Professor Ayo Olukotun, Pioneer Chair, Oba Sir Sikiru Adetona Professorial Chair in Governance
It has been announced by the Olabisi Onabanjo University at Ago-Iwoye, Nigeria, that Professor Ayo Olukotun is to occupy the newly created Oba Adetona Chair. The announcement clearly delineated the objectives of the new academic Chair as following:
(i) Initiate and execute researches that have the capacity of proffering solutions to contemporary challenges and issues of governance at the local and global levels.
(ii) Promote scholarship, rigorous research activities and opportunities for collaboration with scholars and institutions committed to issues of governance.
(iii) Serve as springboard for attracting quality staff and students to the Department of Political Science through research output.
In view of his distinguished professorial and intellectual backgrounds, Professor Olukotun is a perfect fit for the honor, as he is a scholar who will energize the Olabisi Onabanjo University's intellectual community as well as to provide reasonable interventions in critical moments and, in the process, analyze the complex ways in which contemporary education is aligned with politics and development.
Axiomatically, it is not an exaggeration to underscore that Professor Olukotun's garment is a string of pockets, each serving as a container of contents of stellar significance. There are, indeed, those on politics, governance, democracy, institutions and all those listed in the aforementioned objectives. Most certainly, there is no need to elaborate on these totemic accolades. However, what is key and at the very core of the garment and its pockets is the overall mindset that connects a moral economy to a humanitarian order when it comes to Professor Olukotun. Exemplifying the foregoing is the relentlessness of his weekly pieces on one aspect or another of the character of the Nigerian nation.
Clearly, the honoree's moral economy has been connected to a moral compass and its community, via his own long list of recipients of his weekly bags of words, coupled with our own megaphone known as the USA-Africa Dialogue, the alternative Internet site that further broadcasts them far and wide. In totality, Professor Olukotun has created a popular moral movement that generates humanistic-cum-ethical ideas about the state of our being, our nationhood, our future. Without any shade of doubt, he is our leader, and it is befitting that the academy has recognized him transparently. We salute this decision and, in our own way, we publicly honor Professor Olukotun's brilliance and his sense of intellectual purpose.
With Professor Olukotun serving as the first occupant of the Oba Adetona Chair, I am more than assured that he will be a pathfinder, creating a new junction between the ideals of this great university and the humanistic concerns about the future of humanity in general. Furthermore, I am optimistic that new norms will congeal around him to serve as a glue that will bring together activists of the Left with pragmatists of the Right, without the exclusion of cultural jammers, with the overall purpose of discussing the interests, expectations and, above all, the contributions of citizenship. History, politics and nature, in the process, will spell out the structural changes we need in our humanistic conditions.
In appointing Professor Olukotun to this Chair, the Olabisi Onabanjo University has distinguished itself with a clear statement: that scholarship and humanitarian activism is, symbolically, a Siamese Twin that is needed on a serious campus to redefine our intellectual goals, retool our academic politics, and re-generate profound ideas to benefit academia and practical policies. In this important framework, the generous Oba Adetona and the gifted Professor Olukotun are agents of transformation to create a new space to promote and, in the final analysis, to enforce a new national scholarly ethos as well as orientation, coupled with stellar humanitarian ethics.
As colleagues, who admire high quality accmplishments of other colleagues, do please join me in saluting as well congratulating Professor Olukotun and, in unison, joyously exclaim loudly: this is the day that Olabisi Onabanjo University has made, and we shall rejoice in it!
Toyin Falola, November 1, 2016
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