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University Of Pretoria Appoints Falola As Extraordinary Professor Of Political Science
The University of Pretoria Council South Africa has just appointed the eminent scholar Toyin Falola as an Extraordinary Professor in the Department of Political Sciences from
where he will be seconded to the African Centre for the Study of the United States, University of Pretoria (ACSUS-UP). He has accepted the offer with a promise to immediately commence the responsibilities associated with this thoughtful appointment.
The conferment of this appointment on Falola reflects the deep-seated feeling of attachment that he, as an academic, and the University of Pretoria, have towards humanities generally, especially concerning the need to provide alternative perspectives to issues and emerging sociopolitical trends poised to shift erstwhile orientations widely held in the global knowledge economy. Counting Falola worthy of occupying this important role sends a strong signal of certainty that the University of Pretoria, alongside its various intellectual communities, have identified with what his academic engagements have triggered in intellectual conversations. This appointment will provoke the highest level of delight in many others.
Prof. Tinashe Nyamunda, Department of Historical and Heritage Studies, ACSUS
University of Pretoria, South Africa.
Falola has promised to be actively involved in the supervision of postgraduate students in the Department of Political Science and ACSUS-UP whenever assigned. A significant part of his academic career has been dedicated to a lifelong productive relationship with postgraduates whom he has mentored, directed, guided and even aided their academic progression through informed engagements and systematic evaluation of issues. Therefore, being accorded an opportunity to continue in this trajectory, especially by the University of Pretoria, renews his spirit and would most certainly get the best of his attention and dedication to service. It was stated in the letter of appointment that Falola is expected to partake in the research agenda and projects of the university, for which he considers himself ready in the course of his career progression too as an academic, first, and secondly, as an African whose lifelong ambition is to be an active participant in engagements that would catapult the continent to its deserved height in global affairs. Since academia has offered Falola this dreamed opportunity, he cannot emphasize enough how instrumental he will be in this regard.
The above would therefore facilitate the third possible responsibility that Pretoria has deemed fit for Falola as an Extraordinary Professor. Publication of research materials has always been an enduring desire of all academics so that their intellectual efforts would have a wider coverage of readership and, in the process, acceptability. In essence, research engagements that predominantly include Falola’s participation would be seriously worked on to ensure their publications with the notable and international publishing industry. It is a fundamental development that would bring to the academic environment of South Africa as a whole, and the University of Pretoria in particular, the anticipated intellectual advancement that projects not only the findings of seasoned scholars there but also the ones from collaborative and transdisciplinary works. As also stated, Falola is open to participation in seminars and conferences. This would substantially enhance knowledge transfers where exchanging ideas would further refine the university’s intellectual and moral principles as a community and then as individuals. Different conferences are held periodically at the University of Pretoria Future Africa campus to gather people together to deepen conversations around identified topics.
Falola has contributed substantially to the understanding of African politics since the precolonial times till date. Among his latest accomplishments are a series of handbooks that give a good theoretical and practical evaluation of situations to reach an informed position. His latest book published in 2022, Decolonizing African Studies: Knowledge Production, Agency, And Voice, offers a rough-hewn examination of African studies with its seemingly eternal glorification of its Eurocentric counterpart, apparently doing epistemic damage to the African identity. The thematic focus of the work is to break the bondage of inferiority that has compelled the African intellectuals to underutilize their indigenous knowledge system and structure, which are generally expected to engineer a resolute demographic of Africans who would challenge the domination of others that have held them in perpetual bondage. In ways completely interlinked with the South African political experience, the book x-rays the negative consequences of imperialism and how its effects have crawled into the mental department of the people, silently disparaging their thought processes for reasons that would never benefit Africans. The book argues that decolonization is a promising way out for the people.
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In 2022, Falola coedited a handbook titled The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian History, where contributors explored different themes about Nigerian history. The book features contributions from various scholars of history and politics who provide a more robust academic engagement that highlights a timeline of historical experience that has been hitherto poorly organized, distorted or manipulated for purposes known best to the writers. The Nigerian history, they discovered, has always been painted in revisionist colour where the tones of invading colonizers have been given superordinate preferences. Therefore, this has necessitated that many innocent Nigerians and, by implication, the global audience seeking a true history of the people have been fed with distorted information that dictates their relationship with the people. To this extent, many sociopolitical and even academic involvements of the affected have been determined by the revisionist information with which their mental faculty has been programmed. In collaboration with the other scholars involved in the publication, they can situate the good Nigerian history within its deserved position in the intellectual space and filter out the over-saturated misinformation previously created and shared by those interested in Africa’s financial and strictly exploitative gains.
University of Pretoria
The Palgrave Handbook of African Education and Indigenous Knowledge, produced in 2020, follows a familiar trajectory of protest culture against the individuation of African epistemology. It reveals firstly that the education associated with African people in the contemporary time is designed to honour the structure of those inherited from colonial experiences. To that extent, the indigenous knowledge systems and their identified sociological responsibilities have been impaired by the new ones and handicapped by them. As such, the implantation of the Western ideas of humanity and personhood, aided, for example, by the application of Western epistemic legacies, has forced the African minds to conceive of themselves from the lens of their erstwhile predators, which among other things, contaminates the original sense of being to an irreparable degree. As such, the average African has reservations against nearly all African philosophies, ideologies and even perspectives on living. This book, therefore, traces the indigenous African knowledge, its production and distribution methods and the sociocultural import linked with it. This, therefore, helped in reinforcing the assumption that African epistemic systems are not inferior, and neither are they inadequate. Their challenge has always come from the inferiorization of their heritages for no particular reason.
In 2019, Falola co-edited a book titled Oppression and Resistance in Africa and The Diaspora, and the material refracted the various experiences of oppression that the generality of African people witnessed in their recent history. Of particular interest is the suppressive and oppressive experience that the South African people were subjected to during the agonizing years of apartheid. The pains and anguish people faced are best imagined as they witnessed the catastrophic collapse of their indigenous structures both at the level of observable infrastructure and moral systems. To the extent that the Black South Africans were forced to subdue their sense of self and, in exchange, embrace the irreconcilable ideas of the predatory civilization, so much that they had their humanity downgraded and squashed with callous indignity. They could not have access to economic resources, and every of their potential is drained at the corridor of wastage. However, they stood up to these people and also challenged the superstructure. In essence, the book x-rays the various dehumanizing experiments and experiences that these people were subjected to, evaluating their various styles of protest against all these questionable moral behaviours. Their protest led to the actualization of freedom and opened the door to identity reclamation, which gave them the anticipated respite. As such, Falola’s works are foregrounded for their political and historical importance.
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Meanwhile, his coedited work, Africa and Globalization: Challenges of Governance and Creativity, produced in 2018, explored a different but thematically connected subject matter. It seems Africa is caught in the ebbs of restless yet rapid globalization, so much their leadership struggles to consider what it meant by development and how their conception of it would reflect what they face as a people. It is observed, for example, that from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the technological development that introduced internet culture, Africans have always experienced one form of destabilization. Consider, for example, that when Europe accomplished Industrial Revolution, Africa was being ransacked by them either for the enslavement of the people or for the planting of colonization expeditions. This would eventually be overcome by the fast-moving globalization project, which still meets the people at the spot of leadership quagmire. In essence, governance has been grossly ineffective as they have had many complications to deal with in their postcolonial time. This has affected their creativity in all ramifications, and the book offers an insightful perspective to enrich the knowledge community. It is a success given that it received wider acceptability from the reading public.
Despite his exploration of the above topics, a book produced in 2018 titled Exploitation and Misrule in Colonial and Postcolonial Africa has been expository writing on the exploitation of Africa and Africans, this time not from the staple of predatory civilizations but the active participation of the African leaders. In all parts of the ex-colonized civilizations, Africa appears to be the most tormented with visionless leadership. That leaders beleaguer them without any business with leadership has increased their chances of underdevelopment as they have no clear-cut roadmap or blueprint for their collective development. It, therefore, seems from their very attitudes that they consider first the accumulation of public resources for their provincial interests. This has inevitably led to the maneuvering of their systems to assuage the leaders of the moral and ideological punishment they deserve for their unpatriotic engagement against their motherland.
An example is that African leaders expend fortunes to scuttle the process in almost all political circles so they would be favoured in the long run. And the question comes clearly to mind to what extent would an individual truly be ready to sacrifice when they are expected to offer selfless services? The irony in the idea that leaders are extravagant in Africa would therefore reveal reasons for continuing exploitation and misrule that is now characteristic of Africa.
These are part of Prof Falola’s pedigree which he will be bringing to the University of Pretoria to advance the frontiers of knowledge, improve visibility and internationalization for the African Centre for the Study of the United States, the Department of Political Sciences, the Faculty of Humanities and the University of Pretoria at large.
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The Chairman of the Federal Civil Service Commission ( FCSC), Prof. Tunji Olaopa, on Wednesday gave insight into a path that could be taken for national development.
Olaopa spoke at the Department of Political Science, University of Ibadan, during the valedictory lecture and the celebration of the 70th birthday of a Professor of Political Science , Adebayo Okunade. Olaopa spoke on “Is Leadership Sufficient for National Transformation in Nigeria? (Bayo Okunade, Leadership Question and Political Science Scholarship at Ibadan)”.
The celebrant, Prof. Adebayo Okunade, during the occasion.
Prof. Tunji Olaopa having a handshake with Prof. Adebayo Okunade.
The professor of public administration who paid glowing tribute to Prof. Okunade as his teacher with a profound influence at Olivet Baptist High School and the University of Ibadan also used the occasion to critique his theorisation about leadership, national transformation and his “arbitrary privileging of the democratic administration over other possible regimes.”
To Olaopa , rehabilitating Okunade’s theory of leadership out of what he identified as a certain “quandary” requires first the undermining of the intrinsic assumption in Okunade’s theory, about the leader as a change agent with singular capacity to make people do what is needed.
According to Olaopa, 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. To Olaopa, this understanding of political leadership stifles the significance of the relationship between leadership, social change and infrastructural development.
He said: ” 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, making elite consensus required to craft the philosophical construct and principles underpinning the Nigeria of the future.
Participants at the event at the University of Ibadan,Oyo State on Wednesday
“The character of the political class defined by neopatrimonialism and prebendal proclivities further compounds the dynamic making the chances of a patriotic and inclusive development social formation problematic”.
Consequently, Olaopa notes that an alternative articulation of the nature and role of leadership can be found in the change space model of leadership. To him, the change space model is founded on the point that ‘ “organizational and social change emerges when there is acceptance, authority (and accountability) and ability to allow and catalyze ongoing as well as episodic adjustments’ (Andrews et al, 2010: 3). ”
“In other words, the change space is supposed to facilitate the capability of the institutions and systems of government to encounter and engage changes while factoring in contextual pressures and circumstances. Every change requires a leader as change agent who harvests the synergy of a critical mass of other change champions and agents to bring in values such as competences, resources and contexts. One channeled to facilitate genuine and transformational change through a problem-solving approach.
“This change space model of leadership helps us to move away from the idea of a leader as a strong man with singular capacity to get things done, to catalyze the dynamics of the development process sufficiently to achieve desired national transformation.
“With the change space conceptual framework, we are also able to make sense about the relationship between ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ as the process of influencing and mobilizing ideas, resources and acumen to deliver desired development outcomes. Within the framework of the change space model, the political leadership is given the force required to push for progress within a distributed and multi-level leadership arrangement.
“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 this team of leaders in their own right, so they could achieve optimal productivity, performance and impact, that will deliver the change.This is how I chose to weigh in on the Okunade ‘big challenge’ of political leadership in Nigeria which raises the seminal question of how to get a leader who has the capacity to build and motivate a change space populated by a mixed multitude of political, religious, social, technocratic, bureaucratic, and civil leadership corps.
“It is therefore safe to hypothesize that while a leader is key and critical factor in a nation’s transformation journey, it does not by him or herself alone resolve the myriads of predicaments and problems that bedevil the state and society. A leader as a change agent therefore requires a leadership framework that is distributed and multilevel to be able to engage with the various dynamic and challenges that the state faces”, he said.
According to Olaopa, there is the need to deepen the conversation on leadership to enable stakeholders to appreciate the ” context of mis-governance and how to outline a way out. In thinking about leading and leadership, we must consider it a dependent variable that cannot be isolated from overall governance context.”
Olaopa noted: “Prof. Okunade’s idea aligns with the conventional sense that a leader who will achieve significant transformation will fit into the strong man theory of leadership.The point that I have been making is that every leader is situated within a context of practice, which cannot be personalized nor contextualized all around an individual no matter how charismatic and heroic. The real heroic element derives from the capacity to influence, inspire and empower others – teams and groups – to peak performance. As James McGregor Burns argued, the transformational leadership practice is one in which the leader and followers are united in the collective dynamic of influencing one another to increasingly higher levels of morality and motivation.
“Leadership in the change space is a distributed and shared functionality across teams, networks, groups, coalitions, etc. The issue is therefore not who leads but how leadership occurs in actual strategic actors. In political theory, the developmental state model provides the leverage for example for the leadership to harvest and build internal experts’ capacities with emphasis on meritocracy as the defining principle to elevate the public service bureaucracy to become a part of the game changer coalition.”
To Olaopa, “Prof. Bayo Okunade’s theory of political leadership—a systematic 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. This is a significant 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.
“In celebrating Professor Adebayo Okunade the septuagenarian, we have to situate him fully within a continuum of excellence that has at one end the scholarly genius of Billy Dudley, Essien-Udom, Peter Ekeh, Bayo Adekanye, Tunde Adeniran, John Ayoade, Larry Ekpebu, Alex Gboyega, Fred Onyeoziri, Jimi Adisa, Eghosa Osaghae, Adigun Agbaje, Rotimi Suberu, and the host of other stellar personalities and scholars that lit up the credentials of the Department of Political Science and at the other end the aspiring scholarly enthusiasm of the newer faces that are eager to take up the intellectual torch and run with the gems of political science scholarship.
“The beautiful thing about intellectual continuum is that those who have gone before, and the ‘oldies’ who are still reflecting on the political situations and circumstances of the Nigerian state, have laid down a framework of theoretical argumentations that those coming behind have a responsibility to invalidate, rehabilitate or reinforce in order to keep refreshing our understanding of Nigeria and her political processes and structures. Prof. Bayo Okunade’s body of scholarly works becomes a testament to a remarkably erudite mind that still speaks to us from the trenches of critical observations and empirical researches about Nigeria and what she could still be”.
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