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USA Africa Dialogue Series - EXTORTIONIST SENATORS OF NIGERIA.

June 26, 2019, 12:36 pm
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Senators' monthly pay is N15m, Sagay replies Lawan

Published June 26, 2019
Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN)

Tobi Aworinde, Abuja

The Chairman, Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption, Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), has asked Senate President Ahmed Lawan to stop misleading Nigerians, adding that senators earn N15m monthly and not N750,000 as claimed by the Senate President.

Lawan had said on Tuesday that there was no such thing as 'jumbo pay', adding that he earns N750,000 as salary.

Speaking with our correspondent on Wednesday, however, Sagay said Nigerians were more interested in how much senators take home monthly in salary and allowances.

The senior advocate said Lawan was only speaking half truth because everyone knows that the bulk of the money earned by senators is embedded in their allowances.

Sagay said, "He (Lawan) knows that nobody will take him seriously. I respect and like him but what he has done is to give half-truth. He is telling us the actual salary without mentioning anything about the allowances.

"That's where the jumbo pay comes in when you talk of building, furniture, domestic this or that, 15 items and those items alone bring everything up to N13.5m a month. So, simply mentioning the base salary, which brings it over N14m, is not sufficient.

"So, technically, he's right, that's their salary. But what is his income, take-home pay, at the end of the month? It's about N15m and we are not including so many other things we need not talk about now.

The senior advocate said the presiding officers of the National Assembly earn more than ordinary members.

READ ALSO: NYSC member still in Boko Haram captivity as colleagues pass out

He, therefore, asked Lawan to come clean.

"Not only that; that leadership of the two houses earn a lot more — tremendous amounts. I don't really want to go into issues not to create controversy but what he's saying now is pure technical truth about salary but not about allowances, which is where the jumbo really is," Sagay said.

The PACAC chairman, who was the first to expose the jumbo pay of federal lawmakers, said he was still trying to ascertain the allowances of principal officers.

He said, "What I have not been able to do is give details of what the leadership earn. There is the leadership aspect that I hadn't revealed — the excess that the Senate leader (President) and deputy Senate leader, leader of the house; the same thing applying to the House (of Representatives).

"What they get — the current ones — that I have not been able to release. I had the details of the previous house. They were mindboggling; we are talking of one person getting up to N280m a year in allowances for his position. But I don't know what they had during the Saraki era or what the present group are going to award themselves."

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Music Discourse: ABBA and Inter- Reformers

June 26, 2019, 12:53 pm
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 12:54 pm
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Admissions like that ground Christianity. It brings it down to earth. It foreground the paradox of "we are in the world, but we are not of the world." Read the meaning of the world" in Heidegger's and Sartre, and you begin to understand the complexity of vicissitudes. And funny enough, the pastor, who doesn't understand Heidegger's, said you need to play that game because becoming a contractor implies your grounding yourself in that dynamics already. What's the point of becoming g a contractor if you prays always about not giving bribe in a place like Nigeria? You don't play ball, you don't get the contract. Otherwise, get out of the game. 


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 8:17 PM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

na wa.

thanks Oga Adeshina.

Why did this make you happy-
.
'I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity.  '  

what reason did the pastor give for this advice?



On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 19:17, 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Oga Toyin,
The issue is to question the introversion itself; to ask to what extent a Christian can live the inner life of the soul in a postcolonial context like Nigeria; to ask about collusion and complicity in the drive for existential meaning and meaningfulness. One of the things that has struck me clearly is the extent to which all of us, Christians and non-Christian alike, are complicit in the explorations of the loopholes made possible by postcolonial contexts like Nigeria. Do not be surprised that "introverted" Christians "wire" their electricity meter to avoid reading and generating bills. Christians drive across oncoming cars in a bid to get ahead of the traffic. 

Even "introverted" Christians are forced to the realization that life is not either white or black. The tension between the care of the soul and of the body/material thing (to use Wariboko's beautiful distinction) often make a nest distinction near impossible. 

Sermons in Nigeria are so beautiful and intriguing to listen to in Nigeria. You will hear wonderful homilies that attempt to steer the faithful through the existential landmine called the Nigerian society. I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity. 



Adeshina Afolayan  


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 2:13 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 1:12 pm
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The review by James Teku is a very balanced one. I will like to read the book and provide further reviews. While one can understand the difficulty in practising Christianity in Nigeria, it will defeat the essence of grace that underpins Christianity to agree with Prof Afolayan and the Pastor who advised a congregant to give bribe in order to secure contract. Walking away from such contracts and trusting God for a clean business align more with the faith of Christ. From  Teku's review above, one finds that there are the people he calls introverted Christians who still apply the letters of the word to their daily lives. Though this category of people are increasingly becoming a minority, they won't drive against the traffic under any condition, neither will they reduce age to get jobs as it has become a common practice in the country. Preachers like Bro Gbile Akanni that he mentioned as well as Pastor WF Kumuyi of Deeper Life, Wole Oladiyun of CLAM and several others still preach the whole counsel of God. Preaching is one thing while application of the word to the daily lives of the congregants is another thing. This is where personal relationship and experience of salvation come to play. Having said this, I have also questioned the extent to which Pentecostalism in Nigeria has affected our morals and value system. Compared to South Korea, where revival of pentecostalism led to radical change in morals and correspondingly on productivity and economic growth, the same cannot be said of Nigeria, especially after the 1990s. Christian experiences in the 1970s to the late 1980s appear to reflect genuine change of lives for majority of people  who  came to know Christ. Struggle for meaning and survival in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the 1990s until the present time resulted in proliferation of churches. Some founders established churches as a means of survival. In this circumstance, politics of accumulation and pentecostalism of survival meet at a critical juncture. 

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 7:17 PM 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Oga Toyin,
The issue is to question the introversion itself; to ask to what extent a Christian can live the inner life of the soul in a postcolonial context like Nigeria; to ask about collusion and complicity in the drive for existential meaning and meaningfulness. One of the things that has struck me clearly is the extent to which all of us, Christians and non-Christian alike, are complicit in the explorations of the loopholes made possible by postcolonial contexts like Nigeria. Do not be surprised that "introverted" Christians "wire" their electricity meter to avoid reading and generating bills. Christians drive across oncoming cars in a bid to get ahead of the traffic. 

Even "introverted" Christians are forced to the realization that life is not either white or black. The tension between the care of the soul and of the body/material thing (to use Wariboko's beautiful distinction) often make a nest distinction near impossible. 

Sermons in Nigeria are so beautiful and intriguing to listen to in Nigeria. You will hear wonderful homilies that attempt to steer the faithful through the existential landmine called the Nigerian society. I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity. 



Adeshina Afolayan  


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 2:13 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


--
James Yeku
Department of English
University of Saskatchewan, SK Canada
 
Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

--
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - A Republic of Extraverted Pentecostals: A Response to Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic

June 26, 2019, 2:14 pm
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hmmmm

i would not give the bribe.

although i pray i am not in a desperate situation when such temptations arrive.

the whole essence of spirituality is belief in a power that is superior to material reality.

is such belief not the essence of 'being in the world but not of it'?

if one claims to be a spiritual person and yet does not live in relation to that belief, is that person not a toddler in that context?

bribes are less visible in private sector contracts in Nigeria.

the money is not as much, but its there.





On Wed, 26 Jun 2019 at 21:30, Femi Segun <soloruntoba@gmail.com> wrote:
The review by James Teku is a very balanced one. I will like to read the book and provide further reviews. While one can understand the difficulty in practising Christianity in Nigeria, it will defeat the essence of grace that underpins Christianity to agree with Prof Afolayan and the Pastor who advised a congregant to give bribe in order to secure contract. Walking away from such contracts and trusting God for a clean business align more with the faith of Christ. From  Teku's review above, one finds that there are the people he calls introverted Christians who still apply the letters of the word to their daily lives. Though this category of people are increasingly becoming a minority, they won't drive against the traffic under any condition, neither will they reduce age to get jobs as it has become a common practice in the country. Preachers like Bro Gbile Akanni that he mentioned as well as Pastor WF Kumuyi of Deeper Life, Wole Oladiyun of CLAM and several others still preach the whole counsel of God. Preaching is one thing while application of the word to the daily lives of the congregants is another thing. This is where personal relationship and experience of salvation come to play. Having said this, I have also questioned the extent to which Pentecostalism in Nigeria has affected our morals and value system. Compared to South Korea, where revival of pentecostalism led to radical change in morals and correspondingly on productivity and economic growth, the same cannot be said of Nigeria, especially after the 1990s. Christian experiences in the 1970s to the late 1980s appear to reflect genuine change of lives for majority of people  who  came to know Christ. Struggle for meaning and survival in the aftermath of the economic crisis of the 1990s until the present time resulted in proliferation of churches. Some founders established churches as a means of survival. In this circumstance, politics of accumulation and pentecostalism of survival meet at a critical juncture. 

On Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 7:17 PM 'Adeshina Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
Oga Toyin,
The issue is to question the introversion itself; to ask to what extent a Christian can live the inner life of the soul in a postcolonial context like Nigeria; to ask about collusion and complicity in the drive for existential meaning and meaningfulness. One of the things that has struck me clearly is the extent to which all of us, Christians and non-Christian alike, are complicit in the explorations of the loopholes made possible by postcolonial contexts like Nigeria. Do not be surprised that "introverted" Christians "wire" their electricity meter to avoid reading and generating bills. Christians drive across oncoming cars in a bid to get ahead of the traffic. 

Even "introverted" Christians are forced to the realization that life is not either white or black. The tension between the care of the soul and of the body/material thing (to use Wariboko's beautiful distinction) often make a nest distinction near impossible. 

Sermons in Nigeria are so beautiful and intriguing to listen to in Nigeria. You will hear wonderful homilies that attempt to steer the faithful through the existential landmine called the Nigerian society. I was joyous the day I heard a pastor said, in answering a question about corruption, if you are given a contract and you are asked for bribe, give it. That, for me, is the juncture where Pentecostalism meets realism. Let's call it shine-your-eye Christianity. 



Adeshina Afolayan  


Sent from Yahoo Mail for iPhone

On Wednesday, June 26, 2019, 2:13 AM, Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin.adepoju@gmail.com> wrote:

Beautiful.

I was struck by the characterization of Poju Oyemade's church, which I have attended. The church is a very impressive initiative.

The strongest religious power in Nigerian politics, though, is Islam, not Christianity, on account of the domination of Nigerian politics by the Muslim North.

Its wonderful for there to exist an introverted Christianity that sustains a more inward looking, holiness focused Christian walk, as this review indicates.

thanks

toyin





On Tue, 25 Jun 2019 at 23:45, James Yeku <yeku.james@gmail.com> wrote:

Ebenezer Obadare's Pentecostal Republic: Religion and the Struggle for State Power in Nigeria masterfully captures the troubling intersections of state politics and religion in Nigeria, staging vividly Pentecostalism's unabashed appropriation of political power in Nigeria's Fourth Republic. What Pentecostal Republic accomplishes the most is how it makes intelligible the transformation of the political by the forces of religion. The author tracks and solidly analyzes the ascendancy of a brand of Nigerian Pentecostalism that impacts the performance and discharge of official power in Nigeria, arguing that an "enchanted democracy" (15) is the outgrowth of "the social visibility and political influence of a Pentecostal 'theocratic class'" (23) whose grips on Nigeria's democracy further consolidates a vexing desecularization of the country. As a participant observant of the Pentecostal dynamics Obadare writes about, I find Pentecostal Republic to be a magisterial account of the way in which certain vectors of Pentecostalism renders visible an enthronement of hegemonic totalities that stress a theocratic imaginary both in the processes of governance and in public discourses.

That said, the brilliant analysis of this book, and this position comes from critical and ethnographic encounters with Pentecostalism in Nigeria, is contingent on the assumption that Pentecostalism in Nigeria and Prosperity Christianity (based on the so-called prosperity Gospel) are the same. They are not. Obadare's framing of the Pentecostal in the context of Nigerian politics appears to be an essentialist categorization that hardly captures the full spectrum of the Pentecostal experience in the country.

Prosperity Christianity has as its chief aim a morbid desire for the accumulation of capital, which provides an ideological imaginary for the rituals of Christian behaviour and the performative excesses that have come to be associated with a large section of Christianity in Nigeria in recent decades. Its major impulse is the practice of Pentecostalism as a response to the privations and deprivations of the postcolonial moment in the country. The condition for the existence of this brand of the Pentecostal is the desire to transcend the precariousness of economic hardships and failed sociopolitical experiments through an uncritical reliance on the benevolent spectacles of a self-made and ever-present Deux ex machina by which many Christians interpret meaning and reality. Yet, it is upon this premise that Obadare appears to construct his most enduring argument — the belief that state power in Nigeria is burdened and overdetermined by Pentecostal inflections that shaped the politics of Nigeria's Fourth Republic. This thesis is true, but only to the extent that the mode of Pentecostalism that has been intelligently and vigorously analyzed is, in fact, a manifestation of only one of several valences and temperaments of Nigerian Pentecostalism.

Although it is a work that offers a compelling narrative brilliant and gripping in every sense, Pentecostal Republic also ignores a huge swath of the Pentecostal population in Nigeria, a section of Nigerian Pentecostalism that constitutes an alternative strand. There is a sense in which this group might be seen as a puritanical subculture of mainstream Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it should be more appropriately defined as an Introverted Pentecostal culture, as against the extraverted Pentecostalism which Obadare lucidly writes about. Introverted Pentecostalism is marked by a strict insistence on holiness and missionary activities, rather than position itself to perpetuate the "deflection of theological emphasis from holiness to prosperity" (22) as does most of the Pentecostal actors and leaders Obadare's work examines in the context of the struggle for political dominance in the Nigerian state. Introverted Pentecostals are likely to be given to Christian apologetics as well as an intense focus on Christian discipleship, theological domains that are peripheral mostly in practice among mainstream, extraverted Pentecostals, who, ironically, are more visible in the public arena.

While the extraverted Pentecostal appears to shape the explicit discourses and narratives of Nigerian Christianity, it is the introverted Pentecostal that implicitly embodies the quintessence of biblical morality. There could be the argument that this latter group is too reclusive to compel any meaning changes in the politics of state; this is a similar argument that may be made on behalf of moderate Islam which equally seems to stand at the margin of the ascendancy of political Islam on the cusp of global terrorism. To that charge, I will offer an example, noting the obvious imbrications in the ritual expressions of both the Introverted and the extraverted. For instance, Gbile Akanni's Peace House in Benue State gathers thousands of Nigerian Pentecostals to its campground in the city of Gboko every year, and among them may be found some of the most prominent actors of the Fourth Republic that is the focus of analyses in Obadare's book. This fact is in addition to the numerous times Gbile Akanni himself speaks in several meetings organized by state governors and state parliaments across the country. The aim of this evangelical effort is not to seize political power, but to have Christian disciples who quietly live out the principles of the doctrine of Christ in the corridors of power.

This example is not a rare singularity or an exception; there are many other groups that may or may not be visible in the way their practice of Pentecostalism shapes national politics, although we can also acknowledge the recent emergence of an urban middle-class Pentecostal culture (such as Poju Oyemade's church in Lagos) that is savvy in its use of social media, seeks to shape national conversations through secular-rational platforms, and which is highly critical of the crass materialism of prosperity Christianity. I imagine that sequels to Obadare's Pentecostal Republic will attend more critically than I could ever attempt to do to these other groups. Without any intention to romanticize this group, I would suggest that any argument that imagines introverted Pentecostals as a mere conservative bloc of other Pentecostals that may also surrender to the enticing allure of material gains dangled by members of the ruling class that interact with them will be shown to be a misreading of what Introverted Pentecostalism signifies.

I close by reiterating that the vision of Pentecostalism presented in Pentecostal Republic foregrounds prosperity in a manner that departs from the biblical morality of Introverted Pentecostals which, rather than 'demonize' them and all of reality as extraverted Pentecostals do, accepts and celebrates social problems as a necessary and an essential component of the Pentecostal experience. At the unconscious of this paradigm of Pentecostalism that explains every socio-economic malady in spiritual terms, therefore, is a quest for survival that surrenders agency to that which is empirically untenable. The Nigerian political space has a character informed by the capitalist cooptation of state resources. The diversion of public funds for private gains is something that has perennially undermined economic progress in Nigeria. With religion thrown into that mix, what is produced is not only a wanton display of avarice but also a mélange of the impulses of prosperity Christianity and the accumulative propensity of a thieving political class. In other words, both prosperity Christianity and the politics of the Fourth Republic, and indeed most of the Nigerian political space, are driven by the same ideological impulses — the will to capital. It goes without saying that in this framework, religion is not just a mechanism of escaping precarity, it is the means by which state power and resources are distributed, and with prosperity Christians in the locus of this, there is an intensification that assaults common sense.

Unfortunately, the summation of prosperity Christianity is its attainment of political significance and the rendering of reality solely through a logic of spirituality. The problem of the critic is, therefore, not Nigerian Pentecostalism. It is with the practice of prosperity Christianity in Nigeria. In Obadare, the slippages and contradictions produced by this theological project that brazenly insinuates itself into politics are excellently charted. There is so much to learn from Pentecostal Republic. I enjoyed reading it.

— James Yeku writes from Saskatoon, Canada.


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James Yeku
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Do not curse the darkness, BE the candle. Do not just be the candle, REPRODUCE more candles (Matthew 5:14)

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USA Africa Dialogue Series -

June 26, 2019, 7:42 pm
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Sometime ago, on the 19th day of June, 2019, I shared a blog update of
mine on the unfortunate absence of indigenous African traditions of
mathematical thinking in some publications in the West. I made no
pretence about being a mathematician; just a person interested in the
narration of the production of knowledge in our galaxy. You would
agree with me that USAAfricaDialogue is an important classroom for
many of us -- both in the form of peer education and learning from our
seniors/superiors. So, I was not to surprised when I received a
private email from Abdul Salau on my blog article. I read his mail and
shook my head, but I considered it an important contribution from
which I should learn. To make his contribution reach others for their
views, I replied and told him to post his response on the listserv
within seven days or I would help him to do so.

After seven days now, he is yet to post his response to
USAAfricaDialogue. So, I am helping Abdul Salau, in case he has
forgotten. Please, see his reaction below and the link to my article
on mathematics. Help us to continue thinking. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Obododimma.
==============

Prof. Oha:

Ancient Egyptians are Africans I spent my entire academic energies
exploring the relationships of Ancient Egyptian language with Hausa,
Igbo, and Yoruba languages. I chose to write you privately because
the views you are expressing are extremely embrassing.
"The only articulation of knowledge from Africa, even to be drowned in
controversies, is Ancient Egypt. And you may be warned that you are
not speaking of Africa, if you are speaking of Ancient Egypt."
Right on the forum you can write Prof. Gloria Emegwali who can give
you many references on African mathematics as you need. It is so sad
in the age of information a scholar of your stature is misinformed
on the complex subject matter on the basis of an antiquated book .
Professor Shola Olorunyomi at UI can give you information on the
subject matter. I will humbly request a retraction of your view when
you get new information.-new article on the subject matter. I greet
you in the language of Ancient Egyptian ancestors Ankh, Wdja, and
Seneb. Wishing you life, health,and prosperity.

Abdul Salau

https://x-pensiverrors.blogspot.com/2019/06/african-ancestors-and-rough-road-to.html



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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Long Life and Other Funny Human Desires

June 26, 2019, 8:00 pm
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Wishing I were a catechist? No; not yet. I am only interested in the
prayer for "long life" and question of shithole discomfort. My blog
article on Eke na Egwurugwu may interest you. To read it, please,
click on this link:

https://obododimma-oha.blogspot.com/2019/06/long-life-and-other-funny-human-desires.html

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Obododimma.

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M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
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University of Ibadan.

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - CFP: North and South Forms of Inequality within International Politics of Scientific Production

June 26, 2019, 11:53 pm
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Fwd: DANJUMA THE BILLIONAIRE

June 27, 2019, 12:44 am
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---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Anthony Akinola<anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Jun 26, 2019 at 8:31 PM
Subject: DANJUMA THE BILLIONAIRE
To: Anthony Akinola <anthony.a.akinola@gmail.com>


FEATURED

T.Y Danjuma worth $1.2bn, owns international hotels – Bloomberg

Published June 26, 2019
Lt. Gen. Theophilus Danjuma (retd.)

Eniola Akinkuotu, Abuja

United States-based financial data media house, Bloomberg, says a former Minister of Defence, Lt.Gen Theophilus Danjuma (retd.), is worth an estimated $1.2bn (N432bn).

This is the first time Danjuma's net worth would be made public.

Danjuma was mentioned in the Panama Papers in 2017 among prominent Nigerians that operated foreign accounts and had foreign companies while holding public office.

The retired general was also among global personalities found to maintain secret accounts, operated with codes, with the Swiss branch of banking giant, HSBC.

According to Bloomberg's latest report, Danjuma owns not less than 30 properties worldwide some of which include hotels, luxury apartments and others.

Bloomberg said in a report that Danjuma had also acquired the 'Kings Arms Hotel',  a 300-year-old inn next to London's Hampton Court Palace, once the home of King Henry VIII.

It's set to open soon after refurbishment, with rooms costing about 250 pounds ($318) a night.

The report read in part, "In this most English of settings, it's fitting the owner is a retired military man still referred to as "General." But for Theophilus Danjuma, this is just one investment in a network of assets that span at least three continents.

"The 80-year-old Nigerian is worth $1.2bn, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, with his family office managing a portion of that wealth, often through low-key holdings such as the 14-room hotel."

READ ALSO: Youths block Benin-Ore road over woman's killing by suspected herdsmen

Hannatu Gentles, the second daughter of the retired general, confirmed to Bloomberg in an interview that the property was indeed bought by the family and would bear the 'Danjuma' name.

She said they paid 2.4m pounds (N1.09bn) for the hotel.

Gentles said redevelopment work was expected to end in March, filings show, but the inn's age and protected status resulted in higher costs and delays.

"This is the first, and will possibly be the last, listed building we've worked on," Gentles said. "It's taken longer than we wanted, but our name is attached to the building and we want to be proud of our work. It's been a hard slog."

Danjuma's new venture is far removed from civil war and deepwater oil fields, the spheres where he amassed his power and fortune.

In 2006, his South Atlantic Petroleum Ltd. sold almost half its contractor rights for a section off Nigeria's coast to a state-backed Chinese firm for $1.8bn.

The ex-minister was awarded the block in 1998 by the regime of former dictator and fellow army officer Sani Abacha, making him one of a handful of Nigerians made extraordinarily wealthy from the country's energy reserves.

"Basically, these people got winning lottery tickets," said Antony Goldman, founder of West Africa-focused ProMedia Consulting. "At the time, you had a government desperate for credibility that was isolated internationally." Danjuma was "someone who's not really a politician, who is respected in business and in the army."

Danjuma was born in 1938, the year Royal Dutch Shell received its first oil exploration license for the country and more than two decades before it gained independence from Britain.

He dropped out of college in 1960 to join the army, according to "Nigerian Politics in the Age of Yar'Adua" by Bayode Ogunmupe. He gained prominence after participating in the 1966 counter-coup against Nigeria's first military dictator.

A decade later, he was stepping out of a Rolls-Royce in central London to meet British military officials in his role as chief of staff for Nigeria's army. He left the military in 1979 and founded his oil firm and a shipping company, NAL-Comet, which now has more than 2,000 employees in Nigeria. Danjuma paid $25m in 1998 for the oil field exploration license that made him a billionaire. A year later, he became Nigeria's defence minister as the country returned to democracy.

He originally teamed up with Total SA and Brazil's Petroleo Brasileiro SA on the block. The minority stake that Danjuma's company now owns is worth $450m, according to Bloomberg's wealth index.

"Beyond the UK, they own real estate in California and have bought and sold property in Singapore. Their family office also oversees private equity investments, trust funds and a venture capital arm that backs family-run art and film companies. The Danjumas own more than 30 properties worldwide, filings show," the report stated.

Confirming this, Danjuma's daughter added, "We invest in real estate in other jurisdictions, but in the UK we always thought let's stick to areas that we know."

She noted that her father bought a residence in Singapore years ago, "and it made sense then to buy some more," she said, adding they've since sold the properties because of tax law changes.

In addition to the Kings Arms Hotel, the Danjumas have developed residential properties this year in Esher and Wimbledon. They also own a boutique hotel in Lagos, serving beef carpaccio and lobster bisque in one of three dining areas and displaying works from the family's art firm.

--
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"

June 27, 2019, 12:56 am
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The Academic Nonsense Called "Theoretical Framework" in Nigerian Universities

 

By Moses E. Ochonu

 

Note: I wrote this reflection last night as a Facebook update in the aftermath of a vibrant discussion in a seminar I gave yesterday to advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty at the ongoing Lagos Studies Conference at the University of Lagos. We covered several topics but this was by far the most animated and vexing issue for the participants. There is outrage out there against silly regimentations that lack intellectual logic and are only grounded in the silly bureaucratic justification of homogenization, control, and conformity. This is a more polished version of what I told the participants and I have sent it to them as an email attachment.

 

 

Why do Nigerian universities require all academic dissertations in the social sciences and humanities to include a section called "theoretical framework"? There is no logic or compelling scholarly reason other than the inexplicable Nigerian desire for regimentation, uniformity, and unnecessary complication. 

 

And of course, there is the ego and procedural obsession factor: they made us do this, so now that we're professors, our students have to do it too.

 

The fetishization of the "theoretical framework" is a recent development in Nigerian universities. When I was an undergraduate, there was no such blanket requirement. It is lazy and counterproductive, a poor, foolish, and misguided attempt to copy theoretical trends in the Western academy. This mimicry completely and fundamentally misunderstands the theoretical turn in global humanities and social science scholarship, not to mention the point of theorization in the first place.

 

First of all, what is the point of requiring "theoretical framework" of everyone in the social science and humanities as if all topical explorations have to have theoretical endpoints? Some topics, by their nature, lend themselves to theoretical explorations and reflections. Others don't and that's okay. As long as the scholarship is rigorous and has a structuring set of arguments that are borne out by the data, it is fine.

 

Not all works have to be theoretically informed or make theoretical contributions. In historical scholarship for instance, a good narrative that is framed in a sound argument is what we're looking for, not forced theoretical discussions.

 

There are disciplinary differences that make the blanket imposition of the theoretical framework requirement silly. For some disciplines, theory and theoretical framing are integral to their practice. For others, that is not the case. Literary scholarship, for instance, may be more theoretical than other fields. While requiring students in literary studies to write in the theoretical vocabulary of the field or to engage with consequential theoretical conversations of the field or at least demonstrate some familiarity with these conversations, requiring a history and education student to do the same is stupid.

 

And even in the theory-inclined fields, not all topics are theory-laden or require theoretical explorations or conclusions.

 

Secondly, theory can never be imposed or should never be imposed. That produces bad scholarship. Requiring students to have a theoretical framework even before they've done the research or analyzed their data prejudges the work and imposes a predetermined direction and outcome on the dissertation. It amounts to doing scholarship backwards. It stifles scholarly innovation and originality. More tragically, requiring a theoretical framework upfront is bad scholarly practice because it disrespects the data and the analysis/arguments that the data supports.

 

Thirdly, imposing the "theoretical framework" requirement reverses the proper order of the empirical/theoretical dyad. Even in scholarship that lends itself to theoretical reflection and arguments, such theories emanate from the work, from a rigorous distillation of the theoretical implications and insights of the analysis. Imposing theory by choosing some random theory of some random (probably dead) white person defeats the purpose and silences the potential theoretical contributions of the dissertation.

 

It is during the process of data analysis and the development of the work's arguments and insights that its theoretical implications and its connections to or divergence from existing theoretical postulations becomes clear, giving the scholar a clear entry point to engage critically with the existing theoretical literature and to highlight the theoretical contributions and insights of the work in relation to existing theories. Proper theorizing flows from compelling analysis of data, not the other way round. I don't understand why a student is required to adopt a so-called theoretical framework ab initio, before the research is done, before the analyses are complete — before the work's arguments and insights are fully collated and distilled into a set of disciplined postulations on knowledge aka theories. 

 

If a topic has theoretical dimensions, why not simply, as a supervisor, encourage the student to 1) be conscious of the theoretical implications and insights, and 2) highlight these theoretical interventions? Why is a "theoretical framework" section needed? And if you must carve out a section, why not title it "theoretical insights" or "theoretical reflections" or some other similarly flexible and less restrictive category? Doing so gives the student the leeway, flexibility, and incentive to actually reflect on and then highlight the work's theoretical insights (in relation to other theories) instead of blindly dropping the names of some white theorists, whose theories may or may not relate to his work, just to fulfill the requirement of having a so-called theoretical framework? Why do you have to require an arbitrary, mechanical section on theoretical framework?

 

The result of the current requirement in Nigerian universities is that students who have theoretical statements to make through their work cannot do so because the "theoretical framework" requirement merely demands a mechanical homage to existing theories and neither produces a critical assessment of or engagement with such theories nor a powerful enunciation of the work's theoretical takeaways. As practiced in Nigeria, the blanket theoretical framework requirement is nothing more than an annoying, one-size-fits-all name dropping exercise that destroys a dissertation's originality by imposing an awkward theory on it. 

 

And, by the way, every work has theory that is either explicit or implicit, whether the author chooses to highlight them or not. A perceptive reader can identify and grasp the theoretical implications and insights even without a separate, demarcated "theory" section. Sometimes the theory is implied in the analysis can be seen, so requiring a section/chapter dedicated to announcing the work's "theory" is redundant and infantilizes the reader.

 

The "theoretical framework" requirement also makes a dissertation difficult to read as the transition from the work's findings and contentions to the "theoretical framework" is often forced, abrupt, and jarring.

 

In its Nigerian iteration, the tyranny of the theoretical framework requirement does nothing but theoretically restrict the work, putting its arguments and theoretical insights in the shadow of some Euro-American theories with little or no relevance to the work in question or to our African realities and phenomena.

 

Nigeria has so much to offer the world of theory and African scholarship is dripping with potential theoretical contributions, but the arbitrary imposition of a "theoretical framework" requirement kills off or buries such original theoretical contributions by imposing a prepackaged, usually foreign, theory on a work that is chocked full of its own theoretical insights — insights that, if properly distilled and highlighted to stand on their own confident African legs, can revise, challenge, or deepen existing Euro-American theories.

 

 

 

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

June 27, 2019, 2:22 am
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Great Malabite,

If he did not give you the informed consent to name him publicly, you could still have posted the contents of the mail without naming him.

No laughing matter. It is not just ancient Egypt that practiced mathematical thought, Abdul is right.

According to Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computer Engineering and Indigenous Design, the system that gave rise to the complex design of the internet is found all over Africa and it is more widespread in Africa than in any other part of the world. Europeans tend to prefer Cartesian designs of easy-to-control grids while indigenous peoples in the Americas preferred the Euclidean design of the totem pole. Africans prefer to design their hair-styles, textile, architectural design, town-planning, beliefs in the supernatural and the principles are common in arts, economics, healing and politics in predominantly fractal patterns with self-similarity, recursion, fractional dimensions, non-lineal geometry, chaos, and interconnectivity.

But I no blame Dodo Malabite, Ewu, because he probably dreaded Maths in the high school and did not take it for his English degree. On my Freshman way from Aba, I shared a ride from the motor park to Malabor with Sophomore political science students. They tried to tease me by telling me that I was going to face the terror of Maths for Social Science which was required for only Sociology. Bring it on, I bellowed. I meant it too. 

I took maths seriously and copied down every example that the Indian instructor wrote down. When someone said that he or she did not understand where the x came from or did not understand anything, he told us to copy it down and study so that we can understand later. I practiced maths daily and aced it and bonded with a Senior math major who was happy to explain some things for me. 

The lesson is that anyone can practice Maths or any other course and Master it the way sports players practice daily. That is why colleges maintain athletic programs that could teach team building as disciplined workout ethic even in acadaletics.

The answer to the mass failure in maths during WAEC is lack of practice which makes perfect. Practice Maths daily and you perform better.

Biko
On Thursday, 27 June 2019, 00:51:36 GMT-4, Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com> wrote:


Sometime ago, on the 19th day of June, 2019, I shared a blog update of
mine on the unfortunate absence of indigenous African traditions of
mathematical thinking in some publications in the West. I made no
pretence about being a mathematician; just a person interested in the
narration of the production of knowledge in our galaxy. You would
agree with me that USAAfricaDialogue is an important classroom for
many of us -- both in the form of peer education and learning from our
seniors/superiors. So, I was not to surprised when I received a
private email from Abdul Salau on my blog article. I read his mail and
shook my head, but I considered it an important contribution from
which I should learn. To make his contribution reach others for their
views, I replied and told him to post his response on the listserv
within seven days or I would help him to do so.

After seven days now, he is yet to post his response to
USAAfricaDialogue. So, I am helping Abdul Salau, in case he has
forgotten. Please, see his reaction below and the link to my article
on mathematics. Help us to continue thinking. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Obododimma.
==============

Prof. Oha:

Ancient Egyptians are Africans I spent my entire academic energies
exploring the relationships of Ancient  Egyptian language with  Hausa,
Igbo, and Yoruba languages. I chose to  write you privately because
the views you are expressing are extremely embrassing.
"The only articulation of knowledge from Africa, even to be drowned in
controversies, is Ancient Egypt. And you may be warned that you are
not speaking of Africa, if you are speaking of Ancient Egypt."
Right on the forum you can write Prof. Gloria  Emegwali who can give
you many references on African mathematics  as you  need. It is so sad
in the age of information  a scholar of your stature  is misinformed
on the complex subject matter on the basis of  an antiquated book .
Professor Shola Olorunyomi  at UI can give you information on the
subject matter. I will  humbly request  a retraction of your view when
you get new information.-new article on the subject matter.  I greet
you in the  language of Ancient Egyptian ancestors Ankh, Wdja, and
Seneb.  Wishing you life, health,and  prosperity.

Abdul Salau




--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
              +234 8033331330;
              +234 9033333555;
              +234 8022208008;
              +234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - I HEAR AND SENSE A DANGEROUS TREND IN ACCRA

June 27, 2019, 6:15 am
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Kojo
I read Edward Kissi's take on what was happening in Ghana which I ferried from Ghanweb to this platform. On this occasion,  I had nothing to add to Kissi's comment. It looks like you heard a lot  and one would have expected you to add your trumpet  to make his voice louder. Your "Hear Hear Kwabena" adds nothing to what I posted, or Edward's take. It is irritating to the ears. 
Kwabena Akurang-Parry

From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of kojo <andohk10@gmail.com>
Sent: June 21, 2019 4:48 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - I HEAR AND SENSE A DANGEROUS TREND IN ACCRA
 
Hear, Hear, Kwabena, 

On Wed, Jun 19, 2019 at 9:17 PM Kissi, Edward <ekissi@usf.edu> wrote:

In July 1938, or thereabout, Nnamdi Azikiwe's West African Pilot newspaper wrote a long and moral critique of the Nazi behaviour of holding the "sins" of a few Jews against the entire Jewish people of  Germany. I wish the press in Accra, with a few exceptions, will mount a similar moral mission against what is becoming a creeping and dangerous trend in Accra: the ascription of the criminal conduct of a few Nigerians in Ghana, to "Nigerians" as a group of people.

Yes, there have been apprehensions of some Nigerians by the Ghana police for criminal conduct that includes kidnapping of foreign nationals. I hear too, as I move around Accra, cautionary whispers to be careful of the "Nigerians" who have flooded the country.  I wonder how Ghanaians in the capital city are able to make facial recognition of who is, and is not Nigerian. Nevertheless, while every nation is obligated to secure the welfare of its citizens, and visitors, it is equally obligatory for every nation to tamp down any potential descent of its citizenry into the demonization of a national group from the invidious conduct of a few.

I don't like this tendency when it is used to demonize and criminalize a racial group in America. I have looked at the same with scorn in my study of Nazi racism and antosemitism, and I will not be faithful to my intellectual and moral creed if I did not express my dismay at the same creeping trend in my own country Ghana. This time, it is about Nigerians. Somewhere in the world, it could be about Ghanaians.  I remember the wise words of Father Niemoller: First, they came for the Communists.

Edward Kissi
Accra

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andoh

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

June 27, 2019, 6:38 am
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I share Salaus dismay.  Im not given to reading blogs otherwise I would have enlightened you. Western mathematics is actually the Johnny lately come when it comes to mathematics and not African mathemayics.

Also with all that has transpired on this listserv on Black Ifa mathematics I dont think you should have written what you wrote  about the absence of Black African mathematics.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com>
Date: 27/06/2019 06:01 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

Sometime ago, on the 19th day of June, 2019, I shared a blog update of
mine on the unfortunate absence of indigenous African traditions of
mathematical thinking in some publications in the West. I made no
pretence about being a mathematician; just a person interested in the
narration of the production of knowledge in our galaxy. You would
agree with me that USAAfricaDialogue is an important classroom for
many of us -- both in the form of peer education and learning from our
seniors/superiors. So, I was not to surprised when I received a
private email from Abdul Salau on my blog article. I read his mail and
shook my head, but I considered it an important contribution from
which I should learn. To make his contribution reach others for their
views, I replied and told him to post his response on the listserv
within seven days or I would help him to do so.

After seven days now, he is yet to post his response to
USAAfricaDialogue. So, I am helping Abdul Salau, in case he has
forgotten. Please, see his reaction below and the link to my article
on mathematics. Help us to continue thinking. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Obododimma.
==============

Prof. Oha:

Ancient Egyptians are Africans I spent my entire academic energies
exploring the relationships of Ancient  Egyptian language with  Hausa,
Igbo, and Yoruba languages. I chose to  write you privately because
the views you are expressing are extremely embrassing.
"The only articulation of knowledge from Africa, even to be drowned in
controversies, is Ancient Egypt. And you may be warned that you are
not speaking of Africa, if you are speaking of Ancient Egypt."
Right on the forum you can write Prof. Gloria  Emegwali who can give
you many references on African mathematics  as you  need. It is so sad
in the age of information  a scholar of your stature  is misinformed
on the complex subject matter on the basis of  an antiquated book .
Professor Shola Olorunyomi  at UI can give you information on the
subject matter. I will  humbly request  a retraction of your view when
you get new information.-new article on the subject matter.  I greet
you in the  language of Ancient Egyptian ancestors Ankh, Wdja, and
Seneb.  Wishing you life, health,and  prosperity.

Abdul Salau

https://x-pensiverrors.blogspot.com/2019/06/african-ancestors-and-rough-road-to.html



--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
              +234 8033331330;
              +234 9033333555;
              +234 8022208008;
              +234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/

--
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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Bishop Hassan Kukah and Transformational Leadership

June 27, 2019, 8:40 am
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His Lordship, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, has transformed the Sokoto Diocese of the Catholic Church, as well as the city itself. I spent quality time with him, first at dinner, and later in his office. I visited him years earlier, when he was laying the foundation of what is now an extraordinary achievement.

 

With a magisterial command of Nigerian politics, our topics shifted from encounters with major figures, old and recent, revealing the values of oral histories, the pitfalls of relying on published accounts. What a library? His retentive memory is far superior to mine, with the capabilities to remember names, dates and events with accuracy.

 

He is at home in the world of the Nigerian academy, lamenting the decline in its culture. He has nostalgia for the great scholars of the 70s.

 

His missionary work is full-scale—he has built a school, a clinic, an events center, a hotel and a sprawling secretariat complex. His views are realistic, even if some are political in nature.

 

Bishop Kukah is at once a Catholic missionary as he is a human rights activist, a philanthropist, a crusader for the rights of the downtrodden, an outspoken nationalist and, of course, a highly prized intellectual on the global scale.

 

We agreed on many things in the 1980s. Strikingly, we still agree on many things today, not the least our unfulfilled dreams.

 

As I left him, thinking of a trip to Maiduguri, I began to realize that His Lordship, while looking onto the future, is also reaching back to the ground zero of missionary work: the beneficiaries of his largess are not necessarily Catholics, as many are Muslims. This is where his vision is located—that the core of our humanity does not lie in identity politics, but the oneness of our humanity.

 

This is not even a preface!

 

 

↧

Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Bishop Hassan Kukah and Transformational Leadership

June 27, 2019, 10:33 am
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Situated right there in Sokoto, the epicentre of the Nigerian Muslim world, His Lordship Kukah radiates the amity responsible religious engagement can bring to a nation in discord.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Date: 27/06/2019 16:53 (GMT+00:00)
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs+msgappr@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Bishop Hassan Kukah and Transformational  Leadership

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu) Add cleanup rule | More info

His Lordship, Bishop Mathew Hassan Kukah, has transformed the Sokoto Diocese of the Catholic Church, as well as the city itself. I spent quality time with him, first at dinner, and later in his office. I visited him years earlier, when he was laying the foundation of what is now an extraordinary achievement.

 

With a magisterial command of Nigerian politics, our topics shifted from encounters with major figures, old and recent, revealing the values of oral histories, the pitfalls of relying on published accounts. What a library? His retentive memory is far superior to mine, with the capabilities to remember names, dates and events with accuracy.

 

He is at home in the world of the Nigerian academy, lamenting the decline in its culture. He has nostalgia for the great scholars of the 70s.

 

His missionary work is full-scale—he has built a school, a clinic, an events center, a hotel and a sprawling secretariat complex. His views are realistic, even if some are political in nature.

 

Bishop Kukah is at once a Catholic missionary as he is a human rights activist, a philanthropist, a crusader for the rights of the downtrodden, an outspoken nationalist and, of course, a highly prized intellectual on the global scale.

 

We agreed on many things in the 1980s. Strikingly, we still agree on many things today, not the least our unfulfilled dreams.

 

As I left him, thinking of a trip to Maiduguri, I began to realize that His Lordship, while looking onto the future, is also reaching back to the ground zero of missionary work: the beneficiaries of his largess are not necessarily Catholics, as many are Muslims. This is where his vision is located—that the core of our humanity does not lie in identity politics, but the oneness of our humanity.

 

This is not even a preface!

 

 

--
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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

June 27, 2019, 10:38 am
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Biko:

You are right on the money.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 27/06/2019 14:21 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

Great Malabite,

If he did not give you the informed consent to name him publicly, you could still have posted the contents of the mail without naming him.

No laughing matter. It is not just ancient Egypt that practiced mathematical thought, Abdul is right.

According to Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computer Engineering and Indigenous Design, the system that gave rise to the complex design of the internet is found all over Africa and it is more widespread in Africa than in any other part of the world. Europeans tend to prefer Cartesian designs of easy-to-control grids while indigenous peoples in the Americas preferred the Euclidean design of the totem pole. Africans prefer to design their hair-styles, textile, architectural design, town-planning, beliefs in the supernatural and the principles are common in arts, economics, healing and politics in predominantly fractal patterns with self-similarity, recursion, fractional dimensions, non-lineal geometry, chaos, and interconnectivity.

But I no blame Dodo Malabite, Ewu, because he probably dreaded Maths in the high school and did not take it for his English degree. On my Freshman way from Aba, I shared a ride from the motor park to Malabor with Sophomore political science students. They tried to tease me by telling me that I was going to face the terror of Maths for Social Science which was required for only Sociology. Bring it on, I bellowed. I meant it too. 

I took maths seriously and copied down every example that the Indian instructor wrote down. When someone said that he or she did not understand where the x came from or did not understand anything, he told us to copy it down and study so that we can understand later. I practiced maths daily and aced it and bonded with a Senior math major who was happy to explain some things for me. 

The lesson is that anyone can practice Maths or any other course and Master it the way sports players practice daily. That is why colleges maintain athletic programs that could teach team building as disciplined workout ethic even in acadaletics.

The answer to the mass failure in maths during WAEC is lack of practice which makes perfect. Practice Maths daily and you perform better.

Biko
On Thursday, 27 June 2019, 00:51:36 GMT-4, Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com> wrote:


Sometime ago, on the 19th day of June, 2019, I shared a blog update of
mine on the unfortunate absence of indigenous African traditions of
mathematical thinking in some publications in the West. I made no
pretence about being a mathematician; just a person interested in the
narration of the production of knowledge in our galaxy. You would
agree with me that USAAfricaDialogue is an important classroom for
many of us -- both in the form of peer education and learning from our
seniors/superiors. So, I was not to surprised when I received a
private email from Abdul Salau on my blog article. I read his mail and
shook my head, but I considered it an important contribution from
which I should learn. To make his contribution reach others for their
views, I replied and told him to post his response on the listserv
within seven days or I would help him to do so.

After seven days now, he is yet to post his response to
USAAfricaDialogue. So, I am helping Abdul Salau, in case he has
forgotten. Please, see his reaction below and the link to my article
on mathematics. Help us to continue thinking. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Obododimma.
==============

Prof. Oha:

Ancient Egyptians are Africans I spent my entire academic energies
exploring the relationships of Ancient  Egyptian language with  Hausa,
Igbo, and Yoruba languages. I chose to  write you privately because
the views you are expressing are extremely embrassing.
"The only articulation of knowledge from Africa, even to be drowned in
controversies, is Ancient Egypt. And you may be warned that you are
not speaking of Africa, if you are speaking of Ancient Egypt."
Right on the forum you can write Prof. Gloria  Emegwali who can give
you many references on African mathematics  as you  need. It is so sad
in the age of information  a scholar of your stature  is misinformed
on the complex subject matter on the basis of  an antiquated book .
Professor Shola Olorunyomi  at UI can give you information on the
subject matter. I will  humbly request  a retraction of your view when
you get new information.-new article on the subject matter.  I greet
you in the  language of Ancient Egyptian ancestors Ankh, Wdja, and
Seneb.  Wishing you life, health,and  prosperity.

Abdul Salau




--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

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Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"

June 27, 2019, 11:11 am
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0
0
Moses:
 I am with you all the way on this issue of theory and say that when it comes to the disciplines such as history its a Euro-American imposition.  Until I went to graduate school in Europe I never ever thought there could ever be anything such as theory in history and I fought and kicked all the way to the deciding that I would NEVER take a doctorate in history. Like you said it seemed so forced ( with the supervisor asking me to bring in every chapter for approval before the next to ensure they conform to my initial theoretical underpinning before I write the next one.

At a point I wanted to just stop going back and resign myself to the fact the whole idea of graduate studies was a huge mistake. Then I had a rethink because I thought the whole idea was exhumed to prove the black brain cannot cope with theory and that this black block head was merely another example to prove the point.  That is a planned exclusionary device.

I had 2 or 3 black females who sat in at the first 2 or 3 lectures just to complain that black people were not being given a chance and then disappeared.  Needless to say to buttress their fears I was the only black on the course.


OAA.



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: 27/06/2019 14:21 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"

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The Academic Nonsense Called "Theoretical Framework" in Nigerian Universities

 

By Moses E. Ochonu

 

Note: I wrote this reflection last night as a Facebook update in the aftermath of a vibrant discussion in a seminar I gave yesterday to advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty at the ongoing Lagos Studies Conference at the University of Lagos. We covered several topics but this was by far the most animated and vexing issue for the participants. There is outrage out there against silly regimentations that lack intellectual logic and are only grounded in the silly bureaucratic justification of homogenization, control, and conformity. This is a more polished version of what I told the participants and I have sent it to them as an email attachment.

 

 

Why do Nigerian universities require all academic dissertations in the social sciences and humanities to include a section called "theoretical framework"? There is no logic or compelling scholarly reason other than the inexplicable Nigerian desire for regimentation, uniformity, and unnecessary complication. 

 

And of course, there is the ego and procedural obsession factor: they made us do this, so now that we're professors, our students have to do it too.

 

The fetishization of the "theoretical framework" is a recent development in Nigerian universities. When I was an undergraduate, there was no such blanket requirement. It is lazy and counterproductive, a poor, foolish, and misguided attempt to copy theoretical trends in the Western academy. This mimicry completely and fundamentally misunderstands the theoretical turn in global humanities and social science scholarship, not to mention the point of theorization in the first place.

 

First of all, what is the point of requiring "theoretical framework" of everyone in the social science and humanities as if all topical explorations have to have theoretical endpoints? Some topics, by their nature, lend themselves to theoretical explorations and reflections. Others don't and that's okay. As long as the scholarship is rigorous and has a structuring set of arguments that are borne out by the data, it is fine.

 

Not all works have to be theoretically informed or make theoretical contributions. In historical scholarship for instance, a good narrative that is framed in a sound argument is what we're looking for, not forced theoretical discussions.

 

There are disciplinary differences that make the blanket imposition of the theoretical framework requirement silly. For some disciplines, theory and theoretical framing are integral to their practice. For others, that is not the case. Literary scholarship, for instance, may be more theoretical than other fields. While requiring students in literary studies to write in the theoretical vocabulary of the field or to engage with consequential theoretical conversations of the field or at least demonstrate some familiarity with these conversations, requiring a history and education student to do the same is stupid.

 

And even in the theory-inclined fields, not all topics are theory-laden or require theoretical explorations or conclusions.

 

Secondly, theory can never be imposed or should never be imposed. That produces bad scholarship. Requiring students to have a theoretical framework even before they've done the research or analyzed their data prejudges the work and imposes a predetermined direction and outcome on the dissertation. It amounts to doing scholarship backwards. It stifles scholarly innovation and originality. More tragically, requiring a theoretical framework upfront is bad scholarly practice because it disrespects the data and the analysis/arguments that the data supports.

 

Thirdly, imposing the "theoretical framework" requirement reverses the proper order of the empirical/theoretical dyad. Even in scholarship that lends itself to theoretical reflection and arguments, such theories emanate from the work, from a rigorous distillation of the theoretical implications and insights of the analysis. Imposing theory by choosing some random theory of some random (probably dead) white person defeats the purpose and silences the potential theoretical contributions of the dissertation.

 

It is during the process of data analysis and the development of the work's arguments and insights that its theoretical implications and its connections to or divergence from existing theoretical postulations becomes clear, giving the scholar a clear entry point to engage critically with the existing theoretical literature and to highlight the theoretical contributions and insights of the work in relation to existing theories. Proper theorizing flows from compelling analysis of data, not the other way round. I don't understand why a student is required to adopt a so-called theoretical framework ab initio, before the research is done, before the analyses are complete — before the work's arguments and insights are fully collated and distilled into a set of disciplined postulations on knowledge aka theories. 

 

If a topic has theoretical dimensions, why not simply, as a supervisor, encourage the student to 1) be conscious of the theoretical implications and insights, and 2) highlight these theoretical interventions? Why is a "theoretical framework" section needed? And if you must carve out a section, why not title it "theoretical insights" or "theoretical reflections" or some other similarly flexible and less restrictive category? Doing so gives the student the leeway, flexibility, and incentive to actually reflect on and then highlight the work's theoretical insights (in relation to other theories) instead of blindly dropping the names of some white theorists, whose theories may or may not relate to his work, just to fulfill the requirement of having a so-called theoretical framework? Why do you have to require an arbitrary, mechanical section on theoretical framework?

 

The result of the current requirement in Nigerian universities is that students who have theoretical statements to make through their work cannot do so because the "theoretical framework" requirement merely demands a mechanical homage to existing theories and neither produces a critical assessment of or engagement with such theories nor a powerful enunciation of the work's theoretical takeaways. As practiced in Nigeria, the blanket theoretical framework requirement is nothing more than an annoying, one-size-fits-all name dropping exercise that destroys a dissertation's originality by imposing an awkward theory on it. 

 

And, by the way, every work has theory that is either explicit or implicit, whether the author chooses to highlight them or not. A perceptive reader can identify and grasp the theoretical implications and insights even without a separate, demarcated "theory" section. Sometimes the theory is implied in the analysis can be seen, so requiring a section/chapter dedicated to announcing the work's "theory" is redundant and infantilizes the reader.

 

The "theoretical framework" requirement also makes a dissertation difficult to read as the transition from the work's findings and contentions to the "theoretical framework" is often forced, abrupt, and jarring.

 

In its Nigerian iteration, the tyranny of the theoretical framework requirement does nothing but theoretically restrict the work, putting its arguments and theoretical insights in the shadow of some Euro-American theories with little or no relevance to the work in question or to our African realities and phenomena.

 

Nigeria has so much to offer the world of theory and African scholarship is dripping with potential theoretical contributions, but the arbitrary imposition of a "theoretical framework" requirement kills off or buries such original theoretical contributions by imposing a prepackaged, usually foreign, theory on a work that is chocked full of its own theoretical insights — insights that, if properly distilled and highlighted to stand on their own confident African legs, can revise, challenge, or deepen existing Euro-American theories.

 

 

 

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USA Africa Dialogue Series - Call for Papers

June 27, 2019, 1:31 pm
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0
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Chukwuemeka Agbo, M.A.
Doctoral Candidate in African History
Department of History
The University of Texas at Austin
128 Inner Campus Drive
B7000 Austin, Tx, 78712-0220
USA



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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"

June 27, 2019, 1:35 pm
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Addendum.

The other side of the story is I let it slip that I would not be continuing with them anyway and would finish the rest of my studies in the US.  In response to which it was decided that I be graded relatively low and that no one should provide a useful reference for me so that if I wanted to pursue further graduate studies Ill be forced on my knees crawling back to them begging.  Of course I did no such thing preferring to start all over again at Masters level.  That was part of what I meant when I ince wrote here that if members of the intelligentsia decide to be evil they are harder to catch in view of their superior intelligence used to mask the evil.

At a point in time the British intelligence MI6 was even involved with passports disappearing in transit and at the passport office third world styke.

Anyways I supervised a final year history project in which the theory was again given within which the topic was to be written so as you correctly argued it stifles individual response.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: Moses Ebe Ochonu <meochonu@gmail.com>
Date: 27/06/2019 14:21 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfricaDialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - The Academic Nonsense of "Theoretical Framework"

Boxbe This message is eligible for Automatic Cleanup! (meochonu@gmail.com) Add cleanup rule | More info

The Academic Nonsense Called "Theoretical Framework" in Nigerian Universities

 

By Moses E. Ochonu

 

Note: I wrote this reflection last night as a Facebook update in the aftermath of a vibrant discussion in a seminar I gave yesterday to advanced graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty at the ongoing Lagos Studies Conference at the University of Lagos. We covered several topics but this was by far the most animated and vexing issue for the participants. There is outrage out there against silly regimentations that lack intellectual logic and are only grounded in the silly bureaucratic justification of homogenization, control, and conformity. This is a more polished version of what I told the participants and I have sent it to them as an email attachment.

 

 

Why do Nigerian universities require all academic dissertations in the social sciences and humanities to include a section called "theoretical framework"? There is no logic or compelling scholarly reason other than the inexplicable Nigerian desire for regimentation, uniformity, and unnecessary complication. 

 

And of course, there is the ego and procedural obsession factor: they made us do this, so now that we're professors, our students have to do it too.

 

The fetishization of the "theoretical framework" is a recent development in Nigerian universities. When I was an undergraduate, there was no such blanket requirement. It is lazy and counterproductive, a poor, foolish, and misguided attempt to copy theoretical trends in the Western academy. This mimicry completely and fundamentally misunderstands the theoretical turn in global humanities and social science scholarship, not to mention the point of theorization in the first place.

 

First of all, what is the point of requiring "theoretical framework" of everyone in the social science and humanities as if all topical explorations have to have theoretical endpoints? Some topics, by their nature, lend themselves to theoretical explorations and reflections. Others don't and that's okay. As long as the scholarship is rigorous and has a structuring set of arguments that are borne out by the data, it is fine.

 

Not all works have to be theoretically informed or make theoretical contributions. In historical scholarship for instance, a good narrative that is framed in a sound argument is what we're looking for, not forced theoretical discussions.

 

There are disciplinary differences that make the blanket imposition of the theoretical framework requirement silly. For some disciplines, theory and theoretical framing are integral to their practice. For others, that is not the case. Literary scholarship, for instance, may be more theoretical than other fields. While requiring students in literary studies to write in the theoretical vocabulary of the field or to engage with consequential theoretical conversations of the field or at least demonstrate some familiarity with these conversations, requiring a history and education student to do the same is stupid.

 

And even in the theory-inclined fields, not all topics are theory-laden or require theoretical explorations or conclusions.

 

Secondly, theory can never be imposed or should never be imposed. That produces bad scholarship. Requiring students to have a theoretical framework even before they've done the research or analyzed their data prejudges the work and imposes a predetermined direction and outcome on the dissertation. It amounts to doing scholarship backwards. It stifles scholarly innovation and originality. More tragically, requiring a theoretical framework upfront is bad scholarly practice because it disrespects the data and the analysis/arguments that the data supports.

 

Thirdly, imposing the "theoretical framework" requirement reverses the proper order of the empirical/theoretical dyad. Even in scholarship that lends itself to theoretical reflection and arguments, such theories emanate from the work, from a rigorous distillation of the theoretical implications and insights of the analysis. Imposing theory by choosing some random theory of some random (probably dead) white person defeats the purpose and silences the potential theoretical contributions of the dissertation.

 

It is during the process of data analysis and the development of the work's arguments and insights that its theoretical implications and its connections to or divergence from existing theoretical postulations becomes clear, giving the scholar a clear entry point to engage critically with the existing theoretical literature and to highlight the theoretical contributions and insights of the work in relation to existing theories. Proper theorizing flows from compelling analysis of data, not the other way round. I don't understand why a student is required to adopt a so-called theoretical framework ab initio, before the research is done, before the analyses are complete — before the work's arguments and insights are fully collated and distilled into a set of disciplined postulations on knowledge aka theories. 

 

If a topic has theoretical dimensions, why not simply, as a supervisor, encourage the student to 1) be conscious of the theoretical implications and insights, and 2) highlight these theoretical interventions? Why is a "theoretical framework" section needed? And if you must carve out a section, why not title it "theoretical insights" or "theoretical reflections" or some other similarly flexible and less restrictive category? Doing so gives the student the leeway, flexibility, and incentive to actually reflect on and then highlight the work's theoretical insights (in relation to other theories) instead of blindly dropping the names of some white theorists, whose theories may or may not relate to his work, just to fulfill the requirement of having a so-called theoretical framework? Why do you have to require an arbitrary, mechanical section on theoretical framework?

 

The result of the current requirement in Nigerian universities is that students who have theoretical statements to make through their work cannot do so because the "theoretical framework" requirement merely demands a mechanical homage to existing theories and neither produces a critical assessment of or engagement with such theories nor a powerful enunciation of the work's theoretical takeaways. As practiced in Nigeria, the blanket theoretical framework requirement is nothing more than an annoying, one-size-fits-all name dropping exercise that destroys a dissertation's originality by imposing an awkward theory on it. 

 

And, by the way, every work has theory that is either explicit or implicit, whether the author chooses to highlight them or not. A perceptive reader can identify and grasp the theoretical implications and insights even without a separate, demarcated "theory" section. Sometimes the theory is implied in the analysis can be seen, so requiring a section/chapter dedicated to announcing the work's "theory" is redundant and infantilizes the reader.

 

The "theoretical framework" requirement also makes a dissertation difficult to read as the transition from the work's findings and contentions to the "theoretical framework" is often forced, abrupt, and jarring.

 

In its Nigerian iteration, the tyranny of the theoretical framework requirement does nothing but theoretically restrict the work, putting its arguments and theoretical insights in the shadow of some Euro-American theories with little or no relevance to the work in question or to our African realities and phenomena.

 

Nigeria has so much to offer the world of theory and African scholarship is dripping with potential theoretical contributions, but the arbitrary imposition of a "theoretical framework" requirement kills off or buries such original theoretical contributions by imposing a prepackaged, usually foreign, theory on a work that is chocked full of its own theoretical insights — insights that, if properly distilled and highlighted to stand on their own confident African legs, can revise, challenge, or deepen existing Euro-American theories.

 

 

 

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Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

June 27, 2019, 1:42 pm
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This is where one gets worried about comprehension! Maybe I don't even understand my writing! Was the essay saying Africa had no mathematical traditions? No! Was it denying them? No! Was it saying that denial or erasure is justified? No!

Was it saying that Ancient Egypt is not Africa? No! It rather draws attention to existing controversies. This, beyond Afrocentrism, can be verified!

As for silence, Abdul was given seven days, enough time. He should seek redress if exposing his email is out of order.

Thanks.
Obododimma.
PS: Sorry for being telegraphic! Packaging another essay. Sharing soon tonight. But on maths!

On Thursday, June 27, 2019, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
Biko:

You are right on the money.

OAA



Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.


-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 27/06/2019 14:21 (GMT+00:00)
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series -

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Great Malabite,

If he did not give you the informed consent to name him publicly, you could still have posted the contents of the mail without naming him.

No laughing matter. It is not just ancient Egypt that practiced mathematical thought, Abdul is right.

According to Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computer Engineering and Indigenous Design, the system that gave rise to the complex design of the internet is found all over Africa and it is more widespread in Africa than in any other part of the world. Europeans tend to prefer Cartesian designs of easy-to-control grids while indigenous peoples in the Americas preferred the Euclidean design of the totem pole. Africans prefer to design their hair-styles, textile, architectural design, town-planning, beliefs in the supernatural and the principles are common in arts, economics, healing and politics in predominantly fractal patterns with self-similarity, recursion, fractional dimensions, non-lineal geometry, chaos, and interconnectivity.

But I no blame Dodo Malabite, Ewu, because he probably dreaded Maths in the high school and did not take it for his English degree. On my Freshman way from Aba, I shared a ride from the motor park to Malabor with Sophomore political science students. They tried to tease me by telling me that I was going to face the terror of Maths for Social Science which was required for only Sociology. Bring it on, I bellowed. I meant it too. 

I took maths seriously and copied down every example that the Indian instructor wrote down. When someone said that he or she did not understand where the x came from or did not understand anything, he told us to copy it down and study so that we can understand later. I practiced maths daily and aced it and bonded with a Senior math major who was happy to explain some things for me. 

The lesson is that anyone can practice Maths or any other course and Master it the way sports players practice daily. That is why colleges maintain athletic programs that could teach team building as disciplined workout ethic even in acadaletics.

The answer to the mass failure in maths during WAEC is lack of practice which makes perfect. Practice Maths daily and you perform better.

Biko
On Thursday, 27 June 2019, 00:51:36 GMT-4, Obododimma Oha <obodooha@gmail.com> wrote:


Sometime ago, on the 19th day of June, 2019, I shared a blog update of
mine on the unfortunate absence of indigenous African traditions of
mathematical thinking in some publications in the West. I made no
pretence about being a mathematician; just a person interested in the
narration of the production of knowledge in our galaxy. You would
agree with me that USAAfricaDialogue is an important classroom for
many of us -- both in the form of peer education and learning from our
seniors/superiors. So, I was not to surprised when I received a
private email from Abdul Salau on my blog article. I read his mail and
shook my head, but I considered it an important contribution from
which I should learn. To make his contribution reach others for their
views, I replied and told him to post his response on the listserv
within seven days or I would help him to do so.

After seven days now, he is yet to post his response to
USAAfricaDialogue. So, I am helping Abdul Salau, in case he has
forgotten. Please, see his reaction below and the link to my article
on mathematics. Help us to continue thinking. Thank you.


Sincerely,
Obododimma.
==============

Prof. Oha:

Ancient Egyptians are Africans I spent my entire academic energies
exploring the relationships of Ancient  Egyptian language with  Hausa,
Igbo, and Yoruba languages. I chose to  write you privately because
the views you are expressing are extremely embrassing.
"The only articulation of knowledge from Africa, even to be drowned in
controversies, is Ancient Egypt. And you may be warned that you are
not speaking of Africa, if you are speaking of Ancient Egypt."
Right on the forum you can write Prof. Gloria  Emegwali who can give
you many references on African mathematics  as you  need. It is so sad
in the age of information  a scholar of your stature  is misinformed
on the complex subject matter on the basis of  an antiquated book .
Professor Shola Olorunyomi  at UI can give you information on the
subject matter. I will  humbly request  a retraction of your view when
you get new information.-new article on the subject matter.  I greet
you in the  language of Ancient Egyptian ancestors Ankh, Wdja, and
Seneb.  Wishing you life, health,and  prosperity.

Abdul Salau




--
--
B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
              +234 8033331330;
              +234 9033333555;
              +234 8022208008;
              +234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu

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Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
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B.A.,First Class Honours (English & Literary Studies);
M.A., Ph.D. (English Language);
M.Sc. (Legal, Criminological & Security Psychology);
Professor of Cultural Semiotics & Stylistics,
Department of English,
University of Ibadan.

COORDINATES:

Phone (Mobile):
              +234 8033331330;
              +234 9033333555;
              +234 8022208008;
              +234 8073270008.
Skype: obododimma.oha
Twitter: @mmanwu
Personal Blog: http://udude.wordpress.com/




--
Listserv moderated by Toyin Falola, University of Texas at Austin
To post to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com
To subscribe to this group, send an email to USAAfricaDialogue+subscribe@googlegroups.com
Current archives at http://groups.google.com/group/USAAfricaDialogue
Early archives at http://www.utexas.edu/conferences/africa/ads/index.html
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