Falola and a blighted nation’s little mercies
Our politicians who ideally should inspire and bring out the best in us, continue to drag the nation down in taste, values and role–modelling. As the ongoing controversy over the ill-judged presidential pardon for a former Bayelsa State governor, Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, demonstrates, short-term and self-interested political calculations continue to trump enforcement of standards and the need to mind our international image.
The moral downturn and suffocating mediocrity have caused several citizens, having held out hope for long without sniffing any prospects for change to give up or cave under. Kunle Agboluaje, a writer and historian, in a terse, despairing response to my inquiry as to why he stopped writing for a national newspaper lamented: “I am beginning to feel that the Nigerian demon cannot be tamed in my generation. I have therefore resorted to writing books that will impact the next generation.” Touching words that will find an echo across the length and breadth of this much-abused country.
A decidedly different picture of what Nigeria could become emerges, however, when you consider narratives of excellence around the outstanding achievements of Nigerians in the Diaspora; an issue recently touched on by a former United States President, Bill Clinton. Take for example, Toyin Falola, who currently occupies the Jacob and Frances Mossiker chair in Humanities in the state of Texas, and is today being honoured with a honorary Doctor of Letters at the Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba, Ondo State. Considered the most productive and versatile historian that Africa has produced having published either singly or with others over 100 books, the professor exemplifies the yet unharnessed Nigerian spirit of overwhelming industry, flashes of which were displayed recently on the world stage by the nation’s senior national football team, the Super Eagles, when they defied the odds to strike gold at the 2013 Africa Cup of Nations.
It is part of the corruption and degradation of our polity and society that honour is often bestowed on full-time crooks doubling as politicians; and awards of so-called excellence can be exchanged for cash in open market transactions. Even our national honours count for little because of its successive devaluation to include several citizens who, in a different clime would be behind bars.
Part of the journey to national recovery is to look closely at international best practices as well as retell stories of outstanding contribution by our countrymen; who have made landmark contributions in specific areas of human endeavour. In this respect, Falola has set the bar high indeed by breaking all known records in scholarly publishing across a diverse terrain of disciplines in the humanities, putting Nigeria on the global cultural map.
How was this possible? Let us tease out an answer from Malcom Caldwell’s international bestseller on highflyers. Leafing through the rise to stardom of prodigies such as Bill Gates, Wolfgang Mozart as well as chess grandmasters, Caldwell developed a thesis of the 10, 000 hours rule which he called the “magic number of greatness”. He argues that eminence is forged in the crucible of opportunities undergirded by outstanding industry. To quote him: “The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a crucial minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
Connecting this back with Falola’s scholarly front runner position, it is pertinent that he took all his academic degrees from the University of Ife (renamed Obafemi Awolowo University) at a time when that institution ranked among the best in the world, and was a cosmopolitan venue for cross-fertilising ideas on African studies. Specifically, his contributions to the political economy of Africa’s colonial history were developed at Ife where a radical, Marxist and non-Marxist schools of history and the social sciences thrived. Prof. Adebayo Oyebade, one of Falola’s former students, who edited a two volume festschriften on him informs that one of his enduring contributions to colonial economic history is his creative application of political economy to the study of colonial history as well as his penchant for pioneering fresh research paths. This underlies the point that Ife and the critical humanities and social science traditions that it nurtured were critical to Falola’s scholarship and his later ascendancy to global stature at the University of Texas. In other words, Ife provided the intellectual climate for sowing the seeds of distinction which were to fully germinate when in the early 1990’s he moved over, after a stint at the University of Cambridge, to the University of Texas, Austin which is assessed by the most recent World University ranking published by the Times Higher Educational Supplement as number 25 on the global organogram.
On both campuses, Ife and Texas, he became a veritable illustration of Caldwell’s 10,000 hour-rule by applying himself by his own published admission roughly 18 hours a day to researching, teaching, co-editing, hosting conferences, and turning out new books at an incredible momentum. True, quantity of publications is not the same as quality; while profusion is not necessarily profundity as profusion may merely express access to publishing opportunities rather than originality or depth. It is also the case, however, that over time and as the scholar has matured, he has accumulated, to his credit, ground-breaking research and new lines of inquiry, thereby acquiring the status of an elder in the profession. Prof. Bessie House Soremekun of Indiana University, Indianapolis in explaining Falola’s choice as winner of the Distinguished Global Scholar Lifetime Achievement Awards in 2009, asserts that Falola’s work has had “transformative effects on the global epistemological debates which have preoccupied scholars in his disciplinary area of focus.”
Although Falola’s story is mainly one of personal excellence, it offers lessons for Nigeria as it searches for a road map out of the current wilderness of lost opportunities. The first lesson is the need to pay attention to institution building for as we have seen Obafemi Awolowo University of the Falola years as well as the University of Texas, Austin were critical to his rise to academic eminence and the string of laurels that have kept coming his way. It is sad to reflect that Ife, despite ongoing efforts to bring back its lost glory like other Nigerian universities, no longer features in an advantageous position on the global intellectual map; and this brings to mind the question whether it or any other Nigerian university given their current state can produce another Falola. If Nigeria is serious about joining the global knowledge society then it will have to pay attention to rebuilding institutions that make greatness possible.
The final lesson to be drawn from the happy personal trajectory of the scholar is the need to restructure national values by promoting a culture of productivity and achievement-driven norms. This presupposes that Nigeria should build icons who have achieved distinction through honest labour and alternatively criminalise crooks and apostles of ill-gotten wealth currently parading themselves as heroes.
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