From the reactions and responses from the editor and sympathizers of the Unilag Journal of Politics one can deduce one thing: THEY JUST DON'T GET IT A ALL, I'm afraid. First, Professor Ashiru continues to claim that "8)The journal is highly rated as this could be verified from the quality of papers published therein." There can be no better confirmation for my earlier claim that most of the colleagues I encountered during my two-year stay in Nigeria had never heard of global standards or best-practices for judging the quality of academic or scholarly publications. Would Professor Ashiru please tell the world the citation counts of any article published in this "highly rated" journal? Where does each of his contributors rank among the most important contributors to knowledge development in Political Science in Nigeria, Africa and globally? Who are his reviewers, and what are their institutional affiliations and scholarly profile? Can he tell us how many citation counts of any article published in this "highly rated" journal that he can find in Google Scholar--which also lists scholarly work published by Nigerian scholars IN NIGERIA? Are there ways of remedying the situation? Absolutely, but it requires thinking outside the dangerous box that is the prevailing academic culture of dance of deceit in Nigeria.
Strategy One: Stop wasting scarce resources on "Departmental Journals" which are considered third rate publication outlets anywhere in the world. I may be biased because I teach in a Tier I Research University, but I'd like to know how many people on this list outside Nigeria who can confirm that their departments publish departmental or field journals? How much weight is given to articles in such publications? Departmental (and university-based) Journals developed in Nigeria when we had one or two departments (of say, Political Science) in the entire country. Any such journal for most disciplines was likely to attract the best works and did indeed become hallowed outlets for serious scholarship. University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria and Ahmadu Bello University had a handful of those, most of had died by mid-1980s when the rot set in. We now have over 127 universities plus over 100 Colleges of Education and Polytechnics, and nearly a dozen of centers and institutes that do one kind of Political Science research or the other. Sadly, none of these institutions or centers is talking to each other. Instead, they are busy churning out "highly rated" rag sheets that colleagues in the neighboring university down the road may never have heard of, let alone read. In Nigeria, once a "tradition" is instituted, even otherwise well-informed people will continue to perpetuate and defend it per omnia secula seculorum despite evidence that it's time to scrap it.
Another example, an apposite digression, is the tradition of final year undergraduate projects/thesis. Every lecturer will tell you it is a useless exercise--most of the projects are plagiarized or written by lecturers; nobody has the time to read them but students get grades; parents fork out a lot of money for the projects; departments are running out of space for them; they are never indexed so that anybody can track subjects of interest; and more importantly, they create a huge environmental foot print, if you consider the number of trees that go into the wasted paper and the degradation that is caused by wasted ink. Yet every year, our universities go through this motion and nobody asks: Wait a minute, why are we doing this? Student projects or thesis were introduced at UNN when they had 200 students (founding class). Later, all universities copied this innovation in helping students develop critical thinking and writing skills--the hallmark of American liberal arts education--and it worked well, up to a point, perhaps in the mid-1980s. Now that you have over 38,000 students at UNN, should every one be required to write a thesis?
The resort to Departmental journals is symptomatic of a national malaise driven largely by inferiority complex and inability to competeon a level playing field. We are retreating from national engagement to village and "autonomous community" micro-politics. And the Mercy-Industrial Complex is happy to goad us to this path to national perdition. How many departmental journals does Ford Foundation fund in the United States? Perhaps they have done so in the past, but I believe that seeking grants for a national-level journal will create a more credible platform for showcasing Nigerian scholarship. The sad truth is that foreign funding will ALWAYS run out, leaving the recipient poorer and devastated, while the Program Officers of the foreign aid agency will have beefed up their resume for the numerous projects they have shepherded in Africa. Just take a look at their glossy annual reports. The tragedy is that they have turned even our academics into hunters for this White Man's "egunje", and we like to huddle together in our micro-units to share it. The veteran socialist, Edwin Madunagu, defines a Nigerian NGO as an organization run by an educated man and his wife with access to a telephone and fax machine chopping the White man's money.
Have you noticed how knowledge and cultural workers from some sections of the country nowadays routinely gather in their comfort zones and dish out "Best" this, "Best" that awards to their own? In fact, in one of the universities I visited on an NUC accreditation, we were alerted to the fact that a section of the country was awarding too many PhDs to themselves and that many of these half-baked doctorates are eventually forwarded as candidates during competition for Federal appointments requiring the PhD. So, what to do? Manufacture your own PhDs so that you don't miss out at the feeding trough. I wish these "turn-by-turn" charlatans will go back to the First Republic: To match the East one BA Hons. for one BA Hons., Awolowo and Ahmadu Bello established their own equally excellent universities to compete with the University of Nigeria. I digress again.
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