Nigerian academia and the politics of secrecy

In this issue, Jeremiah Arowosegbe makes a number of valid and important observations about the challenges facing the humanities and social sciences in Nigeria. But while he recognizes the importance of the political sphere by discussing the unequal and asymmetric landscape of global knowledge production, he locates most problems of knowledge production in Nigeria within the academy. Focusing on individual and generational responsibility and morality, Arowosegbe also suggests that recent generations of Nigerian academics have been ‘complacent and nonchalant’ in their engagement with global theoretical and methodological debates, and thus bear responsibility for the apparent decline of Nigerian academia.

Drawing on the shared experience of research based at both UK and Nigerian universities,¹ we argue that the current state of research in the humanities and social sciences is not primarily the result of the self-indulgence of Nigerian academics. Certainly, academic productivity is limited by sometimes autocratic forms of leadership and management. However, widely unproductive relations between university management and academic unions, the reduction of internal diversity within many universities, and a studied ignorance of students’ legitimate interests at both undergraduate and graduate levels suggest that the real problems lie beyond the university sector. As lack of funding and authoritarianism have destroyed previously democratic and participatory structures, the transformation of the Nigerian university sector points to the emergence of ‘private indirect government’ beyond the campuses (Mbembe 2001).

The privatization of the state has undermined the foundations on which current forms of academic knowledge production are based, and the state of the academy reflects the culture of secrecy that dominates the polity. In Nigeria’s current political economy, government relies on the tight control of information otherwise considered to be in the public interest. While the state’s decreasing investment in producing basic statistical and demographic information since the 1970s has been partly due to access and capacity problems (Jerven 2013), it has primarily reflected the attempt to avoid political demands on the basis of such information. For example, the lack of reliable large-scale data on Nigerians’ religious identification means that the widespread assumption that the country has a slight Muslim majority – based on numbers obtained during the 1960s – has not been re-examined for decades, clearly with a view to maintaining the status quo.

Like their colleagues in many other sub-Saharan African states, social scientists from Nigeria thus have had to pursue their work without access to the raw materials that would have enabled them to relate to wider debates. The state’s lack of engagement with modern techniques of governmentality has obviously limited Nigerian participation in engagements with quantitative methods that have transformed the social sciences. Moreover, and perhaps ironically, it has silenced Nigerian participation in theoretical debates about the relationship between knowledge production and power. As a result, a large amount of social science research in Nigeria relies on newspaper journalism and small-scale case studies. Such research appeals to wider academic audiences primarily where its content engages with existing global debates on Africa, but it rarely allows Nigerian academics to challenge the underlying assumptions of these debates.

The privatization of information has also had a crippling effect on historical research. While many important files of the colonial period are held outside Africa, those that are based on the continent tend to decline over time, and not only because of often dismal storage conditions. In various Nigerian archives we have consulted, files relating to land, political authority and identity had disappeared or were missing sections. Where files exist, personal experience suggests that it is not unusual for researchers to be put under considerable pressure not to investigate issues that might be seen as challenging the interests of powerful individuals. At the same time, archival resources on the postcolonial period are extremely limited because politicians routinely take home the most important files from their tenure to ensure security. As a result there are, almost fifty-five years after independence, very few local archival sources available to the historian of postcolonial Nigeria, and indeed many other African countries (cf. Allman 2013). Often, the political pressures that limit their access to...