For the humanistic scholar and thinker, man is the be-all and end-all of existence. Only that which is material, that which can be seen, heard, touched, tasted, smelled and felt is real. The spiritual is thus mere fantasy and thus no more than the creation of the fertility of the human imagination. This is perhaps what Marxists mean when they describe consciousness as a creation and reflection of matter and not vice-versa. Of course, not all radical academics are of the humanistic philosophical persuasion. Thus, the late Marxist political scientist, Professor Aaron Gana, for instance, started his Convocation lecture at the University of Jos with the famous declaration, “Let me start this lecture with two apologies. One is that because I am a “Jesus person” I am giving this lecture in Jesus name (Amen). My apology here is to those who might be offended by this declaration”. In giving this apology, Professor Gana obviously had in mind not only those who were not of a Christian religious persuasion but even more so those who are of a humanistic, materialistic, disposition particularly in an academic environment.

Many humanistic thinkers reject the notion that man is essentially and fundamentally flawed as a result of sin and thus hopelessly and helplessly in need of a savior and redeemer to reconcile him to God and salvage him from an innate disposition to evil leading to eternal damnation. ‘I am the captain of my soul and the master of my destiny’ is the enduring credo of the humanistic ideologue. For him, man is a perfect creation with no spiritual flaws. If so, however, how then do we explain the evil we can see all around us transcending social classes, levels of educational attainment, socio-economic status as well as across all categorizations of nations – developing, underdeveloped or developed? The humanist has no answer to the problem of prevalent and persistent evil in human nature and society. Is it any wonder then that such humanist ‘saviours’ of man as Lenin, Stalin or Mao Tse Tung, for example, did not flinch from slaughtering large numbers of people in striving to salvage society and promote what they perceive as the common good of mankind in their respective societies even though the means towards the achievement of their goals were manifestly evil?

Like Professor Gana, Professor Diji Aina comes across in his inaugural lecture under focus here as essentially a ‘Jesus person’. Thus, for him, factionalism has its roots in the inherent spiritually flawed nature of man that predisposes the individual to pervasive selfishness and self-centeredness thus fostering negative and dysfunctional factionalism across diverse sectors of society. As he put it, “The implication of the foregoing is that factionalism is the outward manifestation of a sinful (rebellious) heart, covetousness and of fallen humanity…In the biblical context, factions are outcomes of rebellious acts and are often created via subtle persuasion to upturn natural order and events. In Genesis 3:1-6, the serpent, portrayed as “more crafty than man” asked, “Did God really say you must not eat from any tree in the garden?” From this spiritual analytic paradigm, Professor Aina concludes that “The moral lesson here is that it is only by allowing the indwelling Holy Spirit that we can have eternal peace, one that propels cooperative rather than degenerative spirit that results in factions and its attendant consequences of conflict and violence”.

After a detailed and exhaustive excursion into the manifestations of factionalism in Nigeria right from the colonial era through to the first, second, aborted third and now fourth Republic, Professor Aina posits that “It was not until the advent of crude oil as a major, national, income-earning source that the personal lust over state resources became so evident. Hitherto, it had been shrouded in a regional, economic interest-driven struggle for the political soul of the nation”. It is instructive in this regard that in the first republic, the most progressive, rapidly modernizing and prosperous part of the country, the Western Region, was the most affected by a fierce destructive factionalism within the ruling party, the Action Group, that split the party down the middle, fostered the massive rigging of regional elections, degenerated into widespread anarchic violence that ultimately resulted in the January, 1966 coup and the collapse of democratic rule only six years after independence.

Although the military was initially welcomed by large sections of the populace as a redeeming political Messiah which intervened to save the country from the misrule and venality of the politicians, it took little time before the intervening military itself became the victims of divisive organizational factionalism that deepened ethno-regional mistrust, bred widespread instability and severely threatened the country’s cohesion and continued existence. As Professor Aina pungently and lucidly put it, “Resources accruable from crude oil are largely administered by those who are located outside the terrain of crude oil exploitation thereby creating factions and struggle for control. This resulted in separatist agitations, which eventually led to recurring military coups and transition governments in what Oyediran and others documented as “Transition Without End”.

Read Also: Professor Diji Aina on factionalism, Economic Parasitism and State Fragility (1)

Professor Aina continues by depicting the linkage among militarism, crude oil, economic parasitism of the elite and state fragility. In his words, “Military insurgency and counter-insurgency took the odious dimension, not only truncating the development of civilian rule but the destruction of the socio-political and economic fabric of the nation. Corruption became ubiquitous, evil and malignant. Even the clergy that once served as distant echo of “voice of reason” got engulfed in the greasing of palms and monetary inducement to gain public endorsement…Nigeria is evidently at crossroads. As I have documented in a number of publications, and as many other scholars have confirmed, the factions have multiplied, metamorphosed and transmogrified becoming malignant and inimical to national progress. They have left in their wake multifaceted fragmentations that have resulted in over one million people killed in just 30 months of a civil war and scores of other people most recently in the Niger-Delta insurgency and an international terror-induced hydra-headed insurgency known as Boko Haram”.

The lecturer documents the pervasive and persistent factionalization of political parties and groups in the current fourth republic since 1999, the deepening of corrupt elite enrichment through access to state power, rampant political vagrancy of the polite elite from one party to the other in desperate quest for platforms to contest for public office with scant regard for fidelity to party ideology, philosophy or principles. Just as intra-party factionalism was partly responsible for the loss of the PDP’s control of power at the centre to the emergent APC in 2015, no sooner had the new party assumed office than it became bogged down with fragmentation and factionalism leading not only to organizational immobility but also competing cabals in government resulting in state paralysis on diverse fronts.

According to the author, “Assessing the new ruling party, (APC), as more or less a replica of the former ruling party (PDP), Schineider (2015), dubbed the APC as “an opportunistic coalition of interests.” In  the scenario that ended the seventh assembly, “cross carpeting”, which was the buzzword of of the politics of the 1960s was replaced with “defection”. All it took to decamp or defect in Nigeria’s puerile political ecology was to feel shortchanged in the sharing of the national cake at any point time”. As the countdown to next year’s elections continues, the political elite in control of state power persist in behaving like economic vampires, sucking the resources that should be the lifeblood of providing for the wellbeing of the generality of the people, and rendering the state even more fragile as manifested by pervasive criminality, kidnapping, banditry, rape, incompetent economic management and the contestation of the very sovereignty of the state by criminal gangs and terroristic elements.

Even then, with the evidently increasing autonomy of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and the intensification of the utilization of technology to enhance the credibility and transparency of the electoral process, the electorate may increasingly begin to more effectively utilize the power of the ballot to effect positive change in the efficacy and quality of governance in the country.

Although Professor Aina proposes no less than ten recommendations to deal with and minimize the dysfunctional effects of degenerative factionalism in society, I will conclude by citing only one of these because it brings us right back to the spiritual underpinning of his lecture, with which we began the second part of this review. In his words, “The political society should be re-oriented towards cooperative and competitive rather than degenerative factionalism. This can be achieved if there is a deliberate effort/program towards minimizing crass materialism in the national psyche of the citizenry, using the East Asian “tiger” and Scandinavian countries’ experiences as benchmarks. I call for a return to primitive godliness, a lifestyle that aligns with the biblical aphorism “righteousness exalts a nation, sin is a reproach”. Factionalism is rooted in self and sin”.

Although his inaugural lecture interestingly delivered on the ninth day of March in the ninth year of his promotion to the rank of professor at the Babcock University some six years ago in 2016, Professor Diji Aina’s dissection of the phenomenon of factionalism, economic parasitism and state fragility with particular reference to Africa and Nigeria specifically is one of the most exhaustive and insightful searchlights on the subject that I have read. The issues raised in the lecture are ever so refreshingly relevant to the push and pull of communal life in diverse polities across time and space. Titled ‘Factionalism, Economic Vampires and the Fragile State’, the discourse analyses diverse forms of cooperative and thus healthy factionalism as well as competitive, conflict-laden and thus dysfunctional  factionalism in polities ranging from South Korea, Eastern Europe and Latin America, Western Europe, the United States of America and of course Africa.

Although some scholars have an essentially atomistic view of man as an isolated individual fundamentally preoccupied with the selfish pursuit particularly of his existential material interest at the expense of others, the philosophical basis of the ‘economic man’ of capitalist society, man is basically a social or political animal in Aristotelian terms whose life can only be meaningful in his relationship with other fellow homo sapiens. The imperative of living in society since man is not created to live a Robinson Crusoe-type of self-reliant existence makes the interaction of individuals with others in society inevitable essentially through the formation of groups which may be economic, religious, cultural, military, professional, educational, ethnic, leisure-related or, of course, political in nature.

The political association in the form of the political party in democratic polities’ is perhaps the pre-eminent group in society since it competes with other like groups for the control of state power and the legitimate authority to coordinate and allocate values as well as determine, in the formulation of the political scientist, Harold Lasswell, who gets what, when and how in the societal distribution of resources even though he is criticized for not paying sufficient attention to the production of those resources as well as how much goes to the constitutive classes of society.

Stressing the inevitability of factionalism in organized society, Professor Aina notes that the phenomenon “is an integral part of the political process whether in corporate political settings, autocracy or democracy. Party politics globally has served only as a tool of factional strategy in order to achieve political power. In other words, party politics depended on factionalism because the goal of party politics has been about access to power, the route to economic resources”. He sheds further light on the concept of factionalism stating that “Whereas in the cooperative and competitive typologies, the State is strengthened; in the degenerative model, the fragility of the state is seriously highlighted. For instance, factionalism contributed to political paralysis of the Soviet Union in the late 1970s, delayed Gorbachev’s political reforms in the 1980s, made the prospect of Obama’s last two years dull, and created an ugly scenario in 2015 in Nigeria’s national politics, thereby stultifying the change mantra”.

Incidentally, for the first phase of governance in post-colonial Africa, the fractious character of democratic politics as captured by Professor Aina’s conception of factionalism bred a distrust for liberal democracy with some of the modernization theorists such as Samuel Huntington at the time in the early 60s and 70s,  perceiving and promoting the military, for instance, with its supposed organizational attributes of discipline, efficiency, primacy on order, hierarchy and promptness as a modernizing agent through what was described as ‘developmental dictatorship’. It was this same kind of rationalization that sought to justify the rash of military, one-party and one-man dictatorships across Africa at the time that was perceived as more suited for the attainment of Africa’s desired rapid development than the rancorous debates, noisy disputations, intra-party disputes and inter-party conflicts and protracted legislative deliberations characteristic of liberal democracy, a scenario vividly captured by Professor Aina’s conception of factionalism, which was seen as unduly distracting and obstructive of accelerated transformation in underdeveloped societies needing fast-paced transformation.

It took bitter experience for African and other underdeveloped countries to see that imposing the peace and seeming order of the graveyard on a polity in the quest for development, rather than being a sure and speedy route to development, bred pervasive corruption, drove grievance, dissension and faction underground, inevitably nurtured political persecution, oppression and pernicious human rights abuse while worsening instability and deepening underdevelopment. In Nigeria since 1999, for instance, the most intense forms of intra-party disputations, political disagreements, poor governance, degenerative violence, unbridled corruption among other perverse manifestations of the political process have not tempted Nigerians to desire a return to military or any other form of dictatorship. Sometimes chaotic factionalism is increasingly being seen as an integral part of political contestation in a free and plural society and society must incrementally and systematically develop the capacity to manage such within the prism of democratic culture, institutions and processes.

Illustrated throughout Professsor Aina’s lecture is the thesis that “Factions are ubiquitous aspects of life. From the Caudillos of Latin America where, according to Lewis (2006) strong colorful personalities impose their will on the people through the “hyper-presidential” system to political paralysis leading to Mikhail Gorbachev reform politics of the 1980s in the defunct Soviet Union to the gridlock cum divided government of the United States, factions have either strengthened or weakened the state”. But while relatively strong institutions as well as restraining moral or cultural values have been able to help contain the dysfunctional and disruptive consequences of governmental gridlock or democratic decay in advanced democracies such as Donald Trump’s America or Boris Johnson’s United Kingdom, factionalism has had more devastating and destructive consequences in underdeveloped polities like Nigeria.

As Professor Aina explains, “Unlike in the United States where the political system is confronted by a gridlock and a divided government arising from multiplicity of interest groups and policy options, the Nigerian space is perforated by rampaging economic vampires, predatory elite gangs and a disoriented civic populace whose mind is sold to a complex web of patrons”. The economic parasitism of the political elite described by the professor as ‘rampaging political vampires’ is thus the key explanatory variable that links extreme and divisive factional contestations in Nigeria to state fragility and debilitating underdevelopment.

As he pungently makes the point, “The concept of vampire is mythological. It conveys the idea of an entity or being whose goal is sucking out the life essence (i.e. blood or life sustaining fluid) of other living beings. In this lecture, we use economic vampires to represent all agents of the State and non-State actors who fuel factional flames and fan the embers of degenerative politics with the ultimate goal of preying on the economy. They come as political and economic entrepreneurs, multi-national corporation actors as well as other entities and persons whose apotheosis is putting profit ahead of all other goals and to the exclusion of ethical and moral considerations”.   In the concluding part of this essay, we will relate Professor Aina’s ideas to the character of politics, paralysis of governance, decay of values, heightened state fragility and developmental degeneracy in Nigeria’s fourth Republic with particular attention on the forthcoming general elections.

It is all too rare for good or hopeful news to emanate from our public tertiary institution system at this time. The decrepit facilities including lecture halls, libraries, hostels and laboratories, demotivated lecturers, disoriented and often distracted students and the chronic underfunding that lies at the root of most of these challenges in these institution are too well known. What is baffling is the seeming sheer arrogance, criminal indifference, inexplicable paralysis of will and so obvious cluelessness of successive governments in dealing decisively and creatively with the debilitating, multifarious crises of tertiary education in Nigeria. It is not a peculiar problem of the President Muhammadu Buhari administration as a shamelessly hypocritical opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) would seek, for instance, to portray the persisting 7-month old ongoing strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) as if it was any less clueless and inept in handling the problems confronting the sector in its 16 years in power at the centre.

Rather, the crisis of higher education in postcolonial Nigeria is largely a function of the venality, lack of vision, patriotism and capacity of a decadent, incompetent and hopelessly indolent ruling class comprising functionaries of diverse governments and parties across time. Unfortunately, the ranks of Nigerian academia itself including the higher echelon of university administration in the public sector, is also hobbled by the same industrial-scale corruption, inefficiency and ineffectiveness that characterize the ruling class as a whole not excluding substantial sections of the all too often hypocritical media elite I must hasten to add. But then, this piece is not about the gloom around tertiary education especially public universities in Nigeria but rather focuses on a glimmer of hope as regards the bright future that can be for this sector as indicated by a recent seemingly trivial but really significant event.

Recently, graduate and final year students of foreign policy from the Department of Political Science of the Lagos State University (LASU), undertook a field study visit to the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs (NIIA), Victoria Island, Lagos, where they interacted with the specialists of the reputable research institute on various aspects of Nigeria and Africa’s foreign policy and the dynamics of international relations in general. The initiative I am told was necessitated by the need to expose the students to the foreign policy formulation process and is part of an evolving culture at LASU of encouraging its researchers, lecturers and students to engage productively with ministries, agencies, industries and other institutions through brainstorming, cross-fertilization of ideas, enriching the learning process and fostering greater synergy between theory and relevant practice.

This initiative surely would not have been possible if the Lagos State government-owned LASU had also been on strike like the federal and some state universities across the country. It is all too easy to forget now that LASU once used to be a hot bed of rabid and rancid, militant academic unionism which, coupled with rampant cultism, moral depravity, frequent strikes among other ills made the institution’s academic and social environment anarchic and chaotic. Sanity has, however, been gradually restored to the institution and normalcy regained over the last few years, a situation that I am told has been substantially improved upon by the incumbent Vice-Chancellor, Professor Mrs. Ibiyemi-Olatunji Bello, within her short duration in office thus far. This is indeed not surprising as, before her current appointment, Professor Bello had previously served at various times as Deputy Vice Chancellor and Acting Vice Chancellor and had been a key Actor in the gradual restoration of normalcy to LASU with a predictable academic calendar for the school and the continuing systematic enhancement of its institutional prestige.

When I asked an academic at the school what the social and academic climate looked like now, he was optimistic and upbeat. “Staff morale is high. Salaries are paid not later than 22nd or 23rd of every month. Outstanding promotions have mostly been effected and current promotions are routinely done accordingly. Members of staff are encouraged to go on their annual vacations and undertake sabbaticals. If you visit the university, you will see numerous ongoing structures at various stages construction springing up. The credit goes not just to the VC but also to the governor, Mr. Babajide Sanwo-Olu, who obviously accords high priority to the accelerated transformation of the institution”.

The study visit by students of LASU to the NIIA was evidently a function of the cooperative, collegial spirit prevalent in the institution. It is significant that the team was led by Professor Kayode Soremekun, a former Vice Chancellor of the Federal University, Oye-Ekiti (FUOYE) and a renowned scholar in politics and international relations with specialization in the domestic and global politics of the oil industry. He was accompanied by Dr. Abdul-Wasi Moshood, an accomplished political scientist who has published extensively in the areas of international relations, peace, conflict and governance issues. Of course, the inter-institutional collaboration would not have been possible without the support of the Head of the Department of Political Science, Dr. Paul Sewa-Thoevetin, a well- regarded authority on development and governance issues, as well as the Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, Professor Omobitan Olufunsho Abayomi, who obtained his M.Sc and PhD degrees from the University of Vienna, Austria and was a co-winner along with Professor Adeniyi Harrison also of LASU of the Y2020 Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFund) national research fund.

Incidentally, this column has a number of times interrogated the often provocative ideas of the rhythmical journalistic prose stylist and engaging international relations scholar, Dr. Dapo Thomas, whose authoritative work, ‘The Political Economy of Nigeria-United States Relations’ was published in 2018. LASU no doubt reflects the depth of talent and expertise that still abound in Nigeria’s university system despite the myriad challenges confronting tertiary education in the country. But then, would the NIIA have been an attractive institution for students of Nigerian universities to undertake a study visit to just a few years ago? The answer is a categorical no. But under its new Director-General, Professor Eghosa Osaghae, the country’s premier and most prestigious foreign policy research and formulation think-tank, has undergone a veritable organizational and intellectual renaissance.

In the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the famous main auditorium of the NIIA was the venue for the delivery of critical public lectures and the hosting of diverse symposia, conferences and colloquia that vigorously dissected national issues and proffered creative and insightful solutions. I recall, for instance, a lecture titled ‘Religion and National Integration’ delivered at the NIIA by the former Prime Minister of the Sudan, Al Sadiq El-Madhi, sometime in 2001. It foresees and addresses many of what have become intractable religious problems in Nigeria and other parts of Africa today. If his call on the west at the time not to equate westernization with human civilization and not to adopt a superior disposition to other religions and cultures, would we have avoided one of the backlashes such as the diverse forms of Islamic extremism? El-Mahdi in that lecture called on the West to make three adjustments: “To recognize that its civilization is indebted to others. A point made by Martin Bernal in his book, Black Athena, and by Montgomery Watt in his book, ,The Influence of Islamic civilization on Medieval Europe. To recognize that other cultures have a valuable contribution to make. To accept the fact that as other cultures borrow from the West, they will do so voluntarily and in terms acceptable to them”.

Once again, under the watch of Professor Osaghae, one of Africa’s most distinguished and widely published political scientists who lectured at the University of Ibadan for several years, a former Vice-Chancellor of Nigeria’s premier private university, Igbinedion University, Okada, and Visiting Emeka Anyaoku Chair of Commonwealth Studies at the University of London for 2013/2014, the NIIA has bounced back as a boiling cauldron of intellectual versatility and robust public discourse on national issues and foreign policy. Earlier this year, to cite just one instance, the NIIA collaborated with the Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports Development to organize the first ever conference on Sports Diplomacy as a driver of Nigeria’s foreign policy agenda for Africa, highlighting the power of sports to promote peace and positive change in the world.

Incidentally, on the day the LASU students visited the NIIA, the institution’s interns and senior interns were having their seminar and group debate on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Some of the visiting students were assembled into two groups and offered their perspectives on the issue to the admiration of the management and staff of the NIIA as regards their impressive acquaintance with current and international affairs. Addressing the visiting students, the Research Fellow, Division of Strategic and Security Studies of the NIIA, Dr. Sunday Olubejide, explained the dialectical relationship between a country’s foreign policy and the dynamic interaction of domestic and external factors in international relations.

It is a measure of the depth of the NIIA’s human resource base that renowned Professor of Comparative Politics and International Relations, Professor Femi Otubanjo, who taught for several years at the University of Ibadan and is a respected authority on foreign policy, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute and the students ought to know that they were indeed privileged to interact with such a profound and experienced mind. Perhaps noticing the assorted and sophisticated phones that many of the students carried, Professor Otunbanjo advised them that the phones were not just useful for engaging in conversations or indulging in entertainment but that they were indeed veritable storehouses of valuable information and vast mobile libraries. Reinforcing this, Professor Osaghae stressed the need for the students to read and study widely beyond their recommended texts in class while also acquainting themselves with the works of leading authorities in their fields.

However dismal the situation may appear, there are so many brilliant minds still doing quality and productive work in our higher institutions and research institutes across the country. They are the ones producing the brilliant minds who then travel out of the country to perform exceptionally in post-graduate and other professional studies abroad. A few years ago, this writer stumbled across a six-volume collection of the academic essays of Professor Eghosa Osaghae published in various reputable political science journals between 1986 and 2010 at a bookshop here in Lagos. Although, it made a heavy dent on the pocket, I did not hesitate to acquire the veritable treasure trove which is an invaluable part of my modest library today. This is an example of the uncommon brilliance and industry of many a Nigerian academic. Surely, they deserve their reward right here on earth and government has a responsibility to create the requisite environment and provide the motivation for their talents to flower and flourish for the benefit of accelerated national development. The LASU-NIIA example suggests that there is indeed hope for a thriving intellectual enterprise in Nigeria.