USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Musings on the Crucification of Unilag Journal Of Politics

Apologies to those who do not understand Yoruba or drum language.

These drum texts comes to my mind in the wake of the recent condemnation of Unilag Journal  of Politics and the Nigerian Scholars who are home based:




O to d'igi buruku (2ce)        It can now be called a bad tree? (2ce)
Ogede to wo koko ye            the plantain tree which nursed the cocoa tree to
                    fruition
O to d'igi buruku            It can now be called a bad tree?


Tete opopo (2ce)            The indigenous spinach
O ti sanra                 It is fattened
K'ojo to ro si                before the rain watered it
Tete opopo                The indigenous spinach


Seleru agbo                It is the shallow spring of herbs
Agbara agbo                The flood of herbal concoction
L'Osun fi n we'mo re             That Osun bathes her children with
ki dokita o to de            Before the arrival of doctors



E f'alabelewe l'obe to yanju        Give the one who circumcises a suitable knife
E f'onisona l'ohun ti nse t'ona    Give the craftsman the tool of his trade
E ma f'or i ogongo we t'atioro o    Do not compare the ostrich's head with
                that of atioro
Oba eye ni nse                It is the king of birds


Ko ye aja (2ce)             It is not befitting for a dog (2ce)
B'o ye ni                 If it is befitting for one
gbigbo ko dubu ekun            barking does not kill a leopard
Ko y'aja                  It is not befitting for a dog


Ara re ni o pa (2ce)            It will kill itself (2ce)
Afopina t'o loun o pa fitila        The moth that says it will quench the lamp
Ara re ni opa                 It will kill itself


Eni to loun gbon                 He who claims to be wise
t'o tun l'eni kankan o gbon        and asserts no other one is wise
Oun ni baba...            He is the father of ...
.....







--------------------------------------------
On Tue, 9/3/13, okey iheduru <okeyiheduru@gmail.com> wrote:

Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Unilag Journal Of Politics: Call for Papers-Some Clarifications
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com, "obi iheduru" <ihed101@gmail.com>, akwaaja@gmail.com, "IKHIDE" <xokigbo@yahoo.com>
Date: Tuesday, September 3, 2013, 6:12 AM

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?


Strategy Two: Revive the
Nigerian Political Science Association and make it a truly
national forum and/or outlet for serious scholarship. Get
its moribund journal back on track and publish only quality
work, blind, peer-reviewed without upfront fees. Especially,
the book review section should be an avenue to disseminate
and critique recent or on-going scholarship within and
outside the country.


The resort to Departmental journals is symptomatic of a
national malaise driven largely by inferiority complex and
inability to compete on 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.


Strategy Three: Once you
have gone national, try online or e-journal option, as
suggested by several contributors. Expand the membership of
the Editorial and Advisory Board; it should not be a
"Parapo" thing, please!  Additionally, try
affiliating with reputable academic and scholarly journal
publishers outside the country, like Taylor &
Francis/Routledge, Wiley, Cambridge University Press, etc.
None of these publishers will talk to you if you refuse to
wean yourself off of the prevailing clannishness. They could
care less about our desire to turn all our universities,
including the older ones, into Bantustan or ethnic
universities. POLITIKON, the journal of South
African Political Science Association is published by Taylor
& Francis, and it is just as African as it is, indeed,
"highly rated.: Same story with Social and
Economic Studies in the Caribbean.


Strategy Four: Solicit technical
and financial help or support, from the Nigeria/African
Diaspora. Many people are willing to help, but they must
have CREDIBLE PARTNERS in the home institutions. Why should
I support Unilag Journal of Politics if by all its
appearances (editorial & management team, reviewers,
authors published, etc.) it smacks of an ethnic or clannish
affair?


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.


I'm by no means claiming
that I know all the answers or that any of my suggestions
will work. Nonetheless, it's important to begin to think
outside the box, my brothers and sisters. Our problems are
largely self-inflicted; only we can retrace our steps back
to reality.


Regards,

Okey Iheduru




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