Professor Jibrin Ibrahim at 70: A compass through Nigeria’s political adventures, By Toyin Falola

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim

At 70, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim deserves to be accorded tremendous respect deserving of a statesman. Selfless and incorruptible, he has paid his heavy dues through continued difficult service. He is a national treasure, exceptional because he has committed to the course of progress. He is fearless and never perturbed by anything he experiences while changing our collective human world to a better one. Would he see the changes he wants in Nigeria? Yes, but he must live till 100!

The purposes of Individuals on the face of the earth differ, regardless of how much humans tend to generalise events, activities, and occurrences. Some are naturally designated to provide solutions to the myriad of constraints confronting communities, while some are meant to be the agents of such transformation. In any case, everyone is imbued with different mandates to accomplish things here on earth.

In the categories of what humans are designated to accomplish, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim is an individual talented in evaluating events well and beyond the ordinary lens of looking at issues and giving appropriate diagnoses that can help people handle the affairs of their nations and the world. His understanding of the political system is illustrated by how he engages the reader in interpreting research and educative studies, as well as his way of thinking outside the box to proffer solutions to problems that will address issues based on their context. At home in the world of academia and public policy, he has taken his role as a public intellectual to the highest peak.

This feat is achievable in two ways. First, individuals can demonstrate a deep sense of political understanding and intuition, like Ibrahim, when they have received substantial schooling through extensive reading and from dedicated teachers. In the process, these influences deposit in their minds theoretical ideas with which they can examine, evaluate and assess situations for the purpose of generating and propounding better ideas that can be used to solve big issues. Second, knowledge often comes from experience, which means that the individuals have immersed themselves in the traditions of a particular environment, so that they can adjudicate on political affairs from the point of indigenous wisdom, strength and competence. Professor Jibrin Ibrahim can comfortably be placed into these two categories, as I will unravel soon.

This enigma, whom I have known since the 1980s, is unpretentious about his commitment to truth-telling, especially when his process of coming to such a truth conforms to clear principles of logic and data reliability. He understands that the bane of development anywhere in the world is that although many individuals can speak truth to power, but because they are either seeking validation or recognition or are fearful of what the consequences of their positions would be, they compromise common values and retreat into their silence. Constrained by these internal dilemmas, they let the opportunity to correct glaring anomalies slide away without implementing a process to put things in the appropriate conditions. It should be emphasised that a society that foregrounds cowardly behaviour as such would always dream of becoming great, without nearing greatness. Ibrahim has intellectual courage and the power to put his ideas in clear, elegant prose.

Ibrahim, on many occasions, has cried out that the perennial challenges confronting Nigeria are rooted in the omnipresent corruption that has become a cultural problem. Although the identification of what a problem is falls under the category of what an average individual can do without problems, this prolific Professor always goes a step further with a clinical diagnosis of what these issues are, their symptoms, and the potential threat that they pose to the nation, while at the same time proffering the solutions. For instance, he has identified flaws in all Nigerian political parties and their abysmal disposition to democratic participation and inclusive leadership, and concluded that they are the culprit for the widespread underdevelopment that has become synonymous with the country’s political landscape today. The political parties and the way they practice democracy, Ibrahim, has repeated to the point of saturation, are the real instigators of the problems they are pretending to solve. He argues that political parties have primary ambitions that are especially different from the collective aspirations of the people. This is a considerable challenge that has generated thousands of words from Ibrahim’s ink.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim is a decorated intellectual who has paid his dues. We are indebted to his ideas. If his intellectual engagements reveal one thing, it is that the responsibility of nation-building lies in the hands of both the leaders and the led. He insists that knowledge is needed to understand the context of our problems. He is committed to offering ideas for leaders to solve problems. He is a nationalist who wants Nigeria to remain united. He is a detribalised citizen who is beyond making parochial ethnic analysis.

As an expert in political science and philosophy, he understands that each democracy is meant to reflect the ongoing realities of its immediate environment. It is more of a sin than ignorance to imagine that cultural and ideological factors are not inherently important in the shaping of a people’s political culture. It would betray common sense to think that democracy, as practiced elsewhere with its different economic and sociocultural dynamics, should, therefore, be adopted in Africa without making necessary adjustments. He avers that such practice, apart from its capacity to corrupt the target system and culture, would crumble their state at some point because not only would it have given the space for the mischaracterisation of their existing systems, but it would also have been used as an instrument to trigger an internal explosion.

A country like Nigeria has unique political structures and systems because it is a construct of the imperialists who were on an expansionist expedition. Through this development, the colonisers were concerned, not about how the vulnerable and conquered population would fare in future conflicts or controversies, but how they, the colonisers, would primarily exploit their human and natural resources for their own provincial and parochial intentions. Now that they have terminated their stay, the country they created must have its own strong governance mechanism; otherwise, they would continue to experience persistent challenges that threaten their existence. Professor Ibrahim, therefore, believes that the redemption of Nigeria’s political fate is to become consciously invested in the activity of prosperity through good governance, and of peace through tolerance.

Although he has conducted extensive research on conflict management and political issues, he is unrestricted to this professional undertaking. Professor Ibrahim has been a strong advocate for gender parity in the polity. For illustration, the number of educative engagements he has organised to investigate the skewed systems and how they frustrate females, also contribute to the positive impact he has made on intellectualism and nation-building. He insists that the marginalisation of women within the country’s political climate comes from an insidious attitude that the people have towards women. He challenged the assumption that women are incapable of making resourceful contributions to conversations and policies about the development and advancement of Nigeria.

He criticised the belief that males are above their female counterparts, and that means that anything which involves matters concerning the affairs of their people should not be left to women to decide. This patriarchal opinion creates an exclusionary politics that judges women even without giving them an opportunity to represent themselves. He asserts that such stereotypes pose a danger to the survival of a people than one could have imagined. By shutting out the possibility of women’s participation, humanity would drift into oblivion faster than they could have anticipated. This is underscored by the awareness that women are powerful gatekeepers of anything that has to do with values that would transform the nation and the world. Invariably, his interventions have been noticed because the results that come from his views cannot be overemphasised. People like him change the tides of events positively.

As a conflict management expert, Professor Ibrahim has done tremendous research that uncovers the best ways through which conflicts can be prevented and managed, both in ongoing situations and in cases of unexpected explosions. He believes that the problems that confront the security architecture of the country arise from many things. For one, the porosity of the Nigerian borders has created a different dimension to the perpetration of violent crimes. For illustration, the emergence and survival of insurgent crises in many parts of Nigeria are caused by the weakness of the Nigerian borders against external infiltrators. Nigeria is inhabited by people of different cultural backgrounds, with many groups having connections with their families who reside in adjacent countries, a product of how colonial powers partitioned the continent arbitrarily.

An activist, Ibrahim has served in different capacities. His intellectual brilliance is solicited beyond the shores of our country. He has performed the role of a consultant to different national and international organisations. It is also common knowledge that people always seek his intellectual interventions because he has demonstrated that he has a high level of academic standards that can help usher into existence an ethos of accountability, tolerance, and respect. His contributions to the development of African politics is consistent, positive, resourceful, and commendable.

The connections of geography are also those of genetic ties. As a result, the proliferation of problems in some Northern parts of the country speaks to the fact that they cannot prevent millions of “outsiders” simply because they have an association with them in terms of geographic and genetic identities. Ibrahim mentions that these issues are inhibiting factors towards the attainment of lasting peace, and unless Nigerians come to this understanding, they will continue to experience serious consequences that stand in the way of their collective aspirations. He believes that insurgencies can be addressed in the country only when they realise that a world without contextual understanding of their violence would continue to breed results that are either unsuitable or ineffective.

Professor Jibrin Ibrahim is a decorated intellectual who has paid his dues. We are indebted to his ideas. If his intellectual engagements reveal one thing, it is that the responsibility of nation-building lies in the hands of both the leaders and the led. He insists that knowledge is needed to understand the context of our problems. He is committed to offering ideas for leaders to solve problems. He is a nationalist who wants Nigeria to remain united. He is a detribalised citizen who is beyond making parochial ethnic analysis. He is a patriot in the most positive sense of seeking transformations and not hero-worshipping those in power for monetary purposes.

An activist, Ibrahim has served in different capacities. His intellectual brilliance is solicited beyond the shores of our country. He has performed the role of a consultant to different national and international organisations. It is also common knowledge that people always seek his intellectual interventions because he has demonstrated that he has a high level of academic standards that can help usher into existence an ethos of accountability, tolerance, and respect. His contributions to the development of African politics is consistent, positive, resourceful, and commendable. His ideas, expressed in a seven-day circle, are impressive, imaginative, reflective and impactful. His prodigious instincts are far ahead of those who govern us.

At 70, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim deserves to be accorded tremendous respect deserving of a statesman. Selfless and incorruptible, he has paid his heavy dues through continued difficult service. He is a national treasure, exceptional because he has committed to the course of progress. He is fearless and never perturbed by anything he experiences while changing our collective human world to a better one. Would he see the changes he wants in Nigeria? Yes, but he must live till 100!

Toyin Falola, a professor of History, University Distinguished Teaching Professor, and Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities at The University of Texas at Austin, is the Bobapitan of Ibadanland.