marxist scholars which dismissed or wished away non-economic categories in the explanation of the course of human history”.

Without discounting the class character of Nigerian society and the primacy of the economic substructure in determining social forces, he submits that “while ethnicity would not be the primary contradiction for a society like Nigeria, it has through historical force and the political practices of the ruling class become the fundamental contradiction in shaping the construction of state power and democracy”.

Read Also: IPOB backs Dokubo’s declaration of Biafra

 

Utilizing the tool of Marxist methodology as a light to dispel the fog that beclouds popular conceptions of ethnicity, Professor Ugwu notes that “The choice of the ethnic weapon as technology of power has the consequence of obfuscating social realities from the common people, tends to reify ethnicity as the desiderata of political and social behavior among the people, and ultimately prevents the ordinary people from realizing that they are victims of ethnic manipulation”. It is unfortunate that the widely perceived nepotistic inclinations of the President Buhari administration, particularly the skewed nature of appointments in the security sector as well as the reluctance to forcefully reign in killer herdsmen, plays into the hands of political manipulators of ethnicity. That is why, for instance, Sunday Ighoho’s reported unilateral declaration of a sovereign republic of Oduduwa would resonate with large numbers of the poor, marginalized and unemployed Yoruba underclass.

Political messages deliberately constructed around ethno-regional and religious appeals, Professor Ugwu avers, show how ethnicity is employed as a tool to acquire and keep state power in Nigeria. In his words, “The sheer bellicosity, adversarial politics, and the kind of political grandstanding or the politics of brinksmanship promoted by political parties, candidates and ethno-regional groupings who claim to speak on behalf of ethnic constituencies bring out tellingly the dramaturgy associated with ethnic politics in Nigeria”.

He continues, “However, there is a strong element of self-destruction that is associated with this form of political mobilization and, more recently, the disturbing trend of playing on deep emotions and ethno-regional fault lines, including the most bizarre of hate speeches capable of fuelling violence that could sound the death knell of democracy and Nigerian nationhood”.

To underscore the underlying class character of ethnic relations in Nigeria, I recall that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU),  a few years ago, published a two-page newspaper advertorial in which they shed light on crucial national issues including the incessant herdsmen attacks on farming communities. The union pointed out that, just like majority of peasant farmers, the herdsmen are members of Nigeria’s teeming underclass. They are mostly hired hands who herd cattle owned by members of the wealthy class. It is unlikely that the herdsmen could afford to buy the AK-47 rifles we are now accustomed to seeing them carry. This means they are armed by the same wealthy cattle owners they work for.

The herdsmen continue to follow archaic cattle rearing practices that see them seeking pasture and water for their animals across the country because of the sheer irresponsibility of the northern ruling class, which has neglected to modernize the cattle business, construct ranches or vigorously tackle desertification and climate change. But the peasant farmers too, again due to the sheer incompetence of the ruling class factions, mostly still utilize the rudimentary farming implements used by their forefathers. They have not been organized into modern cooperatives and equipped to run their farms as thriving and fully secured businesses.

In a lecture titled ‘Co-operation as Means to Accelerated Rural Development’ delivered in Akure on Saturday, 23rd August, 1980, Chief Obafemi Awolowo declared, “…in the present economic context of Nigeria, particularly in relation to agricultural development along modern lines, individual efforts are of no avail, and, as far as possible, should be discouraged, not in a negative way by showing hostility to such efforts, but in a positive manner by the deliberate promotion of co-operative efforts”.

The vulnerability of poor peasant farmers to herdsmen attacks is a function, largely, of incompetent and visionless governance. In truth, the northern factions of the ruling class are as venal and inept as their southern colleagues despite flashes of occasional brilliance in some states. An Oduduwa, Biafra or any other imagined republic will be as disastrously ruled as Nigeria is today for as long as the ruling class remains mindlessly corrupt, intellectually slavish and lazy.

How can farmers, herders and millions of other underclass elements be united under a viable and vibrant political platform to bring to power, through the democratic process, a new, genuinely progressive and forward-looking ruling class? The answer is implicit in Professor Egwu’s lecture.

By Segun Ayobolu

A rather angry and clearly exasperated reader reacted, through a text message, to the first part of this piece thus, “Truth be told, I have forgotten how to read ‘Petals of thought!’. Why are you people so shy of saying Africans are inferior to the whites, if not genetically, because such has not been proven; at least be bold and courageous enough to say that socially, politically and technologically etc, Africans are totally inferior to the whites. That’s the whole truth. We must stop verbalizing social progressivism verbiage in advancing Africa’s cause, which in any case the provenance is Western/Euro-American…Externalizing our travails is cheap scapegoatism, cheap escapism, cheap shit-holism”. This may sound alarmingly self-deprecating, but there is some justification in the piqued reader’s brutally frank vituperation. It is unfortunate, indeed absurd, that six decades after the attainment of ‘nominal’ independence, we can still have cause to bemoan the debilitating impact of slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism in the perpetuation and continuous deepening of underdevelopment on the continent.

This tendency has, in fact, also been deplored by progressive and radical scholars who share Professor John Saul’s materialist, political economy approach to socio-political analysis. For instance, in a lecture delivered at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Lagos, in 1989 titled ‘The Prospects for African Development and Self-Reliance in the 1990s’ the late Marxist economist, Professor Eskor Toyo, said, “We reject as well a certain kind of dependencist scholarship which is very prevalent today. It sees African underdevelopment one-sidedly as resulting from the afflictions of colonialism or of the incorporation of African countries within the system of capitalist imperialism. It ignores the fact that for twenty-seven years, for instance, it is Africans that have ruled the countries of West Africa and helped to sustain this incorporation. A scholarship that conveniently turns its eyes from the responsibility of African bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leadership has become evasive and ceased to be honest”.

In his “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, Walter Rodney located the responsibility for the underdevelopment of the continent at two levels. He argues that, firstly, “the operation of the colonial system bears major responsibility for African economic retardation by draining African wealth and by making it impossible to develop more rapidly the development of the continent” and, secondly, that “one has to deal with those who manipulated the system and those who are their agents or unwitting accomplices of the said system”. Even then, Rodney submits that “None of these remarks are intended to remove the ultimate responsibility for development from the shoulders of Africans. Not only are there are African accomplices inside the imperialist system, but every African has a responsibility to understand the system and work for its overthrow”.

The critical significance of the mode of analysis adopted by Professor John Saul in his writings, including this book, ‘Development after Globalization: Theory and Practice for the Embattled South in anew Imperial Age’, is that it does not ignore history in contemplating and proffering solutions to the challenge of the protracted crisis of poverty and underdevelopment in the Third World particularly Africa. Much of the mainstream writing in the received social sciences dominant in Africa, as many radical African scholars such as Claude Ake, Samir Amin, Bade Onimonde, Julius Ihonvbere and others have severally noted, may indeed be methodologically sophisticated and theoretically elegant but they tend to be superficial and only tangentially relevant to the African reality.

As Claude Ake put it with characteristic clarity, “In much of the Western social science that prevails in African institutions of higher learning, there is an unfortunate tendency towards abstraction in the explanation of phenomena” and that “it is unfortunate, though not perhaps so surprising, that social science in Africa is so much in the grip of the methodology of Western social science, unfortunate because to all appearances the concerns of Western social science, particularly the maintenance of social order, is quite different from the concerns of a continent in a hurry to develop, and so, interested less in how to maintain the existing order than how to change it”.

A critical question that people like the angry correspondent that I quoted at the beginning of this piece must think about is if events and phenomena like the slave trade, colonialism and now neocolonialism, were fictional fabrications or did they really occur and even still subsisting even if in mutated forms? If they were really lived experiences of Africans, did they have salutary and beneficial effects on Africans as theorists of the ‘civilizing mission’ of colonialism contend or did they have corrosive, deleterious and deeply embedded negative implications for the self-confidence, psychological wholeness, cultural coherence and self-esteem of Africans? Is there any linkage between Africa’s encounter with imperialism, her enforced incorporation into the imperialist, global, capitalist economy on an unequal and dependent basis and the continent’s continued immersion in the mire of poverty and underdevelopment despite her superfluity of natural and mineral resources?

Let’s take the phenomenon of corruption, for instance, which is a significant causal factor of Africa’s underdevelopment. Can this just be attributed to sheer ingrained and instinctual greed as well as moral perversion on the part of morally perverse African leaders? That may be true to some extent. But the late Professor Peter Ekeh, one of Africa’s most profound social theorists, in his acclaimed ‘theory of the two publics’, links the prevalence of corruption in Africa to the bifurcation of the African public sphere into two mutually  antipathetic spheres – the primordial and the civic publics – as a result of the colonial encounter. Thus, Africans tend to operate as members, first, of the primordial public – their tribal, ethnic, communal, regional, cultural or religious associations where moral norms prevail. As members of these primary groups that predated the colonial intrusion, Ekeh observes, embezzlement of the association’s funds by its officers would be perceived as criminal and immoral.

However, as members of groups in the civic public sphere such as the civil service and other public bureaucracies, the universities, multinational corporations and other corporate entities legislatures etc, it is considered quite normal for the African to steal the funds of these organizations that emerged after colonialism to support the primordial groups to which he belongs. Many Africans continue to have an amoral disposition to the post-colonial state such that members of an ethnic group, for instance, who corruptly enrich themselves when they hold public office, are perceived and celebrated as heroes in their communities. This kind of theoretical articulation by Ekeh enable us to ask such pertinent questions as to what strategies and policies can be utilized to help transform the individual’s moral disposition and attitude to the civic public in such a way that occupants of public office who corruptly enrich themselves will be seen and treated as criminals by members of their communal, religious or ethnic groups.

There are those who argue, for instance, that utilizing concepts like dependency as a handle for analyzing and understanding underdevelopment, like John Saul does, has become outdated and archaic in our contemporary world of globalized neo-liberalism. But the author argues in his chapter on Dependency that the continuing relevance of the approach “lies above all in the analyses it produced of the impact of imperialism, past and present, on the former colonies. Their economic structures tend to reflect the original reason for making them colonies: the production of primary commodities for export and the creation of an infrastructure of railways, roads, ports, and telecommunications oriented to exports, not the promotion of an integrated national economy offering viable internal markets for more than basic goods”. However, he is quick to warn that third world elites can easily plead ‘dependency’ to divert attention from their own misrule and corrupt practices that worsen the plight of their people.

Professor Saul firmly holds on to his view that the present neoliberal, capitalist path trod by most third world countries in this era, where it is claimed there are no developmental alternatives, offer little hope for the liberation and rapid transformation of these countries. He is unshaken in his vision of an alternative radical and socialist developmental agenda for the third world and his disputations with some of his former ideological comrades – in- arms such as Giovanni Arrighi and Collin Leys, who seem to have resigned themselves to the inevitability and irresistibility of the prevalent neoliberal capitalist developmental path, make delightful reading.