But you must persist and press on to invite diverse turn-ons,like-minds, originalResearchers diligent enough to produce something evidently different and typically intellectual.Tacitly your best tents will be multidisciplinary journals of the philosophical,linguistic and social sciences'.Cultural dynamic alone is a raw material to evolve new concepts which can be proven beyond theoretical abstracts especially in the human society where the sheep and the goats abound.The likes of Pius Adesanmi your Late colleague at Carlton University should have been at home with this critical observation.Not to worry.Life is like that and Nigerian intellectuals joyfully ought to be in a continuing onus to contribute holistic knowledge for overall national development.How they have to originate , identify and synthesize this without participating in partisan politics shouldn't be a big deal.Though of course, if not formally consulted by government which may result in mediocrity....They have to strategically warn the nation and top echelons concerned to wake up and perform otherwise the consequences of inaction e.g PMB and chronic INSECURITY in the land,Power epilepsy despite billions of dollars hitherto expended since 1984 through 1999 till July 2019 and both town and gown are just coping unproductively and trying to solve the problem the usual impotent extremely naive individual way.Even the old NEPA offices,the campus, clinics, labs surgical theatres,libraries banks churches have languished in darkness more than Governors. Budget for renovation of governors offices &annual feeding budget at the Presidency contradicts with the fact that we have separate budget for the poor.Intellectuals should be able to extrapolate the discontent crisis of this ostentation and superfluous actions despite humongous allowances of these politicians haven.Hotels are even boasting of 24/7 automatic power supply in a Federal capital that gulped billions for the same amenity that ought to be available but eloped before everybody's eyes!How can academic research -Coordinator like Our beloved Pius,an anti-mediocrity sojourner attracts Big research funds and intelligentia to his home country ?How will his local and international colleagues function maximally without steady grid power and how will they able to use Internet uninterruptedly and report and account their works to the Foundations/donors which sponsored such laudable intellectual endeavour.I' m so surprised Nigerian intellectuals - except the like of The late Ayodele Awojobi inventor of Autonov 1,2 &3 and the 'academic from the womb',Toyin Falola who truncated his secondary education with tacit body language by his grandfather who saw it as a welcome solidarity and joined an aware civically literate Farmers Group, Agbekoya protest of the 60s ...Too bad I missed his recent lecture at UI- on protests.Nigerian academicshave been so dangerously needlessly silent on issues like the economies ,watching or technically participating in Grid Power production to the extent you can even Stop or Request to annul or Take over award of contracts germane to Just 7kw !unless we are working towards 30-40kw the funds expended till date should not warrant the masses with critical intellectuals to permit the wastage and In efficiency it has suffered on Nigerians life & work & GDP that could have been more copious here or there.What of tertiary education? Will the contents and pattern and ultimate expectations of this system (admired and revered certification majorly )deliver us from indefinite colonial mentality with its symptoms already rearing it's ugly heads in redundancy,un-employment , colonial language of instruction since 59 years of political Independence what of exam control, tests & measurement?What of ministerial appointments? Intellectuals should have expected the possibility of many round pegs in square holesWhat of our socio-political and national value system?There ought to have been books and monographs and journal papers shifting or guiding political venturesomeness of politicians from town or Gown or military constituencies.Blessedly there are local and foreign grants available for eligible applicants to pursue original works,'radical research' to use the word of a Turkish academic based in the USA. If amorphous extremism persists in knowledge enterprise in Nigerian ivory towers when or who will then appropriate the contents and direction of higher education for True liberation and effective participation in digital connect snd opportunities ascribed with it in the same global village our social and political destinies partly resides!How elsewill research prompts not continue to be in tandem with colonial paradigms which may not release us from irredeemably damaging alien values with which we have embraced culturally maligning values and unfortunately we are proud of staying cocooned.Gbemi Tijani MSTPaul Harris FellowConvener: CivicconcernFreedom Project FranchiseeIPs.
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Of Extremism and Crude Empericism
by Moses E. Ochonu
It seems that, in Nigeria, we're in love with extremism. In everything we do, we tend to embrace the extreme. When we abandon one form of extremism, we embrace another. For instance, we're either religious extremists or atheistic extremists, and we transition between extremes without making a stop in the middle.
Also, our extremisms are copycat extremisms, but we tend to take them to much higher heights than the people from whom we borrow the fads.
Take Nigerian academics. The other week, I was railing against the rigid, extreme, and counterproductive obsession with "theoretical framework" for its own sake. In the 1950s, there was a rejection of crude empiricism in the humanities and humanistic social sciences in the West. There was a concomitant move to theorize and conceptualize knowledge--what has since become known as the Theoretical Turn.
In the West, the theoretical turn has done its work, overplayed its relevance, and is now gradually on the way out, with scholars recognizing that the rush to theorize kills originality, sound research, and sound analysis while masking the absence of rigor. This realization has tempered theory with an insistence on good data, solid methodology, originality, sound, compelling analysis, and well developed arguments and contentions.
In Nigeria, we're late to the theoretical turn, but, fueled by the proverbial zeal of the convert, and just as Western academics are dialing back on the tyranny of high, esoteric theory, we are fetishizing it, even making it mandatory regardless of fit or relevance to particular topics and fields. Not only that, we have bastardized theory, believing that we can just borrow any random theory uncritically and impose it on our work to render it more fanciful and relevant.
As I pointed out in my earlier intervention, this ironically undermines the original insights and contributions of the work.
This is theoretical extremism, except of course that in most cases, those engaging in it do not even understand the theory they're invoking let alone how to productively use their work to engage it.
But that is not the only kind of extremism Nigerian academics are guilty of. The other extremism is the old, outmoded extremism of crude empiricism. The opposite of theoretical extremism.
Try engaging many Nigerian academics in discussions around concepts and theories and they immediately start referencing narrative, often experiential ones, or go to what they consider empirical examples or instantiations of the theoretical, ideological, or conceptual phenomena in question. They start telling stories or suggesting a practical, instrumental course of action.
They have little or no capacity for theoretical reflection because they're unable or unwilling to apply their minds to the difficult but rewarding intellectual exercise of deep, critical reflection on an elevated theoretical, philosophical, and conceptual level. Their only frame of reference is quotidian, empirical reality and crude instrumentality.
Provoke them to interrogate and deconstruct the philosophical and conceptual foundations of certain paradigmatic practices and discourses such as democracy, globalization, and human rights and they'll likely start talking about how Nigeria's political class is corrupt, how Obasanjo or Yar'Adua bungled this or that project, how such and such governor did this or that, how their local government chairman embezzled money to build a mansion, and how progressive academics should go into elective politics and change the system.
But the point of the conceptual interrogation and critical theoretical reflection is that you cannot change a system if you do not question and challenge its foundational conceptual, philosophical, and theoretical assumptions. In other words, changing a system begins at the level of ideas, in the realm of conceptual rethinking and deconstruction. But the point of philosophical and conceptual reflection is lost on them, as they reduce everything to empirical instrumentality and practical, everyday problem solving.
Many Nigerian academic interlocutors have a hard time grasping the idea that original theory flows from a sound empirical and analytical base (not vice versa) but that to take down a problematic theory or a set of conceptual/theoretical postulations you have to first critique the assumptions and claims that underpin them on a theoretical level before supplying empirical challenges to them to buttress your theoretical critique.
To return to my original point about extremism, then, it seems that if many Nigerian academics are not theoretical extremists of a crude, largely uninformed type, they're empirical extremists, reducing every phenomenon to its assumed empirical exemplars.
Lost on them is the fact that there is a place for sound empirical analysis and a place for deep, critical, original philosophical and theoretical reflection. The ability to marry and combine the two without privileging one or going to the extreme in either direction is the mark of good scholarship.
The discipline to know which topics and phenomena lend themselves to a deconstructive theoretical and conceptual approach and which ones require empirical and analytical rigor is an indicator of intellectual and scholarly maturity.
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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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