We are having posting the one of the greatest teachers of all of Africa in Oxford,
Professor Gavin Williams is a teacher of Teach US, Professor Professor Sir.
There are so many things to say about him that I would not bother to introduce him because I know you all know him.
But his book, which is one of the books that have defined the study of Nigeria, remember reading this in graduate school?
I do a search for students that they are not much of.
Not much of what I read an apology. I got to remember only very, very few things about about it now,
but I remember very well that he was one of the key text that was used in Ibadan to teach us about status society in in Nigeria.
So I'm quite happy that the new edition has been published with a new chapter in it.
So we would introduce our colleague who will be reviewed.
We'll be reviewing the book today. Dr Portia Roelof is an alum of Oxford.
She studied PBE here in Queens College so many years ago and took a moustache from a source and a Ph.D. from King's College.
She was recently a fellow at the LSC in the Department of International Development,
and she just started the Clement Fulford Junior Research Fellowship in Politics and Political Theory S.A. College this October, just this month.
So we are happy to welcome Portia, who would review the book.
But first, we want to hear from the author about the experience of publishing a new edition of the book before Portia would review the book.
And then we'll hear from his response to the review, and then we'll throw it open for discussion.
So I please can you join me in welcoming were only a few copies available of the book, so I suggest that it simply be sent round.
There are sufficient for them to be sent round. At least six people can see what what it looks like.
Let me explain how this book came to be produced in 1980,
at the suggestion of a Nigerian publisher I published four essay is which were all written in the
1970s and represent my thinking about the literature of that period on the political economy,
politics, sociology of Ibadan of Nigeria in that period.
So that in that sense, the book is a book about a generation.
It's about a generation of people writing about Nigeria in that period and coming after an earlier generation of scholars.
I say in the book that basically putting it simply, we thought our work was an advance on this.
Actually, I no longer hold that view. I think that much of the work of authors in the 1960s,
like Richard Sklar can post JP Mackintosh were worked on politics, which we never really could succeed in surpassing.
As I say, what the book is about is what I had to say in the 1970s in the context of debates and discussions with other colleagues,
one of whom is one of whom is you're writing about and trying to interpret Nigeria from that period.
How this book came to be written is that in Niger that it was first published in 1980.
In 2010, I gave a lecture at the University of Ibadan, and Professor Odiegwu Agbaji said, I must lecture on state and society in Nigeria revisited.
And I said, Look, I think I no longer study in Nigeria.
The last thing I ever wrote on Nigeria was written in 1995.
I don't actually know anything about Nigeria.
At least over the subsequent 15 years, that's slightly untrue, because I could borrow, as you see from the work of many of my graduate students.
He said he did know a lot about Nigeria.
Therefore, I took the lecture I gave on that occasion, I revised it and rethought some of the themes which are discussed there,
and particularly themes which had not really appeared in the first edition, notably discussions of religion and ethnicity.
And it suggests that it may be helpful if I simply go through the contents of the first book, so I'll do that very briefly.
The first chapter is called Ideas of Development. It can both be summarised in three words following Henry Ford's long history.
Development is bunk.
The next is on the political economy of Nigeria, which is historical account of the neo colonial and colonial political economies.
As I interpreted them, I said I wouldn't choose the language of Neo anything.
No. And of then the character of the Nigerian political economy and the attempt to make.
An attempt to produce a credible a credible account of Nigeria through a lens of an intellectual perspective,
which place that history within a context of the relations between politics and economics.
It links, I think, to the intellectual context of those of us.
Robin Cohen included who founded the review of African political economy.
The next chapter is entitled Politics in Nigeria.
I can summarise it simply straightforwardly from the text.
Any study of politics must examine the allocation of scarce resources,
the determination of public policy and the relation of conflicts amongst the classes.
The subsequent one for which which has, I think, gained some considerable attention is a study of the political economy,
the political consciousness of the poor in Ibadan and looks both at the urban poor and at the rural society,
particularly a photo of cocoa farmers who engaged at that time in the Agbekoya Rebellion Agbekoya meeting the farmers rely on suffering.
The classic work on the subject is Christopher Bell's book The Poor The Political History of the Nigerian Peasantry.
Contrary to the title, he and I also wrote together, bringing out joint work together in the volume Nigeria economy and society.
A interesting article has been written on the subject, but again,
you're wrong and there is a very good I don't know whether it's an whether it's a Nollywood film of the Agbekoya.
I think if you type it in online, you'll get the film, which is.
That represents the drama very well, and I think allowing for a certain dramatic licence is a very accurate account of the events.
Finally, I looked at ideologies of economic development.
My concern was to try to understand the ideological foundation of the economic development analysis and practise of that period.
That analysis and practise being shaped very much by the Michigan State University School and very much,
I think, in terms of an imposition of policies foundered in the.
Theoretical assumptions, at least of what came to be known as neoclassical economy by all,
by ideology, I meant the assumptions with which people think rather than sets of goals and values.
As for the last chapter, I've already given you an account of how it came to be written,
and in many ways that is perhaps the chapter which is most interesting or important to discuss.
OK, thank you. The question is, how can I find him at the back of my line-up for those who can stand up?
Thank you very much to the African Studies Centre for inviting me to L.A. to listen Julia,
the organisers, to St. Anthony's College for hosting it and to govern for inviting me to review his book.
About 10 years ago, I was an undergraduate here studying under governance, and so it really feels like a huge honour to be kind of given this,
this chance to kind of speak back to to the what really is the canon now in Nigerian politics.
Just a couple of comments on that kind of genealogy in which I feel really happy to be located.
Before I kind of got into the review of the book, first of all, in a tiny amendment to Wiley's bio of me,
I actually did my Ph.D., l'Asie with Kate Mara, who is here, and so I just went to there.
It's not at King's. Yeah. And that is that is another kind of I think, yeah,
the kind of the sense of a developing genealogy of scholars from and through Oxford on Nigerian
studies is is something that kind of comes out of a lot of the work that's coming out at the moment.
It's very collaborative. But also I kind of just looking back on it today thinking I was so lucky that I got
to study here for my undergraduate and that was my first initiation to studying
the politics of countries in Africa because I really I take my armies in vacation
to try and study African politics in a way that neither exercises nor analyses it.
And I really think that was what was happening in the kind of syllabus and curriculum that we dealt with.
That was really kind of in some ways, it predated a lot of the kind of neo patrimonial ISM literature that came out of the 1990s and 2000s,
which was very much what I then encountered when I left and I did a master's in African politics.
So I felt like I was really lucky to have this much more grounded, realistic,
kind of non ideological study of African politics to kind of ground me in before I
went out and kind of into the world and kind of looked at the broader electorate.
So that was very valuable in terms of reviewing this book.
Gavin said, Please feel free to be critical.
And I don't know if I'm going to be critical, but I'm hoping that I can replace the frankness of criticism with the frankness of confusion.
And so reading this book,
State and Society in Nigeria that was entirely written before I Was Even Born does present some aspects of kind of confusion and.
And I try to work through in reading the book and making sense of it.
And so so that's what I'm going to present now.
So I'm going to start with the kind of the the balance and the tension between transparency and confusion.
I think you get in that kind of form in the structure of the book and reading it from Oxford in 2019.
And then I'm going to try and make sense of some of these confusions by talking about the interplay of
possibility and frustration that I think really runs through the book in the study of Nigeria at the time.
And so first of all, the the transparency.
So this book, I don't know if it came across in governance kind of summary,
but it really is the most amazing document of thinking and progress of the revisions.
The reconsiderations, the edits that go into a body of scholarly work so often edited out.
So I think even and I think there's actually more to this than governance lets on.
So we start with an introduction. It's written in 1980 after the subsequent five essays.
We then have two essays on politics and political economy in Nigeria, which, as far as I understand, were written in 1976 and 1977.
There's also then an addendum to those first two essays.
So essay for written in 1979, applying the insights of those two chapters to the 1979 election.
So we already have some looking back, some revision, some changing of of the position, some kind of self-criticism.
We then have two further essays Rural Development and No Political Consciousness in Ibadan and Ideology in Rural Development,
written in 1972 and 1973. So they actually predate the earlier essays in the book.
Then we have the conclusion written in 2010, which is again updated in 2016.
So in terms of kind of showing you are working and leaving of breadcrumbs for the readers to follow and to situate their work,
it's tremendously helpful and coming to the work kind of 40 years later,
potentially it really helps you kind of deconstruct and make sense of the scholarship that's gone into it.
Moreover, there's a real there's a kind of wealth of references and you get a strong sense of us, as Gavin says,
the kind of generation in which he was working in the milieu that really, really influenced that scholarship.
So again, getting rid of the sense of kind of writing from nowhere, writing from a universalist standpoint that's broken down as we see now,
this is where I was writing from here and my colleagues here and my friends. This is what I was reacting to.
Yeah. That said, reading the work when you don't know what any of those references are.
When they refer elsewhere off the page to other other bodies of literature that you're not familiar with,
you still kind of realise how how big a gap there is between the reader and the kind
of writer thinking about that a little bit in terms of reading from here in Oxford,
the possibility of following up those references are filling in the blanks is just a case of kind of walking to the Rhodes library,
walking to the cell. A lot of these parts, a lot of those references you can follow up.
If you were a postdoc in many universities in Nigeria,
the ease with which you could fill in the blanks and make sense of of any work that this work as well would be much, much more difficult.
So I think that that's worth bearing in mind and also just the kind of the sense
of of what has happened in the interim between the writing of this book and now.
So this book covers a period of independence and the Nigerian Civil War and the shift from a kind of military dictatorship into civilian rule.
So it covers a lot and yet reading from 2019.
There's a strong sense that some of the most decisive moment in Nigeria's political and political economic history haven't happened,
that just around the corner, that kind of waiting to happen. So for this, I'd say it's a 1993 crash in oil prices,
which actually governs analysis of the kind of contradictions of industrial development under Obasanjo in the late 70s,
really pre pre figures, but also the imposition of structural adjustment policies in the late 80s and early 90s.
So there is a sense of kind of reading before these almost catastrophic events occur.
And so there's a sense of foreboding and kind of dramatic irony in places.
But then I think there's also a kind of a confusion I had, which I think is kind of inherent in the text,
and that's what I'm going to devote the rest of this review to. So whilst it's clear what it is governance is doing in terms of the kind of activity
like he's describing the politics and political economy of Nigeria in various periods.
I did. I did get a sense of confusion or ambivalence over what it was really for,
what was the motive, what was the motivation of doing this sort of analysis?
And so I think there are two contending options for what the motivation is.
And so the first one is this kind of it set out in the introduction,
where he draws on classical Marxist Lenin Shenkman and others who argue that capitalism is not an end in itself,
but it's a means to expanding the productive capacity of the economy such that socialism can be ushered in in the state withers away.
And so there's a lot of evidence in the book. This is this is the motive you're analysing.
How far is Nigeria along this journey in terms of the development of capitalist society?
So, for example, he notes that the development of capitalism is too serious of business to be left to the capitalists.
The conclusion of the second essay is that neither the military government nor its political rivals have demonstrated their capacity to
establish the social institutions necessary for a successful Nigerian capitalist revolution and the maintenance of a capitalist society.
Similar conclusions come in the next essay and then looking back on what he was trying to do,
he says What we were trying to do was to make sense of the international economic context and the formation of a capitalist society.
So that gives you a pretty standard kind of Marxist account of the time.
This is why we're doing this analysis to kind of measure Nigeria on its path towards this kind of a logical end.
And yet running alongside this motivation. There seems to be a contradiction as well.
So after the introduction, spends several pages setting up this framework for analysis, it also kind of conducts an about turn in the last two lines.
It says the starting point of the essays in this volume is a radical rejection of development through the exploitation and subjection of producers,
whether in the name of socialism or liberation. Rather, it's a commitment to the emancipation of labour,
the creation of conditions that enable people to produce freely in cooperation with each other, rather than under the direction of capital and state.
So here we see a motivation, which is slightly different. It's about the emancipation of labour free production,
but it seems to kind of untether itself a little bit from the really prescriptive analysis that we see of the kind of socialist.
Line of thinkers. What's really interesting is that the very end of the book, so just before the 2010 conclusion,
almost the last line is we must face the question under what conditions can farmers advance and protect their interests and how can they,
an alliance with others, establish and maintain this conditions?
So what I find really interesting here is we have almost several chapters describing the kind of
mechanisms of capitalist development class relations within quite a fixed analytical framework.
And almost the last line of the book, as it was written in the 70s, is to throw this all open and say, Well, are these conditions?
We've got to work them out. Who knows what they might be? So I thought that was a really kind of interesting tension.
And so to answer and kind of my answer to this,
I think it's important to look at the kind of the way that possibility in frustration runs through the book.
So reading this in 2019, one is really struck by the sense of ambition and political possibility that existed in Nigeria in the 1960s and 70s.
So I won't go into it kind of in detail, but we see the hugely ambitious Independence Day announcement from General Gowon setting out a nine point
programme where he's really saying how he's going to design and transform all aspects of the political system,
the military social relations. We see this again in the 1976 draught of the Constitution,
whether the draught is aimed for nothing less than defining a universal goal for the nation and seem to be pretty confident that they can stipulate
what that goal is and kind of set out a blueprint to pack together amidst all of these kind of state led ambitions of the National Development Plans,
income review process is quite kind of far reaching sense of possibility of what could be designed, what could be reinvented.
You also see quite impressive kind of actions within society outside of the state.
So I think in nineteen sixty three sixty four, there was seven hundred and fifty thousand workers withdrew the labour for two weeks.
And this is at a time when the Nigerian population is a quarter of what it is today.
So these are quite meaningful and kind of large scale political manoeuvrings.
And yet at the same time,
and I think it's also worth just noting the roles of Nigerian intellectuals in this process and in the sense of possibility and ambition.
So I talk about it a bit more in the kind of written review. But if you look at the work of people like Yusuf Bangura, the work of Jibrin Ibrahim,
there's a huge sense that political scientists and academics themselves can be perhaps at the forefront of this kind of expansive,
ambitious reconsideration of what society in politics could be.
So there are kind of a number of things in the book that point to this.
One thing I wanted to just kind of highlight that is after the timeframe of the book.
So in 1986, the National Political Science Association of Nigeria had a conference called Alternative Political Futures for Nigeria, 1990 and Beyond.
And Jibrin Ibrahim writes after review of this conference for the review of African political economy that same year.
And he notes that the one thing that the left and the right could not agree on in this country that they could
agree on in this conference was that they were not going to advocate liberal democracy to the government.
So, so there is a sense amongst the kind of Nigerian political science intelligentsia of politics is still the deciding.
There is no kind of political consensus is still wide open.
So I think that's kind of an interesting thing to note.
And yet at the same time, you get the strong sense of frustration running through the book running through the era.
There's a book about Ken Saro-Wiwa, his life by Roy Doyin and Toyin Falola, and they describe how in 1966,
when there was news of the coup kind of ending the First Republic, there were celebrations in the University of Ibadan.
People were cheering, they were hugging each other. They really describe this carnivalesque atmosphere.
So the kind of the frustration and the disappointment with what Nigeria was
turning into in the early years of independence were really kind of visceral. There's also a quote from the book, which is even earlier.
It dates frustration to 1960, it says. By 1960,
it was clear that hopes for life more abundant were only to be realised for the
few Nigerians found that colonial rule had been replaced with politicians.
Rule politics itself became the focus of resentment. It was identified with the corrupt and blatant enrichment of the few at the expense of the many.
The nepotism, tribalism and repression with which politicians kept themselves in power.
So reading that in 2019, you think, man, so this is 1960 like the Nigerian project was over before it was even begun.
What are we meant to do with this information? So alongside this kind of great ambition, great sense of frustration.
I think the book presents a number of ways of kind of getting over this, this this tension.
And I think they were present in the kind of political life that Gavin was describing.
So the first option as as proposed by Gavin and the kind of military government is that you take certain things
outside of politics and you allow government to just steer the country in the direction of the national interest.
So bureaucratic authoritarianism.
So, for example, Darwin proclaimed that as such, the federal government operates a system which knows no loyalty other than loyalty to the nation,
the people and development which are all above politics. So the sense of okay, you can you can bracket politics, you can limit it.
There's another option as opposed to bureaucratic authoritarianism, which is constitutionalism.
So if you look at, for example, the 1976 draughting process of the Constitution,
and that's something I'm sorry, I didn't quite know the relationship between 1976 and 1979 invasion,
but there is a sense led by political scientists like Billy Dudley, that constitutionalism can do the same job but in a different way.
So, for example, political ideals and body and public goals and values should be placed above
politics and define the framework within which political conflict can take place.
And they were saying, you can do this by writing the Constitution. So again,
another attempt to kind of section off what can be discussed within politics as a way of
kind of limiting it and reaching the kind of public good or the national interest overall.
However, in in governance, and we get the sense that neither of these is likely to work.
So civilian rule is less likely to repeat the failure of politics and hence to invite in
its turn for fresh demonstrations from the military of the failure of administration.
So neither of these options can have face much, much prospect of succeeding.
And so here we start to get a sense of of Gavin's own kind of normative motivation.
In the book, he says that while there was no space in the politics of wheeling and dealings,
more expansive political values like equality and legitimacy,
they could nonetheless be sought through direct resistance to exploitation and oppression.
As, for example, in the 1964 general strike or the TIV and Yoruba resistance to their respective regional governments,
of which the prime example is a breakaway, a rebellion that he details in one of the chapters.
Talking about the strike that I mentioned before, he says this was in effect, a strike against parliamentary politics.
As part of this mobilisation, a demonstration of 30000 people, a Ibadan Racecourse chanted No AIG, no and C and C.
So that's no to both of the political parties that are operating at the time.
And so I think what's really interesting here, he argues a narrow conception of politics reduces it to the contest for political office,
and the competition for it spoils politics in Nigeria often seems to be about justice.
So what's interesting is that if you think about a lot of the work that's written on Nigeria at the moment,
the kind of essentially like pro-democracy writings they say Nigeria will will improve,
it will redeem itself if it sticks more tightly to the narrow electoral conception of democracy.
So if it if it does succeed in placing certain things outside of politics, so the inviolability of electoral rules,
the rule of law, these kind of can we see this kind of lean towards constitutionalism in the current commentary?
Gavin offers us something totally different.
He says at the end of the night, the kind of middle chapter the task the socialist seems to me to be fine,
to find ways to build on the resistance of common people,
to exploitation and to create a popular socialist movement which goes beyond the issues which concern workers alone and articulates
the grievances of all exploited classes in opposition to the current alternatives of bourgeois politics and authoritarian rule.
And he also points out in the same chapter that really all of the polity,
all of the political parties that contest elections tend to offer the same thing and because this is happening in 1979.
So we get this totally alternative view of how you fulfil the possibilities and ambitions
of the moment and you do it not by limiting politics and putting it to one side,
but opening it up and putting kind of class conflict back on the table of what can be contested within the realm of political competition.
So in the remaining time,
I just want to raise a kind of a potential complication to my my analysis and then kind of draw out what I think is a kind of main message.
So what's interesting if, if is this suggests Kevin is not especially committed to a Marxist political economy analysis,
why is it spend so much time using that conceptual framework and that kind of mechanisms to make sense of what's going on,
especially as later in the book, we get more and more of a kind of loosening of that conceptual framework is more analytical.
Categories are admitted into the analysis.
So for example, the chapter on on farmers and Rural Development Governance quotes Polly Hill saying, We must study the farmer, not patronise him.
You must assume that he knows his business better than we do unless there is evidence to the contrary.
And so this is part of a justification of really grounded inductive bottom up research.
And it was really interesting reading that chapter on the day that the Nobel prise
was awarded for randomised controlled trials because I think that's a very,
very strong critique. You know, 30 years before it's really worth reading.
That chapter is a kind of engagement with the politics of research. But I mean, we get kind of more inductive approach in the final conclusion.
He also kind of releases his grasp even on the idea of class.
So he he says that he's rethinking his idea of the bourgeoisie class and status
analytically separate how they relate to one another is an empirical question.
I am now, if anything inclined to think that everything is about status and honour, it often appears to be so in Nigeria.
Nigerian public life. So again, after a strongly class based analysis for several chapters,
it kind of conclude by saying maybe class isn't actually the important kind of category here.
We also see this in its kind of reverse in the chapter on political consciousness and Ibadan,
with the shift away from talking about workers or farmers or any specific category,
and accepting that this may in terms of political consciousness, function more as a group of just the have nots.
So a kind of broader consciousness here.
So I think what's interesting is you see in the book a kind of strengthening as the book goes on of the sense of motivation.
And yet a weakening of the confidence, actually, a set analytical framework is going to explain or guide or analyse what's going on in politics.
And so thinking of that in 2019, thinking of it today, I I feel that in some ways, what Gavin calls for has to some extent happened.
So the kind of post politics, end of history consensus that was represented at least in this country by New Labour and in the US,
by the kind of Clinton era has really fallen apart and we see much more of what Shantel move would call agonistic politics.
All of a sudden, everything is on the table. Politics seems to have nothing that's off limits.
There are many kind of core questions suddenly up for debate again,
and this kind of poses the question how confident are we in our conceptual
frameworks that we used to analyse this kind of newly opened up field of politics?
And so I don't know what government thinks of that analysis. I think there's a lot in the book.
Give us some of these tools.
But there's also a really interesting kind of humility in awareness that whatever sort of conceptual tools you start out with,
you may well end up kind of shifting them and adapting them in light of the complexities of the country that you study.
So I'll leave it there. Thank you very much for that excellent review.
I would open it up for.