Moses:

 

The most productive argument will be to assume that many won't disconnect! Society and people do not just shift. Something must first shift before they respond. Thus, we have to work out a new way of thinking that will accommodate that, which may be unfortunate.

I have been to Jos and Kaduna where making the disconnect argument to our colleagues may not even have any appeal. If you wake up in the city, driving to work to see which road is taken by the Christians and another by the Muslims, the first thing they do when they get to the office and return back home is to pray. Even as an External Examiner in such places, I joined them in that prayer. And in the classrooms, they pray, and they prayed for me, and they work faith into their presentations. I listen and process to understand where they are coming from. Not that I agree with them, but that I understand why they do what they do.

 

I know how to make the theoretical arguments about the disconnect, but at the same time, I know that in practice it won't happen.

 

 

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

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http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

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From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:40 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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TF,

 

We get all that. Some of my own family members get scandalized when I tell them that they're too quick to blame the devil/witchcraft and to resort to prayers for problems that are physical and require taking concrete action. That's not the point. In our work, we reckon with the existence and influence of that worldview, which cuts across all of Africa's religious traditions. The point is that an academic should not uncritical substitute a religious dogma founded on faith and unverifiable supernatural truth claims for a rigorous, analytical engagement with such claims. An academic who is a Pentecostal Christian, devout Muslim, or Ifa practitioner should compartmentalize his religious beliefs when doing academic work. Yes, all writings are autobiographical, but when we say that, we are talking about subconscious bias and the ways in which our socializations seep into our approaches subconsciously. It does not refer to the conscious certitude of passing off unverifiable spiritual and other truth claims as "factual." There're  probably Western academics who believe in alien abductions but will they try to publish that belief in a journal or present it as fact in an academic lecture? They know better than to try to do that. Even if they want to write on alien abductions, they know that the academic protocol is to maintain a critical, scholarly distance from the subject/object of inquiry and analysis.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 7:25 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

I am beginning to enjoy this debate.

What is "factual"? At Ibadan, my city, and yours, witchcraft is "factual"!!  The mission of Christ is "factual". It is the fact of faith, not the fact of science.

Years ago, in the company of others, when I told my mom that I did not believe in witchcraft, I sent her into panic and she began to look for remedies for me to stay alive. I don't believe that there are witches, but have the witches now left Ibadan because I don't believe in them?

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:13 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

This message is from an external sender. Learn more about why this matters.

 

And, by the way, yes, a "fundamentalist Christian" can win the Nobel Prize in Medicine but certainly not by advancing his religious beliefs as his oeuvre. Yes, we need an epistemology that engages with prevalent beliefs in supernatural causation in Africa because these beliefs are pervasive, inform devotional practices, and animate and constrain attitudes towards politics in African countries. That epistemology is already underway, with many scholars such as Nimi Wariboko, Obadare, Peter Gaschere, Elias Bombgba, Olupona, Asonze Uka, yourself, Are Adogame, and others already engaging critically with that world. However, it would be academically suicidal if these scholars where to attempt to pass off an uncritical endorsement of Nigerian religious beliefs as "factual" in the most important academic lecture of their career or in a book.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 5:11 AM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Oga TF,

 

As a person of faith myself I have absolutely no problem with people believing in whatever they choose. That is their right. However, there are two issues here. One is that this was an inaugural lecture delivered to an academic community and later self-published as an academic book. An inaugural lecture is supposed to be the capstone of a professor's research enterprise and academic contributions, which if not publishable, should at least be worthy of submission for peer review. Can this mishmash of Pentecostal and African traditional religious beliefs be submitted for academic review in any serious academic culture?

 

Secondly, here is what Nwolise wrote: "The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual." The Professor of political science is passing off his witchcraft claims as factual. He is both professing and affirming witchcraft remote controls and the instrumental and causative agency of malevolent spirits as factual, but what is the basis for this? Where's the proof, the demonstration, the logic. I would not have a problem if he had stated that he was outlining the prevalent beliefs in Nigeria. No, he advanced these unproven and unprovable beliefs and spiritual opinions as factual. This is what I expect to hear and hear all the time from the pulpit in my church. I've never heard it in an academic lecture unless the academic is quoting or paraphrasing someone in order to analyze the claims or beliefs. Professor Nwolise would have delivered his spiritual thesis to an audience of Pentecostal Christians. Conjectures, faith, opinions, and beliefs cannot substitute for academic rigor, scholarly skepticism, and analytical tentativeness and distance in matters that are beyond empirical proof and rest on faith, piety, and belief.

 

Some of my Facebook friends posited that I should at least give the man credit for putting his imagination to good use and for giving us something in the magical realism genre. But the man is not a novelist. He is not even a Professor of literature. My favorite fictional niche is actually magical realism, two of my favorite novels being Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. I also love Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons. But these are works of fiction and folklore, not academic lectures/books purporting to explicate and solve a problem in society as Nwolise claims to be doing in regard to human (in)security.

 

The full title of Nwolise's inaugural lecture is: Is Physical Security Alone Enough For the Survival, Progress and Happiness of Man?"~O.B.C Nwolise- (Inaugural Lecture 2012/13, University of Ibadan). 

 

By the way, what does Nwolise proffer as a solution to his claimed ubiquity and multivalent instrumentality of evil spirits? He says Nigeria needs to take "spiritual security" and "Strategic Spiritual Intelligence" seriously and that Nigerians should counter this ubiquity of spiritual threats with what he calls "Divine Security Insurance."

 

At any rate, several of my Facebook interlocutors raised the questions you're raising here and I will save myself some effort by reproducing my responses to them below.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa, Believe whatever you want. I am a Christian and believe similarly as you. It is your right and prerogative. Other people, including atheists, have their own opinions and beliefs. Find a church or the appropriate venue to peddle and profess those beliefs. Beliefs and mere opinions are not admissible as factual in academic discourse, period. I can believe if I want that lizards are capable of giving birth to humans. I will probably find an audience somewhere that is receptive to it, and I have the right to that opinion. But I would be laughed off the stage in a serious academic culture were I to try to pass it off in a lecture as factual. Piety and belief have their place. Academic rigor and analysis have their place as well.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa but how can we proceed when there is no verifiable, empirical basis to do so? If I come to your church, the Christian that I am will take your word for your "empirical experience with witches." But in my terrain of academics, how can you convince me except by merely inviting me to accept your word for it. Academia has its rules and that is not how it works. The gentleman in question is a professor and was giving an academic lecture to an academic audience. And yes, as an academic theory or argument, the quote deserves nothing but ridicule. He should have been laughed off that stage, but I'm sure they clapped for him and praised him. However, if he had expressed those sentiments in a church, I would not have ridiculed him at all.

 

To the Facebook follower who posted a link to an academic study of witchcraft, I had this to say.

 

 

This is a study of witchcraft. Academics have been studying witchcraft and associated beliefs for centuries. But they don't advance them as factual. They maintain a critical distance from the belief system and practice. They don't pass off these unproven and unprovable phenomena, beliefs and practices as "factual." They don't lionize or legitimize the beliefs.

 

 

 I don't have the energy to even engage this type of academic, but you mentioned opinions, which we all have. He wasn't just expressing an opinion on Facebook or to his friends in a conversation. This is his inaugural professorial lecture, which should be publishable or at least worthy of submission to a journal in his field. Tell me, can this paper be submitted to any journal let alone be considered for publication in a journal in his field? Is it even worthy of an academic debate? Can it provoke academic debate? I am a practicing Christian. I have my beliefs in that regard. But I will not deliver an ACADEMIC lecture at a university, let alone a professorial inaugural, that is basically a rehash of my Christian or theological beliefs. If I desire a forum and platform to propagate a theological theory of spiritual causation, I will look for a religious audience, preferably in my church. I have no problem with people believing what they believe, but religious beliefs or opinions or convictions do not constitute academic theories. He actually says in the excerpt that his witchcraft scenarios are "factual," as actual as the science behind TV transmission and remote control technology. Where is the proof for this? Where is a demonstration of this? In scholarship, you do not make claims or assertions without demonstrating them. I am a little disappointed that you're dignifying a mishmash of traditional African religious and Pentecostal spiritualist explanations as a social scientific theory. The man is a political scientist for crying out loud. I can say a tree can learn a language. I have a right to that opinion but would I not be laughed off the stage and humiliated if I were to go before an audience of academics and express that opinion and posit it as fact?

 

All peoples have their beliefs, superstitions, metaphysical claims, and cosmologies. The difference is that you don't find their professors of political science delivering academic lectures claiming, without proof, that they are factual.

 

 

Scholars study all phenomena, including religious and superstitious beliefs but they maintain a scholarly distance and/or engage critically with them. They don't advance such unproven and unprovable phenomena as "factual" without proof or verifiable methodological demonstration. And stop with excusing poor, inept, and uncritical scholarship with claims of a decolonizing agenda. That's how some Nigerian academics who cannot write simple English sentences will claim that their poor writing skills are a form of rebellion against the white man's colonizing language and that they are trying to Africanize and decolonize African scholarship.

 

Anyway, perhaps I should not waste energy and time on nonsense and heed the advice of my brother, Professor Adeeko, below.

 

 

Adeleke Adeeko Moses Ochonu My friend, please leave witch hunters alone! Why bother to debate people who choose to equate the being of electronic remote devices and the being of beliefs. How can you begin to understand the structure of a moral framework that cedes complete control to forces beyond understanding, an allegedly moral (?) system that accepts as justified the killing of children as witch, a system that fails to question the sexism that restricts witch convictions to women, a system that equalizes belief and proof. Moses, please leave these people alone. How can you talk to them?

 

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 7:04 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Question:

 

Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:

"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."

 

Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?

 

And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor".  The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.

 

There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.

 

The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.

 

In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

 

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

 

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

 

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

 

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

 

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

 

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Oh, Brother Agozino Biko!

You just went off on a wild chase in your vain attempt to refute Prof. Ochonu's post, thereby exposing your total ignorance of both Prof. Obadare's highly acclaimed book and Prof. Osisioma Basil Chinedu Nwolise's very strange "theory of strategic spiritual intelligence." I've copied from Prof. Nwolise's CV and pasted below the exact text of the abstract of a book manuscript he says he's writing on this subject to give you some idea of what he means.

"Introduction To Strategic Spiritual Intelligence":  This book presents spiritual intelligence as a compliment to emperical (sic) intelligence.  It challenges Sun Tzu's thesis that foreknowledge can not be got from ghosts and spirits.  The work is aimed at terminating inelligence (sic) garthering (sic) through torture, quicken investigation, and promote human security." 

I first heard about Prof. Osisioma's bizarre thesis in October 2011 when he spoke on "Intelligence and National Security" to Course 20 Participants (students) at the National Defense College, Abuja where I had just arrived two weeks earlier on sabbatical leave. The hot exchanges between me and the guest lecturer during Q & A were so brutal that it became my first full introduction to the students (who were mostly Army Colonels or equivalent ranks in the other Services) and the other Directing Staff (faculty members--mostly Brigadier-Generals and Major-Generals--or equivalent ranks, and two other university professors) many of whom were clearly impressed with the "erudite scholar." 

I later learnt that Prof. Nwolise had been giving the same lecture and promoting his "strategic spiritual intelligence" to rapturous applause three years in a row (Each cohort numbers about 135 students, including those from 10-15 other African countries). It's worth noting that many in the audience were/are notorious for burying live rams and white cocks in "aladura" churches and Alfas' shrines/mosques as part of their arsenal to ward off evil forces (witches being top on the list) during their board promotion interviews! 

The Professor is also propagating this same "theory" among the dozens of PhD students he's supervising all over the country. In addition to the nine PhDs he has supervised (by 2016), this is what he wrote in his CV: 

"Currently, I am supervising five Ph.D. students in the Department of Political Science, and four Ph.D. students in the Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies (IPSS), University of Ibadan. I am also supervising five Phd students on part-time basis in Igbinedion University, Okada.  Between 2007 and 2015, I successfully supervised five Phd Students in the Department of Political Science of Igbinedion University. I also co-supervised a Phd student at Covenant University."

Regrettably, Prof. Nwolise isn't on this forum to defend himself, but in one of my post-sabbatical posts in 2013, I wrote about concerns in some quarters in Nigeria about some professors awarding "Pure Water PhDs" as part of the factors responsible for the deteriorating standards of scholarship in Nigeria's higher ed institutions. I make no such accusation against Professor Nwolise, but I'm not sure what to make of an academic who proudly claims to be supervising fourteen (14) PhD candidates at the same time! Worse still is the institutional setting that allows such joke to be perpetrated.

So, Prof. Agozino, if you still want to learn more about Professor Nwolise's "science of witchcraft", you may wish to consult the bibliographic references (including the Professor's "Inaugural Lecture") listed below.

Regards,

Okey

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++=====  

1. Nwolise OBC, (2015), "Motion for Serious Focus of Research On The Spiritual Dimension of Human And National Security", Studies In Politics and Society, Vol.3, No. 1, December, pp. 1-14

 

2. Nwolise OBC (2014),"Oracles On Excessive Use of Force", Ibadan Journal of Peace and Development, Vols 3 and 4, May, pp 35-42.

3. Is physical security alone enough for the survival, progress and happiness of man? : an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Ibadan on Thursday, 20 February, 2014

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	Ibadan, Nigeria : Ibadan University Press Publishing House, 2013. ©2013
Series:	Inaugural lectures (University of Ibadan), 2014.

4. Spiritual dimension of human and national security

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	[Ibadan] : Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Ibadan, [2012]
Series:	Faculty lecture series (University of Ibadan. Faculty of the Social Sciences), no. 18

5. Battle for security must first be won in the spirit realm —Prof. Nwolise

By Mayowa Okekale, Ibadan on 28/02/2014

https://www.newsexpressngr.com/news/detail.php?news=4789  

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A university don, Prof. Osisioma Nwolise, has stressed the need for the country's quest for security to be extended to the spiritual realm, saying the battle cannot be won if limited to the physical realm.

Nwolise, of the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences of University of Ibadan, made the submission in his inaugural lecture entitled 'Is physical security alone for the survival, progress and happiness of man?' delivered recently at the Trenchard Hall of the university.

He enjoined the leadership of the country to, as a matter of urgency, embrace the indigenous knowledge of spiritual instrument to enhance security in the country. In his words, "There is so much anarchy and havoc going on in the spiritual realm of human and national security today that there is every urgent need for governmental and societal attention to be focused on that realm, with a view to saving lives, protect human rights and national values, and to enhance human and national security.

"There is nothing happening in the physical world today that is not happening in the spiritual world – rape, bombing, robbery, kidnapping, hostage taking, food poisoning, ambushing, imprisonment, murder, torture, politics and accidents."

Nwolise argued that there is an urgent need to establish an academic structure for the teaching, research and study of the spiritual dimension of human and national security. His words: "There is a need to open up studies in mysticism, Nigerian n and African divinities, magic, spiritual healings, death and Strategic Spiritual Intelligence (SSI). We should as well open a new Department of Metaphysical Studies or Department of Spiritual Studies, which will serve as the nucleus for a future Faculty of Spiritual Sciences, because our little efforts so far convinced me that juju can be dissected, studied and understood just as the rabbit."

He described security as the primary concern of all humans and nations at all times, as it is a pre-requisite for their survival, progress and happiness of humanity.

In his comparison on physical and spiritual security, Nwolise opined that the welfare of human beings is not only in the physical realm as perceived by many leaders but also in the spiritual realm. Quoting the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he said: "The aim of a leader should be the welfare of the people whom he leads. I have used 'welfare' to denote physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the people."

Nwolise faulted the stance of scientific posture on nature, arguing that science is being too cowardly, pompous, despotic and arrogant in insisting that whatever it cannot understand, capture, measure, control or predict, does not exist. The don said it is important to understand the spiritual not only because it is superior to the physical but also because it positively reinforces the physical, and can equally endanger it under some certain circumstances.

Prof. Nwolise condemned what he called the miseducation of today's children and youths as well as the poor funding of the education sector, stressing a need for this to be urgently reversed so as to rescue the country's future.

•Photo shows Prof. Osisioma Nwolise.

Source News Express

Posted 28/02/2014 11:12:11 PM

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 5:04 PM 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

The Professor was analyzing a core belief of most Nigerians and that is what social scientists do. He is not alone in identifying that Nigerians believe that juju is factual. Awolowo stated the same thesis of Juju as Science for killing enemies (1939) in opposition to Azikiwe who called for the scientific method to be applied to healthcare in Renascent Africa (1937). In his series of essays on 'How I survived Ebola', Biodun Jeyifo observed that medical doctors and Physics professors still believe in divine intervention even when they follow the scientific method. Professor Nwolise may have been arguing the same thesis as Obadare but from a different perspective, from the perspective of the believers.

Without reading the entire lecture, we should not judge his entire scholarship or those of all Nigerian professors based on one paragraph taken out of context. He may have been hypothesizing, like Obadare, that in a country where rulers call for prayers as the solution to every problem, how is a political scientists to be taken seriously if he fails to address this mindset? His argument may be that psychological health is indeed part of national security and so if the average Nigerian goes about with the belief that there are witches and wizards out to cause every kind of mischief, it will be a mistake for social scientists to call them imbeciles without risking irrelevance. That was why religion was called the opium of the people, the soul of a soulless world, and the heart of heartless conditions.

Even after the society guarantees the security of electricity supply, pipe-borne water, hospitals and schools for all, motor-worthy roads, fast railways, safer airlines, food and housing, jobs with living wages, the people will continue to reserve the right to believe in spiritual curses as realities sui generis. The trick is to be tolerant of all spiritual beliefs that are not oppressive of others and focus public policy on things that can be solved without mysticism while researchers should not be ridiculed for trying to understand the magical thinking of most human beings.

The Japanese and Chinese still pray at the shrines of their ancestors for blessings, Israelis still pray at the Wailing Walls, a religious party dominates India today, Arabs still fast, pray and believe that there are evil forces of Shetan, Americans still believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and many think that elected officials are the representatives of the Divine, while the British still have a state church. No one is weeping for them because they also have huge funding for research and development by their STEM specialists who send people to the moon, build enough weapons to wipe out life on earth, tackle incurable diseases, and make millions speculating on market trends. 

Instead of weeping for our colleagues at home, we should be humble and acknowledge that some of them, like OBC Nwolise himself, are busy advocating for the Nigerian Diaspora to be given a role in Nigerian foreign policy, addressing the insecurity in the country, peacemaking in West Africa, analyzing the implications of the Arab Spring, and advocating gender sensitivity in public policy. 

Did Obadare have recommendations on how to solve some these problems that Nwolise has been addressing? Pentecostal Republic is a narrow title anyway because adherents of traditional spirituality, Catholics, Rasta, and Islamists all buy into the idea of spiritual warfare around the world and not only in Nigeria.

Biko

On Sunday, 5 May 2019, 17:56:28 GMT-4, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

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Just published"The African Corporation, 'Africapitalism' and Regional Integration in Africa" (September 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785362538.

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Oga Toyin, 

It's my deliberate judgement to agree with you entirely. My concern about majority of posts here here is inconclusive lamentation. Let's not portray ourselves as if the politicians & leadership across we complain about daily are better than us. They complain & pretend they are the solutions. But we lament and don't proved solutions, which means we need to shift ground. There's nothing that has not been said regarding Nigeria's ills. Let's put our analysis on the solutions.

On Mon, May 6, 2019, 14:40 Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu wrote:

Moses:

 

The most productive argument will be to assume that many won't disconnect! Society and people do not just shift. Something must first shift before they respond. Thus, we have to work out a new way of thinking that will accommodate that, which may be unfortunate.

I have been to Jos and Kaduna where making the disconnect argument to our colleagues may not even have any appeal. If you wake up in the city, driving to work to see which road is taken by the Christians and another by the Muslims, the first thing they do when they get to the office and return back home is to pray. Even as an External Examiner in such places, I joined them in that prayer. And in the classrooms, they pray, and they prayed for me, and they work faith into their presentations. I listen and process to understand where they are coming from. Not that I agree with them, but that I understand why they do what they do.

 

I know how to make the theoretical arguments about the disconnect, but at the same time, I know that in practice it won't happen.

 

 

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

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From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:40 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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TF,

 

We get all that. Some of my own family members get scandalized when I tell them that they're too quick to blame the devil/witchcraft and to resort to prayers for problems that are physical and require taking concrete action. That's not the point. In our work, we reckon with the existence and influence of that worldview, which cuts across all of Africa's religious traditions. The point is that an academic should not uncritical substitute a religious dogma founded on faith and unverifiable supernatural truth claims for a rigorous, analytical engagement with such claims. An academic who is a Pentecostal Christian, devout Muslim, or Ifa practitioner should compartmentalize his religious beliefs when doing academic work. Yes, all writings are autobiographical, but when we say that, we are talking about subconscious bias and the ways in which our socializations seep into our approaches subconsciously. It does not refer to the conscious certitude of passing off unverifiable spiritual and other truth claims as "factual." There're  probably Western academics who believe in alien abductions but will they try to publish that belief in a journal or present it as fact in an academic lecture? They know better than to try to do that. Even if they want to write on alien abductions, they know that the academic protocol is to maintain a critical, scholarly distance from the subject/object of inquiry and analysis.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 7:25 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

I am beginning to enjoy this debate.

What is "factual"? At Ibadan, my city, and yours, witchcraft is "factual"!!  The mission of Christ is "factual". It is the fact of faith, not the fact of science.

Years ago, in the company of others, when I told my mom that I did not believe in witchcraft, I sent her into panic and she began to look for remedies for me to stay alive. I don't believe that there are witches, but have the witches now left Ibadan because I don't believe in them?

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:13 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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And, by the way, yes, a "fundamentalist Christian" can win the Nobel Prize in Medicine but certainly not by advancing his religious beliefs as his oeuvre. Yes, we need an epistemology that engages with prevalent beliefs in supernatural causation in Africa because these beliefs are pervasive, inform devotional practices, and animate and constrain attitudes towards politics in African countries. That epistemology is already underway, with many scholars such as Nimi Wariboko, Obadare, Peter Gaschere, Elias Bombgba, Olupona, Asonze Uka, yourself, Are Adogame, and others already engaging critically with that world. However, it would be academically suicidal if these scholars where to attempt to pass off an uncritical endorsement of Nigerian religious beliefs as "factual" in the most important academic lecture of their career or in a book.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 5:11 AM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Oga TF,

 

As a person of faith myself I have absolutely no problem with people believing in whatever they choose. That is their right. However, there are two issues here. One is that this was an inaugural lecture delivered to an academic community and later self-published as an academic book. An inaugural lecture is supposed to be the capstone of a professor's research enterprise and academic contributions, which if not publishable, should at least be worthy of submission for peer review. Can this mishmash of Pentecostal and African traditional religious beliefs be submitted for academic review in any serious academic culture?

 

Secondly, here is what Nwolise wrote: "The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual." The Professor of political science is passing off his witchcraft claims as factual. He is both professing and affirming witchcraft remote controls and the instrumental and causative agency of malevolent spirits as factual, but what is the basis for this? Where's the proof, the demonstration, the logic. I would not have a problem if he had stated that he was outlining the prevalent beliefs in Nigeria. No, he advanced these unproven and unprovable beliefs and spiritual opinions as factual. This is what I expect to hear and hear all the time from the pulpit in my church. I've never heard it in an academic lecture unless the academic is quoting or paraphrasing someone in order to analyze the claims or beliefs. Professor Nwolise would have delivered his spiritual thesis to an audience of Pentecostal Christians. Conjectures, faith, opinions, and beliefs cannot substitute for academic rigor, scholarly skepticism, and analytical tentativeness and distance in matters that are beyond empirical proof and rest on faith, piety, and belief.

 

Some of my Facebook friends posited that I should at least give the man credit for putting his imagination to good use and for giving us something in the magical realism genre. But the man is not a novelist. He is not even a Professor of literature. My favorite fictional niche is actually magical realism, two of my favorite novels being Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. I also love Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons. But these are works of fiction and folklore, not academic lectures/books purporting to explicate and solve a problem in society as Nwolise claims to be doing in regard to human (in)security.

 

The full title of Nwolise's inaugural lecture is: Is Physical Security Alone Enough For the Survival, Progress and Happiness of Man?"~O.B.C Nwolise- (Inaugural Lecture 2012/13, University of Ibadan). 

 

By the way, what does Nwolise proffer as a solution to his claimed ubiquity and multivalent instrumentality of evil spirits? He says Nigeria needs to take "spiritual security" and "Strategic Spiritual Intelligence" seriously and that Nigerians should counter this ubiquity of spiritual threats with what he calls "Divine Security Insurance."

 

At any rate, several of my Facebook interlocutors raised the questions you're raising here and I will save myself some effort by reproducing my responses to them below.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa, Believe whatever you want. I am a Christian and believe similarly as you. It is your right and prerogative. Other people, including atheists, have their own opinions and beliefs. Find a church or the appropriate venue to peddle and profess those beliefs. Beliefs and mere opinions are not admissible as factual in academic discourse, period. I can believe if I want that lizards are capable of giving birth to humans. I will probably find an audience somewhere that is receptive to it, and I have the right to that opinion. But I would be laughed off the stage in a serious academic culture were I to try to pass it off in a lecture as factual. Piety and belief have their place. Academic rigor and analysis have their place as well.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa but how can we proceed when there is no verifiable, empirical basis to do so? If I come to your church, the Christian that I am will take your word for your "empirical experience with witches." But in my terrain of academics, how can you convince me except by merely inviting me to accept your word for it. Academia has its rules and that is not how it works. The gentleman in question is a professor and was giving an academic lecture to an academic audience. And yes, as an academic theory or argument, the quote deserves nothing but ridicule. He should have been laughed off that stage, but I'm sure they clapped for him and praised him. However, if he had expressed those sentiments in a church, I would not have ridiculed him at all.

 

To the Facebook follower who posted a link to an academic study of witchcraft, I had this to say.

 

 

This is a study of witchcraft. Academics have been studying witchcraft and associated beliefs for centuries. But they don't advance them as factual. They maintain a critical distance from the belief system and practice. They don't pass off these unproven and unprovable phenomena, beliefs and practices as "factual." They don't lionize or legitimize the beliefs.

 

 

 I don't have the energy to even engage this type of academic, but you mentioned opinions, which we all have. He wasn't just expressing an opinion on Facebook or to his friends in a conversation. This is his inaugural professorial lecture, which should be publishable or at least worthy of submission to a journal in his field. Tell me, can this paper be submitted to any journal let alone be considered for publication in a journal in his field? Is it even worthy of an academic debate? Can it provoke academic debate? I am a practicing Christian. I have my beliefs in that regard. But I will not deliver an ACADEMIC lecture at a university, let alone a professorial inaugural, that is basically a rehash of my Christian or theological beliefs. If I desire a forum and platform to propagate a theological theory of spiritual causation, I will look for a religious audience, preferably in my church. I have no problem with people believing what they believe, but religious beliefs or opinions or convictions do not constitute academic theories. He actually says in the excerpt that his witchcraft scenarios are "factual," as actual as the science behind TV transmission and remote control technology. Where is the proof for this? Where is a demonstration of this? In scholarship, you do not make claims or assertions without demonstrating them. I am a little disappointed that you're dignifying a mishmash of traditional African religious and Pentecostal spiritualist explanations as a social scientific theory. The man is a political scientist for crying out loud. I can say a tree can learn a language. I have a right to that opinion but would I not be laughed off the stage and humiliated if I were to go before an audience of academics and express that opinion and posit it as fact?

 

All peoples have their beliefs, superstitions, metaphysical claims, and cosmologies. The difference is that you don't find their professors of political science delivering academic lectures claiming, without proof, that they are factual.

 

 

Scholars study all phenomena, including religious and superstitious beliefs but they maintain a scholarly distance and/or engage critically with them. They don't advance such unproven and unprovable phenomena as "factual" without proof or verifiable methodological demonstration. And stop with excusing poor, inept, and uncritical scholarship with claims of a decolonizing agenda. That's how some Nigerian academics who cannot write simple English sentences will claim that their poor writing skills are a form of rebellion against the white man's colonizing language and that they are trying to Africanize and decolonize African scholarship.

 

Anyway, perhaps I should not waste energy and time on nonsense and heed the advice of my brother, Professor Adeeko, below.

 

 

Adeleke Adeeko Moses Ochonu My friend, please leave witch hunters alone! Why bother to debate people who choose to equate the being of electronic remote devices and the being of beliefs. How can you begin to understand the structure of a moral framework that cedes complete control to forces beyond understanding, an allegedly moral (?) system that accepts as justified the killing of children as witch, a system that fails to question the sexism that restricts witch convictions to women, a system that equalizes belief and proof. Moses, please leave these people alone. How can you talk to them?

 

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 7:04 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Question:

 

Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:

"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."

 

Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?

 

And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor".  The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.

 

There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.

 

The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.

 

In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

 

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

 

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

 

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

 

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

 

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

 

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Colleagues and friends,

Setting aside for the moment the bizarre atmospherics of Professor Nwolise's oeuvre, have we pause to consider the implications of what Okey Iheduru posted from eye-witness knowledge? He told us that in this age of heightened insecurity and multiple threats to the sovereignty of Nigeria, Professor Nwolise makes regular lecturing appearances at the only postgraduate institution of the Nigerian armed forces, the National Defense College, urging army colonels and generals and their equivalents in other branches of the armed forces to gather military intelligence through ghosts and spirits and, more disturbingly, that he receives a "rapturous" applause and positive reception each time he presents this dangerous nonsense to the students. Wow, just wow. And we wonder why the Nigerian armed forces cannot understand the security threats facing the country, let alone tackling them. And some say I'm exaggerating when I say the country is doomed.

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 9:03 PM Ashafa Abdullahi <abashafa@gmail.com> wrote:

Oga Toyin, 

It's my deliberate judgement to agree with you entirely. My concern about majority of posts here here is inconclusive lamentation. Let's not portray ourselves as if the politicians & leadership across we complain about daily are better than us. They complain & pretend they are the solutions. But we lament and don't proved solutions, which means we need to shift ground. There's nothing that has not been said regarding Nigeria's ills. Let's put our analysis on the solutions.

On Mon, May 6, 2019, 14:40 Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu wrote:

Moses:

 

The most productive argument will be to assume that many won't disconnect! Society and people do not just shift. Something must first shift before they respond. Thus, we have to work out a new way of thinking that will accommodate that, which may be unfortunate.

I have been to Jos and Kaduna where making the disconnect argument to our colleagues may not even have any appeal. If you wake up in the city, driving to work to see which road is taken by the Christians and another by the Muslims, the first thing they do when they get to the office and return back home is to pray. Even as an External Examiner in such places, I joined them in that prayer. And in the classrooms, they pray, and they prayed for me, and they work faith into their presentations. I listen and process to understand where they are coming from. Not that I agree with them, but that I understand why they do what they do.

 

I know how to make the theoretical arguments about the disconnect, but at the same time, I know that in practice it won't happen.

 

 

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

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http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:40 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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TF,

 

We get all that. Some of my own family members get scandalized when I tell them that they're too quick to blame the devil/witchcraft and to resort to prayers for problems that are physical and require taking concrete action. That's not the point. In our work, we reckon with the existence and influence of that worldview, which cuts across all of Africa's religious traditions. The point is that an academic should not uncritical substitute a religious dogma founded on faith and unverifiable supernatural truth claims for a rigorous, analytical engagement with such claims. An academic who is a Pentecostal Christian, devout Muslim, or Ifa practitioner should compartmentalize his religious beliefs when doing academic work. Yes, all writings are autobiographical, but when we say that, we are talking about subconscious bias and the ways in which our socializations seep into our approaches subconsciously. It does not refer to the conscious certitude of passing off unverifiable spiritual and other truth claims as "factual." There're  probably Western academics who believe in alien abductions but will they try to publish that belief in a journal or present it as fact in an academic lecture? They know better than to try to do that. Even if they want to write on alien abductions, they know that the academic protocol is to maintain a critical, scholarly distance from the subject/object of inquiry and analysis.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 7:25 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

I am beginning to enjoy this debate.

What is "factual"? At Ibadan, my city, and yours, witchcraft is "factual"!!  The mission of Christ is "factual". It is the fact of faith, not the fact of science.

Years ago, in the company of others, when I told my mom that I did not believe in witchcraft, I sent her into panic and she began to look for remedies for me to stay alive. I don't believe that there are witches, but have the witches now left Ibadan because I don't believe in them?

TF

 

Toyin Falola

Department of History

The University of Texas at Austin

104 Inner Campus Drive

Austin, TX 78712-0220

USA

512 475 7224

512 475 7222 (fax)

http://sites.utexas.edu/yoruba-studies-review/

http://www.toyinfalola.com 

http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa  

http://groups.google.com/group/yorubaaffairs 

http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue   

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday, May 6, 2019 at 7:13 AM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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And, by the way, yes, a "fundamentalist Christian" can win the Nobel Prize in Medicine but certainly not by advancing his religious beliefs as his oeuvre. Yes, we need an epistemology that engages with prevalent beliefs in supernatural causation in Africa because these beliefs are pervasive, inform devotional practices, and animate and constrain attitudes towards politics in African countries. That epistemology is already underway, with many scholars such as Nimi Wariboko, Obadare, Peter Gaschere, Elias Bombgba, Olupona, Asonze Uka, yourself, Are Adogame, and others already engaging critically with that world. However, it would be academically suicidal if these scholars where to attempt to pass off an uncritical endorsement of Nigerian religious beliefs as "factual" in the most important academic lecture of their career or in a book.

 

On Mon, May 6, 2019 at 5:11 AM Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

Oga TF,

 

As a person of faith myself I have absolutely no problem with people believing in whatever they choose. That is their right. However, there are two issues here. One is that this was an inaugural lecture delivered to an academic community and later self-published as an academic book. An inaugural lecture is supposed to be the capstone of a professor's research enterprise and academic contributions, which if not publishable, should at least be worthy of submission for peer review. Can this mishmash of Pentecostal and African traditional religious beliefs be submitted for academic review in any serious academic culture?

 

Secondly, here is what Nwolise wrote: "The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual." The Professor of political science is passing off his witchcraft claims as factual. He is both professing and affirming witchcraft remote controls and the instrumental and causative agency of malevolent spirits as factual, but what is the basis for this? Where's the proof, the demonstration, the logic. I would not have a problem if he had stated that he was outlining the prevalent beliefs in Nigeria. No, he advanced these unproven and unprovable beliefs and spiritual opinions as factual. This is what I expect to hear and hear all the time from the pulpit in my church. I've never heard it in an academic lecture unless the academic is quoting or paraphrasing someone in order to analyze the claims or beliefs. Professor Nwolise would have delivered his spiritual thesis to an audience of Pentecostal Christians. Conjectures, faith, opinions, and beliefs cannot substitute for academic rigor, scholarly skepticism, and analytical tentativeness and distance in matters that are beyond empirical proof and rest on faith, piety, and belief.

 

Some of my Facebook friends posited that I should at least give the man credit for putting his imagination to good use and for giving us something in the magical realism genre. But the man is not a novelist. He is not even a Professor of literature. My favorite fictional niche is actually magical realism, two of my favorite novels being Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Ben Okri's The Famished Road. I also love Tutuola's The Palm Wine Drinkard and Fagunwa's Forest of a Thousand Demons. But these are works of fiction and folklore, not academic lectures/books purporting to explicate and solve a problem in society as Nwolise claims to be doing in regard to human (in)security.

 

The full title of Nwolise's inaugural lecture is: Is Physical Security Alone Enough For the Survival, Progress and Happiness of Man?"~O.B.C Nwolise- (Inaugural Lecture 2012/13, University of Ibadan). 

 

By the way, what does Nwolise proffer as a solution to his claimed ubiquity and multivalent instrumentality of evil spirits? He says Nigeria needs to take "spiritual security" and "Strategic Spiritual Intelligence" seriously and that Nigerians should counter this ubiquity of spiritual threats with what he calls "Divine Security Insurance."

 

At any rate, several of my Facebook interlocutors raised the questions you're raising here and I will save myself some effort by reproducing my responses to them below.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa, Believe whatever you want. I am a Christian and believe similarly as you. It is your right and prerogative. Other people, including atheists, have their own opinions and beliefs. Find a church or the appropriate venue to peddle and profess those beliefs. Beliefs and mere opinions are not admissible as factual in academic discourse, period. I can believe if I want that lizards are capable of giving birth to humans. I will probably find an audience somewhere that is receptive to it, and I have the right to that opinion. But I would be laughed off the stage in a serious academic culture were I to try to pass it off in a lecture as factual. Piety and belief have their place. Academic rigor and analysis have their place as well.

 

 

 Eric Terfa Ula-Lisa but how can we proceed when there is no verifiable, empirical basis to do so? If I come to your church, the Christian that I am will take your word for your "empirical experience with witches." But in my terrain of academics, how can you convince me except by merely inviting me to accept your word for it. Academia has its rules and that is not how it works. The gentleman in question is a professor and was giving an academic lecture to an academic audience. And yes, as an academic theory or argument, the quote deserves nothing but ridicule. He should have been laughed off that stage, but I'm sure they clapped for him and praised him. However, if he had expressed those sentiments in a church, I would not have ridiculed him at all.

 

To the Facebook follower who posted a link to an academic study of witchcraft, I had this to say.

 

 

This is a study of witchcraft. Academics have been studying witchcraft and associated beliefs for centuries. But they don't advance them as factual. They maintain a critical distance from the belief system and practice. They don't pass off these unproven and unprovable phenomena, beliefs and practices as "factual." They don't lionize or legitimize the beliefs.

 

 

 I don't have the energy to even engage this type of academic, but you mentioned opinions, which we all have. He wasn't just expressing an opinion on Facebook or to his friends in a conversation. This is his inaugural professorial lecture, which should be publishable or at least worthy of submission to a journal in his field. Tell me, can this paper be submitted to any journal let alone be considered for publication in a journal in his field? Is it even worthy of an academic debate? Can it provoke academic debate? I am a practicing Christian. I have my beliefs in that regard. But I will not deliver an ACADEMIC lecture at a university, let alone a professorial inaugural, that is basically a rehash of my Christian or theological beliefs. If I desire a forum and platform to propagate a theological theory of spiritual causation, I will look for a religious audience, preferably in my church. I have no problem with people believing what they believe, but religious beliefs or opinions or convictions do not constitute academic theories. He actually says in the excerpt that his witchcraft scenarios are "factual," as actual as the science behind TV transmission and remote control technology. Where is the proof for this? Where is a demonstration of this? In scholarship, you do not make claims or assertions without demonstrating them. I am a little disappointed that you're dignifying a mishmash of traditional African religious and Pentecostal spiritualist explanations as a social scientific theory. The man is a political scientist for crying out loud. I can say a tree can learn a language. I have a right to that opinion but would I not be laughed off the stage and humiliated if I were to go before an audience of academics and express that opinion and posit it as fact?

 

All peoples have their beliefs, superstitions, metaphysical claims, and cosmologies. The difference is that you don't find their professors of political science delivering academic lectures claiming, without proof, that they are factual.

 

 

Scholars study all phenomena, including religious and superstitious beliefs but they maintain a scholarly distance and/or engage critically with them. They don't advance such unproven and unprovable phenomena as "factual" without proof or verifiable methodological demonstration. And stop with excusing poor, inept, and uncritical scholarship with claims of a decolonizing agenda. That's how some Nigerian academics who cannot write simple English sentences will claim that their poor writing skills are a form of rebellion against the white man's colonizing language and that they are trying to Africanize and decolonize African scholarship.

 

Anyway, perhaps I should not waste energy and time on nonsense and heed the advice of my brother, Professor Adeeko, below.

 

 

Adeleke Adeeko Moses Ochonu My friend, please leave witch hunters alone! Why bother to debate people who choose to equate the being of electronic remote devices and the being of beliefs. How can you begin to understand the structure of a moral framework that cedes complete control to forces beyond understanding, an allegedly moral (?) system that accepts as justified the killing of children as witch, a system that fails to question the sexism that restricts witch convictions to women, a system that equalizes belief and proof. Moses, please leave these people alone. How can you talk to them?

 

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 7:04 PM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Question:

 

Is the professor expressing a belief system or affirming a belief system? If expressing a belief system, there is nothing new in what he has said. If he is affirming it, can you and I deny him of his faith? Pentecostalists tend to believe in magic and witchcraft. There is a clue in one sentence:

"In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic."

 

Suppose the professor is a practicing Muslim who is observing the Ramadan and he talks about Allah and the rewards of heaven, is this not similar to his ideas on Nigerian religion?

 

And what about he a Christian, do we accept his faith-derived statement? A fundamentalist Christian can win the Nobel Prize in medicine.

 

I am not sure that one can win the argument in many parts of Africa that it is possible to disconnect this kind of belief from the work they do. In many Nollywood movies, the medical doctors tell their patients to forget about modern medicine and see the "native doctor".  The campuses are littered with sacrifices, and when I was at Ife, one was put in my office.

 

There must be an examination of his essays and books to conclude on the degree to which his faith as affected his findings. Human beings can "fragment" one part of the brain to write the most brilliant essay today and another part can see witches the next day.

 

The assumption that human beings are rational all the time is actually not correct. Indeed, they are not, in the secularist understanding of faith.

 

In any case, I hope the professor is reading this so that he can teach Moses a lesson by breaking his two legs!!!

TF

 

From: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of moses <meochonu@gmail.com>
Reply-To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sunday, May 5, 2019 at 4:56 PM
To: dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Nigeria is Doomed and Her Academics are Culpable

 

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I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

 

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

 

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

 

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

 

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

 

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

 

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Prof. Nwolise is correct. Like the G. O. of my church said:

"Anything that is accomplished in the physical was first perfected in the spiritual"

I have just taken delivery of my bullet proof amulet, made from the skin of an agilinti that was flayed alive. It is guaranteed to Ward off bullets from guns ranging from the musket to the mundane Dane gun to the Gatling gun. I'm not entirely sure about Kalash but I'm dead certain my ancestors are looking out for me in the spiritual. You know, no weapon fashioned against my amulet shall prosper. 

Why do I need a bullet proof amulet? The spate of kidnappings for one. The failure of our security agencies to stem the tide is another. And of course, the cost of a kevlar suit is prohibitive and the security guys may take an hostile stance against a kevlar wearing bagga like me. I have therefore taken a cue from the erudite professor to seek a kinda Bendel insurance from the spiritual realm. 

Surprisingly, when I went to witness the live demonstration of the efficacy of spiritual anti projectile (SAP) I met already sat in rapt attention 2 medical doctors and 4 professors, including a professor of nuclear physics. It is what it is. The professor of literature amongst these erudities, while helping me pick my jaw from the ground justified the dissonance by quoting Shakespeare:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I woke up, picked the te ki ina loji remote to switch on the TV. Breaking news: A Professor of nuclear physics, Saka Simfont has been kidnapped.

On Mon, May 6, 2019, 12:19 Okey Iheduru <okeyiheduru@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh, Brother Agozino Biko!

You just went off on a wild chase in your vain attempt to refute Prof. Ochonu's post, thereby exposing your total ignorance of both Prof. Obadare's highly acclaimed book and Prof. Osisioma Basil Chinedu Nwolise's very strange "theory of strategic spiritual intelligence." I've copied from Prof. Nwolise's CV and pasted below the exact text of the abstract of a book manuscript he says he's writing on this subject to give you some idea of what he means.

"Introduction To Strategic Spiritual Intelligence":  This book presents spiritual intelligence as a compliment to emperical (sic) intelligence.  It challenges Sun Tzu's thesis that foreknowledge can not be got from ghosts and spirits.  The work is aimed at terminating inelligence (sic) garthering (sic) through torture, quicken investigation, and promote human security." 

I first heard about Prof. Osisioma's bizarre thesis in October 2011 when he spoke on "Intelligence and National Security" to Course 20 Participants (students) at the National Defense College, Abuja where I had just arrived two weeks earlier on sabbatical leave. The hot exchanges between me and the guest lecturer during Q & A were so brutal that it became my first full introduction to the students (who were mostly Army Colonels or equivalent ranks in the other Services) and the other Directing Staff (faculty members--mostly Brigadier-Generals and Major-Generals--or equivalent ranks, and two other university professors) many of whom were clearly impressed with the "erudite scholar." 

I later learnt that Prof. Nwolise had been giving the same lecture and promoting his "strategic spiritual intelligence" to rapturous applause three years in a row (Each cohort numbers about 135 students, including those from 10-15 other African countries). It's worth noting that many in the audience were/are notorious for burying live rams and white cocks in "aladura" churches and Alfas' shrines/mosques as part of their arsenal to ward off evil forces (witches being top on the list) during their board promotion interviews! 

The Professor is also propagating this same "theory" among the dozens of PhD students he's supervising all over the country. In addition to the nine PhDs he has supervised (by 2016), this is what he wrote in his CV: 

"Currently, I am supervising five Ph.D. students in the Department of Political Science, and four Ph.D. students in the Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies (IPSS), University of Ibadan. I am also supervising five Phd students on part-time basis in Igbinedion University, Okada.  Between 2007 and 2015, I successfully supervised five Phd Students in the Department of Political Science of Igbinedion University. I also co-supervised a Phd student at Covenant University."

Regrettably, Prof. Nwolise isn't on this forum to defend himself, but in one of my post-sabbatical posts in 2013, I wrote about concerns in some quarters in Nigeria about some professors awarding "Pure Water PhDs" as part of the factors responsible for the deteriorating standards of scholarship in Nigeria's higher ed institutions. I make no such accusation against Professor Nwolise, but I'm not sure what to make of an academic who proudly claims to be supervising fourteen (14) PhD candidates at the same time! Worse still is the institutional setting that allows such joke to be perpetrated.

So, Prof. Agozino, if you still want to learn more about Professor Nwolise's "science of witchcraft", you may wish to consult the bibliographic references (including the Professor's "Inaugural Lecture") listed below.

Regards,

Okey

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++=====  

1. Nwolise OBC, (2015), "Motion for Serious Focus of Research On The Spiritual Dimension of Human And National Security", Studies In Politics and Society, Vol.3, No. 1, December, pp. 1-14

 

2. Nwolise OBC (2014),"Oracles On Excessive Use of Force", Ibadan Journal of Peace and Development, Vols 3 and 4, May, pp 35-42.

3. Is physical security alone enough for the survival, progress and happiness of man? : an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Ibadan on Thursday, 20 February, 2014

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	Ibadan, Nigeria : Ibadan University Press Publishing House, 2013. ©2013
Series:	Inaugural lectures (University of Ibadan), 2014.

4. Spiritual dimension of human and national security

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	[Ibadan] : Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Ibadan, [2012]
Series:	Faculty lecture series (University of Ibadan. Faculty of the Social Sciences), no. 18

5. Battle for security must first be won in the spirit realm —Prof. Nwolise

By Mayowa Okekale, Ibadan on 28/02/2014

https://www.newsexpressngr.com/news/detail.php?news=4789  

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A university don, Prof. Osisioma Nwolise, has stressed the need for the country's quest for security to be extended to the spiritual realm, saying the battle cannot be won if limited to the physical realm.

Nwolise, of the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences of University of Ibadan, made the submission in his inaugural lecture entitled 'Is physical security alone for the survival, progress and happiness of man?' delivered recently at the Trenchard Hall of the university.

He enjoined the leadership of the country to, as a matter of urgency, embrace the indigenous knowledge of spiritual instrument to enhance security in the country. In his words, "There is so much anarchy and havoc going on in the spiritual realm of human and national security today that there is every urgent need for governmental and societal attention to be focused on that realm, with a view to saving lives, protect human rights and national values, and to enhance human and national security.

"There is nothing happening in the physical world today that is not happening in the spiritual world – rape, bombing, robbery, kidnapping, hostage taking, food poisoning, ambushing, imprisonment, murder, torture, politics and accidents."

Nwolise argued that there is an urgent need to establish an academic structure for the teaching, research and study of the spiritual dimension of human and national security. His words: "There is a need to open up studies in mysticism, Nigerian n and African divinities, magic, spiritual healings, death and Strategic Spiritual Intelligence (SSI). We should as well open a new Department of Metaphysical Studies or Department of Spiritual Studies, which will serve as the nucleus for a future Faculty of Spiritual Sciences, because our little efforts so far convinced me that juju can be dissected, studied and understood just as the rabbit."

He described security as the primary concern of all humans and nations at all times, as it is a pre-requisite for their survival, progress and happiness of humanity.

In his comparison on physical and spiritual security, Nwolise opined that the welfare of human beings is not only in the physical realm as perceived by many leaders but also in the spiritual realm. Quoting the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he said: "The aim of a leader should be the welfare of the people whom he leads. I have used 'welfare' to denote physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the people."

Nwolise faulted the stance of scientific posture on nature, arguing that science is being too cowardly, pompous, despotic and arrogant in insisting that whatever it cannot understand, capture, measure, control or predict, does not exist. The don said it is important to understand the spiritual not only because it is superior to the physical but also because it positively reinforces the physical, and can equally endanger it under some certain circumstances.

Prof. Nwolise condemned what he called the miseducation of today's children and youths as well as the poor funding of the education sector, stressing a need for this to be urgently reversed so as to rescue the country's future.

•Photo shows Prof. Osisioma Nwolise.

Source News Express

Posted 28/02/2014 11:12:11 PM

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 5:04 PM 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

The Professor was analyzing a core belief of most Nigerians and that is what social scientists do. He is not alone in identifying that Nigerians believe that juju is factual. Awolowo stated the same thesis of Juju as Science for killing enemies (1939) in opposition to Azikiwe who called for the scientific method to be applied to healthcare in Renascent Africa (1937). In his series of essays on 'How I survived Ebola', Biodun Jeyifo observed that medical doctors and Physics professors still believe in divine intervention even when they follow the scientific method. Professor Nwolise may have been arguing the same thesis as Obadare but from a different perspective, from the perspective of the believers.

Without reading the entire lecture, we should not judge his entire scholarship or those of all Nigerian professors based on one paragraph taken out of context. He may have been hypothesizing, like Obadare, that in a country where rulers call for prayers as the solution to every problem, how is a political scientists to be taken seriously if he fails to address this mindset? His argument may be that psychological health is indeed part of national security and so if the average Nigerian goes about with the belief that there are witches and wizards out to cause every kind of mischief, it will be a mistake for social scientists to call them imbeciles without risking irrelevance. That was why religion was called the opium of the people, the soul of a soulless world, and the heart of heartless conditions.

Even after the society guarantees the security of electricity supply, pipe-borne water, hospitals and schools for all, motor-worthy roads, fast railways, safer airlines, food and housing, jobs with living wages, the people will continue to reserve the right to believe in spiritual curses as realities sui generis. The trick is to be tolerant of all spiritual beliefs that are not oppressive of others and focus public policy on things that can be solved without mysticism while researchers should not be ridiculed for trying to understand the magical thinking of most human beings.

The Japanese and Chinese still pray at the shrines of their ancestors for blessings, Israelis still pray at the Wailing Walls, a religious party dominates India today, Arabs still fast, pray and believe that there are evil forces of Shetan, Americans still believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and many think that elected officials are the representatives of the Divine, while the British still have a state church. No one is weeping for them because they also have huge funding for research and development by their STEM specialists who send people to the moon, build enough weapons to wipe out life on earth, tackle incurable diseases, and make millions speculating on market trends. 

Instead of weeping for our colleagues at home, we should be humble and acknowledge that some of them, like OBC Nwolise himself, are busy advocating for the Nigerian Diaspora to be given a role in Nigerian foreign policy, addressing the insecurity in the country, peacemaking in West Africa, analyzing the implications of the Arab Spring, and advocating gender sensitivity in public policy. 

Did Obadare have recommendations on how to solve some these problems that Nwolise has been addressing? Pentecostal Republic is a narrow title anyway because adherents of traditional spirituality, Catholics, Rasta, and Islamists all buy into the idea of spiritual warfare around the world and not only in Nigeria.

Biko

On Sunday, 5 May 2019, 17:56:28 GMT-4, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

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Just published"The African Corporation, 'Africapitalism' and Regional Integration in Africa" (September 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785362538.

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'To repeat, those beliefs do not impact my own work, so that my contributions are not misread.

TF'

I wonder what beliefs exactly Falola is referring to in the context of this discussion of relationships between belief, critical analysis and the academy, and  how factual is his claim of his beliefs, perhaps in certain Yoruba religious values, not impacting his work.

Are those beliefs, in whatever way they are understood to be held by him, not central to his philosophical work?

One approach to that qs could be to ook at Falola's very fine essay- 'Ritual Archives' in The Toyin Falola Reader and ThePalgrave Handbook of African Philosophy edited by Falola and Afolayan.

A core strength of this essay is his effort to negotiate a relationship between the concept of the archive as a belief system and the archive as analytical resource.

At one or two points in the essay, he slips from the conventional scholarly stance of investigative distancing into one of empathetic identification.

What is he identifying with?

The idea of the existence of a universe partly composed of unconventional forms of sentience, also known as spirits.

He does not analyse the logic of this belief but proceeds to mine it for ideas, hence generating a tantalizing sense of suspense- does he believe, does he not believe, why is he placing this in an essay brimming with careful analysis- are some of the qs this strategy may open up.

Great scholarship is necessarily infused with passion. How that passion is expressed may differ in various cases. 

Henry Oldmeadow's "C.G. Jung and Mircea Eliade: " Priests Without Surplices"? Reflections on the Place of Myth, Religion and Science in their Work" provokes a rethinking of these great scholars as believers of a kind, believers outside conventional creeds but identifying with something beyond the reduction of the world of knowledge to the dissective capacities of the intellect.

Did Abiola Irele believe in the truth of the metaphysics of Negritude, presented with such power in texts like "What is Negritude"? in The African Experience in Literature and Ideology?

He presents Negritude as an account of the views of Senghor, particularly, and others, but if he did not share some, perhaps even a depth of identification with the vision, even if not with all the details of Negritude, could his exposition be so powerful?

Falola describes himself in an interview as undergoing a contemplative process under the direction of a guide in Asian contemplative practices that helped him overcome the trauma of losing the manuscript of a book he was working on, if I recall that account clearly enough.

Does that experience contribute to his rich depiction of a contemplative process centred in the Yoruba deity Eshu in 'Ritual Archives', in which the contemplative is described as reaching identification of self with the deity, assimilating the divine personage's qualities?

Is Falola writing as a believer in the existence of Eshu rather than a describer of a purely imaginative encounter?

Should that essay not be seen as a blend of Yoruba Orisa theology-discourse from the perspective of belief in a spiritual system- and scholarly analysis contextualizing such identification in relation to other bodies of knowledge?

A related kind of navigation is also beautifully developed in Falola's  In Praise of Greatness, in terms of an imaginative rendition of death as transition, not cessation of being, with the author picturing himself as a journeyer between terrestrial and post-terrestrial existence, bringing messages to those on earth in the form of the theatrical messengers from the beyond inadequately characterized as 'masquerades'.

                                                                                  

                                                                                   

                                                                                                   Isola, Ologbojo Baba Egun, oil on canvas, Moses Ogunleye

                                                      Falola as Inter-Dimensional Traveler, as Spirit Messenger

Having reached a point where he can affirm his mortality, using it as an imaginative device, the writer declares 

"In an unusual manner, the poet can self-transmogrify to perform adulation of himself as an extraterrestrial object, an animal, an ìrókò or baobab tree, or as an ará ọ̀run (the dead). I want to close this book by writing from "Heaven." This is not a play, but a poetic reality in which one can assume that the author is in the afterlife and speaking from heaven.

...

In speaking from my grave... I am now the masquerade myself, changing my being,ready to give you closing lessons, in poetic admonitions, in prayers, in warnings, and in advice" ( 954 and 956).

May the wise one live very long.

A central part of the concept of the humanities professorship in the German model, according to one view, was the idea of the professor as a person professing some unique organisation and interpretation of knowledge, a world view, more or less, with the profs discipline as the central organising principle. 

Philosophers, specifically in Western philosophy, with its pride in logic, from Plato's Socrates to Hegel, have created great systems, not all of which guiding beliefs are thoroughly analysed. But those beliefs are core to the passion that fires their work. 

Socrates' arguments on the immortality of the soul in Plato's Apology are far from exhaustive, looking to me inadequate to sustain his readiness to face death, suggesting a conviction not anchored on the logic he presented, a belief in immortality perhaps arising more from the intuitive and revelatory encounters credited to him, and the logical analysis perhaps an effort to describe intuition in terms of logic, an unsuccessful  effort in my view in this case, with the power of the story emerging from this tension.

To what degree is this a counsel of perfection or a basic fact -"The quality of analysis or critical contextualization of one's beliefs represents the quality of one's scholarship"?

"There is nothing that you and I can do to prevent people from holding their beliefs—what we can do is to let them conform to academic practices. And I think we should also understand that African spaces will create semi-autonomous understanding of what this academy is about."- Toyin Falola

Can M.H. Abrams' Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature, on Romanticism as the baptizing of religious ideas  into Western philosophy, help assess Falola's statement on  culturally contingent formations of the academy?

At what point does such autonomy become empowering of the ability to create critical knowledge and at what point does it become disempowering of that ability?

On Tue, 7 May 2019 at 12:09, Abolaji Adekeye <blargeo.dekeye@gmail.com> wrote:

Prof. Nwolise is correct. Like the G. O. of my church said:

"Anything that is accomplished in the physical was first perfected in the spiritual"

I have just taken delivery of my bullet proof amulet, made from the skin of an agilinti that was flayed alive. It is guaranteed to Ward off bullets from guns ranging from the musket to the mundane Dane gun to the Gatling gun. I'm not entirely sure about Kalash but I'm dead certain my ancestors are looking out for me in the spiritual. You know, no weapon fashioned against my amulet shall prosper. 

Why do I need a bullet proof amulet? The spate of kidnappings for one. The failure of our security agencies to stem the tide is another. And of course, the cost of a kevlar suit is prohibitive and the security guys may take an hostile stance against a kevlar wearing bagga like me. I have therefore taken a cue from the erudite professor to seek a kinda Bendel insurance from the spiritual realm. 

Surprisingly, when I went to witness the live demonstration of the efficacy of spiritual anti projectile (SAP) I met already sat in rapt attention 2 medical doctors and 4 professors, including a professor of nuclear physics. It is what it is. The professor of literature amongst these erudities, while helping me pick my jaw from the ground justified the dissonance by quoting Shakespeare:

There are more things in heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

I woke up, picked the te ki ina loji remote to switch on the TV. Breaking news: A Professor of nuclear physics, Saka Simfont has been kidnapped.

On Mon, May 6, 2019, 12:19 Okey Iheduru <okeyiheduru@gmail.com> wrote:

Oh, Brother Agozino Biko!

You just went off on a wild chase in your vain attempt to refute Prof. Ochonu's post, thereby exposing your total ignorance of both Prof. Obadare's highly acclaimed book and Prof. Osisioma Basil Chinedu Nwolise's very strange "theory of strategic spiritual intelligence." I've copied from Prof. Nwolise's CV and pasted below the exact text of the abstract of a book manuscript he says he's writing on this subject to give you some idea of what he means.

"Introduction To Strategic Spiritual Intelligence":  This book presents spiritual intelligence as a compliment to emperical (sic) intelligence.  It challenges Sun Tzu's thesis that foreknowledge can not be got from ghosts and spirits.  The work is aimed at terminating inelligence (sic) garthering (sic) through torture, quicken investigation, and promote human security." 

I first heard about Prof. Osisioma's bizarre thesis in October 2011 when he spoke on "Intelligence and National Security" to Course 20 Participants (students) at the National Defense College, Abuja where I had just arrived two weeks earlier on sabbatical leave. The hot exchanges between me and the guest lecturer during Q & A were so brutal that it became my first full introduction to the students (who were mostly Army Colonels or equivalent ranks in the other Services) and the other Directing Staff (faculty members--mostly Brigadier-Generals and Major-Generals--or equivalent ranks, and two other university professors) many of whom were clearly impressed with the "erudite scholar." 

I later learnt that Prof. Nwolise had been giving the same lecture and promoting his "strategic spiritual intelligence" to rapturous applause three years in a row (Each cohort numbers about 135 students, including those from 10-15 other African countries). It's worth noting that many in the audience were/are notorious for burying live rams and white cocks in "aladura" churches and Alfas' shrines/mosques as part of their arsenal to ward off evil forces (witches being top on the list) during their board promotion interviews! 

The Professor is also propagating this same "theory" among the dozens of PhD students he's supervising all over the country. In addition to the nine PhDs he has supervised (by 2016), this is what he wrote in his CV: 

"Currently, I am supervising five Ph.D. students in the Department of Political Science, and four Ph.D. students in the Institute for Peace and Strategic Studies (IPSS), University of Ibadan. I am also supervising five Phd students on part-time basis in Igbinedion University, Okada.  Between 2007 and 2015, I successfully supervised five Phd Students in the Department of Political Science of Igbinedion University. I also co-supervised a Phd student at Covenant University."

Regrettably, Prof. Nwolise isn't on this forum to defend himself, but in one of my post-sabbatical posts in 2013, I wrote about concerns in some quarters in Nigeria about some professors awarding "Pure Water PhDs" as part of the factors responsible for the deteriorating standards of scholarship in Nigeria's higher ed institutions. I make no such accusation against Professor Nwolise, but I'm not sure what to make of an academic who proudly claims to be supervising fourteen (14) PhD candidates at the same time! Worse still is the institutional setting that allows such joke to be perpetrated.

So, Prof. Agozino, if you still want to learn more about Professor Nwolise's "science of witchcraft", you may wish to consult the bibliographic references (including the Professor's "Inaugural Lecture") listed below.

Regards,

Okey

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++=====  

1. Nwolise OBC, (2015), "Motion for Serious Focus of Research On The Spiritual Dimension of Human And National Security", Studies In Politics and Society, Vol.3, No. 1, December, pp. 1-14

 

2. Nwolise OBC (2014),"Oracles On Excessive Use of Force", Ibadan Journal of Peace and Development, Vols 3 and 4, May, pp 35-42.

3. Is physical security alone enough for the survival, progress and happiness of man? : an inaugural lecture delivered at the University of Ibadan on Thursday, 20 February, 2014

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	Ibadan, Nigeria : Ibadan University Press Publishing House, 2013. ©2013
Series:	Inaugural lectures (University of Ibadan), 2014.

4. Spiritual dimension of human and national security

Author:	O B C Nwolise
Publisher:	[Ibadan] : Faculty of the Social Sciences, University of Ibadan, [2012]
Series:	Faculty lecture series (University of Ibadan. Faculty of the Social Sciences), no. 18

5. Battle for security must first be won in the spirit realm —Prof. Nwolise

By Mayowa Okekale, Ibadan on 28/02/2014

https://www.newsexpressngr.com/news/detail.php?news=4789  

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 Share

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Views: 8,090

A university don, Prof. Osisioma Nwolise, has stressed the need for the country's quest for security to be extended to the spiritual realm, saying the battle cannot be won if limited to the physical realm.

Nwolise, of the Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences of University of Ibadan, made the submission in his inaugural lecture entitled 'Is physical security alone for the survival, progress and happiness of man?' delivered recently at the Trenchard Hall of the university.

He enjoined the leadership of the country to, as a matter of urgency, embrace the indigenous knowledge of spiritual instrument to enhance security in the country. In his words, "There is so much anarchy and havoc going on in the spiritual realm of human and national security today that there is every urgent need for governmental and societal attention to be focused on that realm, with a view to saving lives, protect human rights and national values, and to enhance human and national security.

"There is nothing happening in the physical world today that is not happening in the spiritual world – rape, bombing, robbery, kidnapping, hostage taking, food poisoning, ambushing, imprisonment, murder, torture, politics and accidents."

Nwolise argued that there is an urgent need to establish an academic structure for the teaching, research and study of the spiritual dimension of human and national security. His words: "There is a need to open up studies in mysticism, Nigerian n and African divinities, magic, spiritual healings, death and Strategic Spiritual Intelligence (SSI). We should as well open a new Department of Metaphysical Studies or Department of Spiritual Studies, which will serve as the nucleus for a future Faculty of Spiritual Sciences, because our little efforts so far convinced me that juju can be dissected, studied and understood just as the rabbit."

He described security as the primary concern of all humans and nations at all times, as it is a pre-requisite for their survival, progress and happiness of humanity.

In his comparison on physical and spiritual security, Nwolise opined that the welfare of human beings is not only in the physical realm as perceived by many leaders but also in the spiritual realm. Quoting the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, he said: "The aim of a leader should be the welfare of the people whom he leads. I have used 'welfare' to denote physical, mental, and spiritual well-being of the people."

Nwolise faulted the stance of scientific posture on nature, arguing that science is being too cowardly, pompous, despotic and arrogant in insisting that whatever it cannot understand, capture, measure, control or predict, does not exist. The don said it is important to understand the spiritual not only because it is superior to the physical but also because it positively reinforces the physical, and can equally endanger it under some certain circumstances.

Prof. Nwolise condemned what he called the miseducation of today's children and youths as well as the poor funding of the education sector, stressing a need for this to be urgently reversed so as to rescue the country's future.

•Photo shows Prof. Osisioma Nwolise.

Source News Express

Posted 28/02/2014 11:12:11 PM

On Sun, May 5, 2019 at 5:04 PM 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

The Professor was analyzing a core belief of most Nigerians and that is what social scientists do. He is not alone in identifying that Nigerians believe that juju is factual. Awolowo stated the same thesis of Juju as Science for killing enemies (1939) in opposition to Azikiwe who called for the scientific method to be applied to healthcare in Renascent Africa (1937). In his series of essays on 'How I survived Ebola', Biodun Jeyifo observed that medical doctors and Physics professors still believe in divine intervention even when they follow the scientific method. Professor Nwolise may have been arguing the same thesis as Obadare but from a different perspective, from the perspective of the believers.

Without reading the entire lecture, we should not judge his entire scholarship or those of all Nigerian professors based on one paragraph taken out of context. He may have been hypothesizing, like Obadare, that in a country where rulers call for prayers as the solution to every problem, how is a political scientists to be taken seriously if he fails to address this mindset? His argument may be that psychological health is indeed part of national security and so if the average Nigerian goes about with the belief that there are witches and wizards out to cause every kind of mischief, it will be a mistake for social scientists to call them imbeciles without risking irrelevance. That was why religion was called the opium of the people, the soul of a soulless world, and the heart of heartless conditions.

Even after the society guarantees the security of electricity supply, pipe-borne water, hospitals and schools for all, motor-worthy roads, fast railways, safer airlines, food and housing, jobs with living wages, the people will continue to reserve the right to believe in spiritual curses as realities sui generis. The trick is to be tolerant of all spiritual beliefs that are not oppressive of others and focus public policy on things that can be solved without mysticism while researchers should not be ridiculed for trying to understand the magical thinking of most human beings.

The Japanese and Chinese still pray at the shrines of their ancestors for blessings, Israelis still pray at the Wailing Walls, a religious party dominates India today, Arabs still fast, pray and believe that there are evil forces of Shetan, Americans still believe in the inerrancy of the Bible and many think that elected officials are the representatives of the Divine, while the British still have a state church. No one is weeping for them because they also have huge funding for research and development by their STEM specialists who send people to the moon, build enough weapons to wipe out life on earth, tackle incurable diseases, and make millions speculating on market trends. 

Instead of weeping for our colleagues at home, we should be humble and acknowledge that some of them, like OBC Nwolise himself, are busy advocating for the Nigerian Diaspora to be given a role in Nigerian foreign policy, addressing the insecurity in the country, peacemaking in West Africa, analyzing the implications of the Arab Spring, and advocating gender sensitivity in public policy. 

Did Obadare have recommendations on how to solve some these problems that Nwolise has been addressing? Pentecostal Republic is a narrow title anyway because adherents of traditional spirituality, Catholics, Rasta, and Islamists all buy into the idea of spiritual warfare around the world and not only in Nigeria.

Biko

On Sunday, 5 May 2019, 17:56:28 GMT-4, Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com> wrote:

I am reading Professor Ebenezer Obadare's brilliant new book, Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria (Zed Books, 2018), and I came across the quote below, one of those he advances as touchstones for his central argument.

It is not lifted from a sermon or a facebook post. It is not extracted from a theological or hermeneutical document. 

On the contrary, ladies and gentlemen of Facebook Nigeriana, it is an excerpt from the inaugural professorial lecture of a certain Professor Osisioma B.C Nwolise, a Professor of Political Science (a social science that teaches logic, empirical proof, rigor, verifiability, and rational analysis) at the University of Ibadan. 

This is the most important lecture of his academic career, delivered in a university to an academic audience. And yet if I did not know its context I would have surmised that this was a sermon delivered in one of the parishes of my home church, the Redeemed Christian Church of God.

Here is an academic lending his professorial weight to the Nigerian pastime of spiritualizing sociopolitical, security, and economic problems--our culture of conflating piety and politics, or neglecting political action for pietistic escapism. 

We try to pray away our problems when we should be acting against them. Now, our professors who should know better are uncritically legitimizing and trying to intellectualize this culture of fatalistic spiritualization of secular, practical problems.

Farooq Kperogi is right; our problem is not just leadership but also a national scourge of illiteracy (literal and figurative) and irrationality. How can a country whose professors profess such nonsense make progress or solve its problems?

And how can a people challenge their oppressors and tormentors in power when even their professors subscribe to such drivel, such spiritual causality for everything, including election rigging, bad governance and incompetent leadership?

Read and weep for what remains of the diminishing country called Nigeria.

"When we want to watch our television, we switch it on with our remote control by pressing a button. Then we can stay in Ibadan and watch a football match being played in Athens, Sydney or Paris. In the same way, a witch stays in her house in Lokoja or any other town, stirs water in a pot, or conjurs(sic) a mirror, and can monitor any targeted person or object in London, Athens, or Sydney. In these two instances, one is seen as science, and the other is seen as magic. A witch can also stay in South Africa or the United Kingdom and break the leg of an effigy spiritually programmed to represent a person domiciled in the United States, and the person's leg will break mysteriously there. The scientist or intellectualist may not see or accept these as real based on his training, but they happen daily and are factual. There are spirits attached to walls, plants, leaves, found in bushes, on people's clothes, etc.; and there are roving spirits that move about especially between 12 noon and 2.00 pm, and at night. Some of these spirits are benevolent, while others are malevolent. It is the malevolent spirits that constitute threats to humans. They can project sickness into people's bodies, change people's star or destiny, or change the sex of a baby in the womb, remove the baby completely or turn it into a stone, or tortoise, snail, horse, snake, or a disabled [person]. If it were possible to carve out a block of the air for spiritual analysis, we can find several arrows, and many other dangerous pollutants, spiritual weapons of mass destruction flying in various directions 24 hours of the day."

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Just published"The African Corporation, 'Africapitalism' and Regional Integration in Africa" (September 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.4337/9781785362538.

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