Last Thursday, I had the honour of accompanying Professor Okechukwu Ibeanu, a distinguished professor of political science and former national commissioner of Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to the first international conference organized by the Department of Political Science, Bingham University, located at Abuja-Keffi Road, New Karu, Nasarawa State, about 26 kilometers from Nigeria’s federal capital city, Abuja. The theme was: ‘Political Instability and Crisis of Development in Africa’. Seasoned academics and civil society actors like Professors Adele Jinadu and Jibril Ibrahim were in attendance.
Founded in 2005 by the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA), the university was named after an English Canadian missionary, Rowland Victor Bingham, the man behind the formation of Sudan Interior Mission but later called Serving in Missions (SIM). He answered a divine call in 1893 to bridge the gap in missionary activities in the coast of Africa. Before his entrance, the gospel had not reached the hinterland. He worked with two partners -Walter Gowans and Thomas Kent, who died a year after they came to Nigeria. Not deterred, Bingham made some breakthroughs with the establishment of some stations in Patigi, Bida, Wushishi, Egbe, Paiko, Kpada, Kwoi, and Karu between 1901-1910. It was, however, the idea of making local evangelical movements independent from SIM that led to the establishment of Evangelical Church of West Africa (ECWA) in 1954 in Kagoro, Kaduna State. In 2011, the name was changed to ‘Evangelical Church Winning All’ with a different meaning but retaining the acronym, ECWA.
The Faculty of Architecture’s auditorium which served as the venue was set by the time we arrived. After the opening formalities that had welcome speeches from the head of department and the vice chancellor, the chairman of local organizing committee, Professor Gani Yoroms, a very conscientious scholar, whom I met last during the conference of Nigeria Political Science Association (NPSA) at the University of Calabar in 2021, set the ball rolling. The keynote speaker, Professor Mohammed Salih of the International Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, who was represented, wetted our appetite by citing global conflict trends published by Peace Research Institute Oslo which revealed that out of 59 active state-based conflicts in the world, 28 of them are in Africa, the highest among the regions of the world. He noted that political instability and underdevelopment in Africa has been compounded by Anthropocene and called for development of new alternative policies instead of tinkering with “business-as-usual solutions.” He urged African universities to take up pivotal roles in showing the way forward for Nigeria and new Africa.
After him, the lead paper presenter, Professor Adebayo Olukoshi of Institute of Governance, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, had the floor. For me, it was a lifetime opportunity of listening to an egghead whom I had cited some of his published works that helped in sharpening my analytical rigour. In fact, I gained useful insights from his materialist interpretation of structural adjustment in Africa while writing my doctoral thesis.
Looking warm, calm, relaxed, unassuming, and relatively young at 65, Olukoshi took us on a historical ride of the underlying drivers of Africa’s unending instability and crisis of development. Even without a prepared speech, he kept the informed audience spellbound. He stated that pluralism is not new to Africa and management of multiple identities had been a work in progress. But what infused crisis, according to him, was state formation by coercion instead of consent. The colonial masters used divide and rule tactics against the indigenous peoples so that their stay would endure; hence, they claimed that pre-colonial states were atavistic in nature and that foreign rule was necessary for civilizing the colonies.
He noted that the Kwame Nkrumah-led pan-Africanist struggle meant to unite Africans to end their balkanization occasioned by the colonial enterprise was not supported by other elites. They were against the muted unification and preferred consolidation of the newly independent states. Thus, post-colonial politics morphed into a consolidation of ethnic, regional, and other primordial cleavages. Many years later, those who opposed Nkruma’s idea regretted when the emerged political class became willing tools in the hands of colonial masters. The masses became engrossed with petty differences of diversity vis-à-vis their oppressors. The unity of the excluded and marginalized needed to put bad governments to flight became illusive.
Olukoshi further explained that misgovernance by successive ruling class engendered immiseration of the people and inadvertently built a counter army against the state. And desperate for reforms, the managers of African states resorted to the Bretton Woods institutions for wholesale introduction of market economy without welfare anchor. Yet, “no society that is cohesive is built on an entirely market economy.” He was of the view that: “A buccaneer economy erodes the capacity of the state.” He advised African leaders to take ahistorical methods to solve their problems and stop looking up to the West as “best practices exist nowhere.”
At a roundtable on ‘Election Crisis and Election Integrity in Africa’ convened by The Electoral Hub/The Electoral Forum chaired by Professor Jibril Ibrahim and moderated by Barr Festus Okoye, Prof. Okey Ibeanu noted that it is an irony that elections which are meant to resolve issues have become a source of crisis or crisis in itself because of breakdown of trust. He located the root of electoral crisis to African states which are divisive and crisis-prone, but the beauty of the crisis, for him, is that it is a juncture where changes can begin. A former INEC Director, Okechukwu Ndeche, expressed what he called democratic backsliding and urged the students to gird up their loins for the future. Other participants like Dr Regina Omo-Agege and Adagbo Onoja, the publisher of Intervention made useful contributions on how to ensure integrity of the electoral process.
In conclusion, Prof. Ibeanu cautioned against disillusionment with democracy, as questing for an alternative is dangerous. Generally, the conference harped on home-grown solutions to African problems. And to make progress, pluralism and diversity must be managed as they are integral part of every society.