Category: Commentaries

Professor Bayo Okunade has crossed into the seventh bracket; he is now effectively a septuagenarian—that state of hoariness where he joins the gang of the sages who have been given the capacity to connect divinity with humanity in terms of wholeness. Seventy is a weighty number in spiritual and cultural terms. In spiritual terms, seven and ten elevates sacredness in numerical reckoning both for the Israelites, the ancient Egyptians and the Yoruba. Seven indicates perfection and ten signals completeness. Must be the reason why Psalms 90 says “The years of our life are seventy.” This makes seventy years a most notable year that represent fullness—the time of reckoning and deep reflection and appreciation. And yet, for the Yorùbá, in terms of the chronological reckoning as àgbà, àgbàlagbà, arúgbó, we also see why seventy is just another chance at consolidating a life well-spent.

That he would eventually become a teacher was something that was almost inevitable. Being born to parents who were teachers could not possibly have been rosy for any young child. Teachers, especially those who have strong cultural knowledge about parenting and child upbringing, could only be seen back then as efficient taskmasters. They are those who were already seen as exemplary and who, by the force of societal expectations, also expect their children to take after them exemplarily. So, when he resumed his teaching trajectory at the Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, it was a critical juncture that would not only lay the foundation of his political science teaching and scholarship—he was the Government teacher. It was also the point at which a young, suave and brilliant Government teacher began to enlighten me particularly as a green-eye Aáwé lad about a possible future in political science tutelage.

This is why, on this occasion, I am celebrating Prof. Okunade’s in terms of the consummation of his stature in the political science scholarship in Nigeria. A brief historical note will serve the purpose of properly situating the significance of Okunade. The emergence of political science in Nigeria was chequered by two significant issues. The first was the colonial administration and its fear of a possible emergence of an ideologically sophisticated student body. The second reason for the delay in the establishment of political science as a discipline was a similar fear by the nationalist elite who suspected that political science will radicalize the Nigerian masses and expose the elite’s standpoint.

By the time Okunade would be completing his undergraduate and graduate studies, he was already getting drawn into the foundational curriculum and pedagogical issues that would shape the political science teaching orientation and scholarship at Ibadan, and provide the stimulus for redirection. From independence to the Nigerian civil war and the aftermath of military incursion into politics, Nigeria was already going through a flood of postcolonial national issues, replicated across Africa, that demanded that political science needed to be taught differently. Bayo Okunade the student was a witness to these curricular unfolding and growth. And Bayo Okunade the teacher was eminently situated at the preeminent citadel at the University of Ibadan, that was to serve as the bastion of the political science education in Nigeria, as part of a critical mass of change agents who had been saddled with the responsibility of bringing political science theorization to bear on the sociopolitical and national experiences of the postcolonial Nigerian state.

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This scholarly enthusiasm attending the deployment of social science scholarship to the understanding of the Nigerian national experiences is demonstrated in his first set of over fifty publications, from 1985 to 2010, and the legion of others thereafter. These publications range from local government structure, public policy, public bureaucracies and human rights to foreign relations, electoral processes, constitutionalism, democracy and democratization. This entire corpus signals the urgency of mastering the conceptual, intellectual and empirical bases of the symptoms and morbidities of the Nigerian state and its multiple consequences on and for Nigerians. It was inevitable that the Department of Political Science would be at the forefront of the radical discourse on revolutionary possibilities that ensured. For instance, that a staple of our intellectual and academic learning was the Marxian political economy perspectives on the postcolonial frameworks and trajectories of the Nigerian state was inevitable. Dependency and World System theories and its centre-periphery structure made strenuous efforts that provided the basis for a class analysis of the Nigerian society, especially given the capitalist accumulation enabled by colonialism and its deepening by the postcolonial comprador elements. As the radical fervour of the Marxist-Leninist revolutionary scholarship started to wane on the rubbles of the collapse of the communist Soviet Union, it became increasingly important that political philosophers, political scientists and other committed scholars began to explore alternative theoretical resources and praxis that could facilitate a critical understanding of the structural, institutional and historical bases of Nigeria’s federal system and its hobbled economic development which had from then till now made national development a mirage.

This is the critical defining juncture that opens up the fundamental significance of Prof. Okunade’s social constructivist theoretical framework which enabled a formidable research contribution to the body of scholarly knowledge about political engineering as it relates to Nigeria’s sociopolitical dynamics. With Naija Marxism and the Nigerian Left floundering, and the Nigerian federalism in a lopsided constitutional mire, the next best thing on the table was the idea of restructuring. In the absence of the possibility of a revolution, how do we restructure the political structure of the postcolonial Nigerian state that has been hobbling national development, nation-building and democratic governance for more than six decades since independence? Prof. Okunade has not minced words on this issue: it cannot work. According to him, “any system that is not totally off the mark can work. It takes people for a system to work. For a system to work, there has to be consistency with the construed norms and supportive ethos that will make it work. If we change the system, even with restructuring or whatever, how much of what were on ground are we substantially complying with? And then we change to another system. They are the same thing.”

On the contrary, a much more fruitful course of discourse should be on leadership, and how it could be deployed in facilitating the emergence of a well-ordered society in Nigeria. For sixty-four years, it would seem that Nigeria has been locked in a national question that has not produced any significant governance and development answer by which the lives of Nigerians could be transformed. And, to quote Albert Einstein, insanity is precisely to keep doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different result. And such a society, for Okunade, would revolve around the critical variables like the rule of law, constitutionalism, human rights and local governance. These requisite institutions and their fundamental ethos make for an efficient public administration that backstop good governance and our idea of a society that functions efficiently for the betterment of the citizens. The responsibility to pull all these variables together in the service of a vision of a society that governs for her citizens rests squarely on the shoulders of a good political leadership. Such a leadership must be, on the one hand, morally and technically good; and on the other, effective in terms of governance programmes and policies.

Beyond Chinua Achebe’s announcement and analysis of the leadership predicament, Prof. Okunade provided a fundamental iteration of the political leadership as a “big challenge.” This challenge is grounded on a more empirically sophisticated frameworks of the variables involved in bad leadership and the consequences that have kept Nigerians impoverished since independence. And that empirical political analysis has been further demonstrated by the inability of the continent itself to throw up a critical mass of leadership figures that is able to win the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership for four consecutive years. The transformational qualities that the Mo Ibrahim Award requires of the recipient is what Prof. Okunade infuses into his own deep analysis of what leadership requires. The worth of a leadership, as Daren Acemoglu and James Robinson demonstrates, in Why Nations Fail (2012), derives from whether their decision facilitates the emergence of extractive or participatory institutions.

The issue is critically about “how decisions actually get made, who gets to make them, and why those people decide to do what they do.” And then, there is the equally fundamental issue of how these decision aggregate in the design and operational function and optimality of public institutions.

What we see, between Okunade’s concession to political leadership, and Acemoglu and Robinson’s concession to institutionalism, is the agelong discourse on the relationship between agency and structure. Yet, both are caught in an empirical grip of counterexamples that undermine their theses. On the one hand, the authors of Why Nations Fail are hard-pressed to explain why China has kept progressing economically under successive authoritarian regimes (same can be said about Singapore under Lee Kuan Yew, as well as other Asian Tigers) while India’s progress might be hard to attribute to its putative democratic leaders. On the other hand, Prof. Okunade’s thesis also need to explain the successes of China and Singapore whose leadership demonstrated governance effectiveness without the accompanying ethical imperative.  

To rehabilitate Prof. Okunade’s theory of leadership out of this quandary requires first that we undermine the intrinsic assumption in Okunade’s theory, about the leader as a change agent with singular capacity to make people do what is needed. This is evident, in Okunade’s inaugural lecture, from his assessment of leadership activities from Tony Blair and George Bush to Olusegun Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua. I think that this understanding of political leadership stifles the significance of the relationship between leadership, social change and infrastructural development. Indeed, it puts a lot of over-extended pressure on a political leader in terms of the expectation of magical transformation by a wave of the leader’s wand that turns poverty to prosperity. We must therefore ask, legitimately, if this understanding of political leadership is sufficient for national transformation. This question is justified when we take cognisance of Nigeria’s unique political sociology and how it throws up compromised leaders who are forced to play bad politics with the commonwealth to hold on to power. There is a one-to-one relationship between this skewed political sociology and the construction of elite nationalism in Nigeria.

An alternative articulation of the nature and role of leadership can be found in the change space model of leadership. The change space model is meant to facilitate the capability of the institutions and systems of government to encounter and engage changes while factoring in contextual pressures and circumstances. It therefore depends on a distributed and multilevel understanding of leadership that requires, (a) a political leader as the lead change agent, and (b) a critical mass of change agents who can bring abilities/competences, resources and context together in facilitating genuine and transformational change through a problem-solving approach.

Apart from helping us move away from the idea of a leader as a change agent with a singular capacity, it also proposes the understanding of leadership as what influences the difference between a change that is intended for development, and the one that is actualized through infrastructural development. A change leadership is the one that initiate the change space and motivates it efficiently to achieve desired transformation. With this model, therefore, we have a conceptual framework to make sense of the relationship between “leader” and “leadership” in understanding how the change space through leaders and the leadership dynamics that mobilize people, ideas, resources and infrastructures in order to be able to catalyze change. The leadership is therefore expected to: (a) build coalition for change; (b) assemble a team with sufficient IQ, wisdom and commitment to initiate, implement and deliver the change; and (c) grant required authority, incentive and support, with accountability, to these team of leaders in their own right, so they could achieve optimal productivity, performance and impact, that will deliver the change.

It would be interesting to see what a change space model of Nigeria’s political trajectory would have yielded if interjected into Prof. Okunade’s analysis of leadership. More worthwhile is what the idea of distributed and multilevel leadership framework could mean for our understanding of impactful politics and national development. This in my assessment of Prof. Okunade’s “big challenge” of the political leadership in Nigeria—a leader who has the capacity to build and motivate a change space populated by different levels of leadership frameworks, political, religious, social, bureaucratic and civil. It is therefore safe to hypothesize that while a leader is a key and critical factor in transforming a state, it does not by itself resolve the myriads of predicaments and problems that bedevil the Nigerian state and society.

To conclude: Prof. Bayo Okunade stands in a continuum of scholarly excellence that has at one end the scholarly genius of Billy Dudley, E. U. Essien-Udom, Peter Ekeh, Bayo Adekanye, John Ayoade, Tunde Adeniran, Busari Adebisi, Larry Ekpebu, Alex Gboyega, Femi Otubanjo, Fred Onyeoziri, Jimi Adisa, Kunle Amuwo, Eghosa Osaghae, Adigun Agbaje, OBC Nwolise, Rotimi Suberu, and the host of other stellar personalities and scholars that lit up the credentials of the Department of Political Science. Prof. Bayo Okunade’s theory of political leadership—a systematic and empirically sophisticated articulation of Chinua Achebe’s diagnosis of the Nigeria problem—unarguably presents a research outline that speaks to the need for more theoretical and practical engagement with the leadership phenomenon in a postcolonial context like Nigeria. I see this as a critical challenge to the political science scholarship in Nigeria; the challenge of articulating theoretically feasible and nuanced understanding of what ails the Nigerian state, her leaders and leadership and her citizens.

• Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration & Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja

(Being Prof. Adebayo Okunade’s 70th Birthday Anniversary and Valedictory Lecture Delivered at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, on Wednesday, 12th of March, 2025)