Best Ideology for the Nigerian State: Awolowo-Dudley Discourse Revisited

By Tunji Olaopa

It is always a delight to test the ideas of a politician against those of the political scientist. Both are concerned with politics and the political, and especially on the question of how a state ought to be governed, and the dynamics of a government vis-à-vis the lives and flourishing of the citizens. And what better contribution can one possibly make as the nation once again cast a searchlight on politics and governance, to mark the June 12 democracy day. I have argued in another piece that there is a tendency to want to favor the active politician over the academic political scientist given the reasoning that the politician is more concerned with the practical, and hence the more critical, dimensions of politics and politicking than the academic who is more given to theorizing the essence of politics. However, the equation becomes even better if the politician is a political scientist.
When this permutation is juxtaposed with the persistent predicament of the postcolonial Nigerian state, and the task of national integration and national development, we immediately see how huge the challenge for the politician and the political scientist becomes. Since independence, the governance of the fundamentally divided multinational Nigerian state has remained one fundamental challenge for consecutive governments. The question is how the state should be governed to articulate and effectively implement a development plan that will elevate the betterment of Nigerians. Or, to put in more seminal term: how can Nigeria become a developmental state with an ideological direction for governance?
As the most populous country in Africa, and a critical geopolitical figure on the continent, Nigeria’s statist dynamics demand fundamental attention from her politicians and political scientists. As the political elites, both should be able to take a gamble on development by betting on ideological discourses that could yield development bargains—decisional and policy determination that leads to economic growth. This is the argument of Stefan Dercon in Gambling on Development (2022). His argument is that there cannot be any meaningful development except the political elite is politically willing and ideologically ready to take a gamble on it. This means shirking all forms of distraction, attitudes and orientations that might undermine the stated objectives of putting a state on the path of development.
This gambling metaphor is the context within which to situate the ideological contestation between a consummate politician and an astute political scientist on the question of the best ideological orientation that could ground the developmental state in Nigeria. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a real and significant political and intellectual ferment that focused on the possibilities of transforming Nigeria into a state that took development seriously. Chief Obafemi Awolowo, first the premier of the western region, and the leader of the Action Group and later the Unity Party of Nigeria, was in the forefront of the push to arm Nigeria with an ideological framework around which development could be directed. The western region was the locus of his ideological experimentation. And between him and a civil service that was willing to follow the clarion call of giving life in abundance to the people, Awolowo followed an ideological pathway that transformed the western region into an infrastructural wonder. He then articulated the critical elements of his ideological vision into several books, from The People’s Republic in 1968 to The Strategy and Tactics of the People’s Republic of Nigeria in 1970.
Awolowo’s keen intellectual mind and ideological posturing already elicited the interest as it constituted a significant challenge to the political science and larger intellectual communities. These communities too were sufficiently charged to respond to the provocation. Several Nigerian Marxists, including the illustrious Claude Ake, were already engaging with several dimensions of Nigeria’s postcolonial structural and governance frameworks. However, Billy Dudley, a professor of political science at the University of Ibadan, adopted a method of contextual political analysis which took Awolowo and party politics seriously. This is especially given that the first and second republics were period of intense interrogation of Nigeria’s national status as a nation.
Both Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Professor Billy Dudley were genuinely interested in Nigeria from different divides of the Nigerian political equation. Awolowo, in true leadership fashion, was minded to provide an ideological framework that would guide governance and development of a state like Nigeria. Dudley, on his own, applied a classic critique of the foundation of Nigeria’s political existence. He was concerned with why it is dangerous, given the contradictions of the Nigerian state, to apply even the most well-meaning and well-designed of any ideological paradigm like Awolowo’s.
Awolowo was a democratic socialist. He was convinced that apart from her federal character which is well suited to managing the divergent constituents, Nigeria needs a welfarist ideology provided by democratic socialism. This ideological bent was not a whimsical or frivolous recommendation; it was founded on a philosophical and political strain. The philosophical dimension rests on what Awolowo called mental magnitude—a philosophical framework that demands of a charismatic leader the developed mind, self-discipline and willful character to, in Dercon’s words, take a gamble on development. The political dimension of democratic socialism takes its root from Fabian socialism grounded in a gradualist democratic approach to institutionalizing a socialist state. Thus, democratic socialism envisions an egalitarian society by advocating a state-led development initiative that seeks to integrate the democratic ethos with limited public ownership. The idea of a state-led development is meant to counter the virulence of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm. The state jumpstart equitable distribution of resources—the key issue in social justice—by instigating free and compulsory education, social security coverage, healthcare and full employment for the citizens.
Awolowo’s recommendation is a classic political philosophy par excellence. In clear Aristotelian manner, it is a philosophy that orients politics on morality; in other words, any political ideology must be tested by how far it leads the citizens to living the good life. Democratic socialism is geared towards an equitable distribution of the resources of the state. And this demands that a leader must have the spiritual and moral depth of character to be able to push through the ideological demands of democratic socialism within a federal state like Nigeria. As a political scientist, Dudley must have recognized the critical insights and beauty of Awolowo’s ideological formulation. From an analytical perspective, Dudley supported Awolowo’s ideological construct at least to the extent that it resisted the urge to take the competitive market model as the only ideological pathway to development. Indeed, Dudley acknowledged, in An Introduction to Nigerian Government and Politics (1982), that while other parties during the Second Republic were concerned with organizational matters, Awolowo’s Unity Party of Nigeria was “well on the way with a well-thought-out electoral programme and the image of the only party with an effective and efficient organization.”
And yet, Dudley was a sterling political scientist. And in his engagement with the Nigerian political dynamics, his concern was with the understanding of a viable political order which is compromised in Nigeria by ethnicity, clientelism, abuse of power, and other variables. To understand what it means to achieve political development and economic growth therefore requires understanding the structure of the Nigerian state and what is responsible for her structural failures, especially in terms of democratic progress and consolidation. Put in the contemporary parlance of achieving a democratic developmental state, Dudley’s analysis would be pessimistic in terms of how a deeply flawed system could be pressed to the service of structural transformation. In the case of Awolowo, Dudley’s analytical approach would reject the notion of a centralized party system, with a charismatic leadership, and the tendency to be autocratic which stands contrary to any democratic intent. In other words, a personal, personalized and centralized understanding of leadership which Awolowo typified would be anti-democratic.
Such a democratic political context, to be able to activate its potential for political order, must accentuate scepticism to the level of a political virtue. A centralized and charismatic leadership must be obviated by a citizenry that cultivate scepticism as an instrument of democratic accountability towards a more stable polity. Dudley’s critique therefore is not as optimistic as Awolowo’s ideological preference. A political ideology, in Dudley’s assessment, would be as good as the foundation of political stability it is founded on. One should therefore recognize the utopian basis of Awolowo’s recommendation of a democratic socialism within a state that is plagued by structural contradictions, even in terms of its federalist credentials. By the time the first coup of 1966 was done, the Nigerian federal constitution had become centralized in ways that undermined all federal aspirations. While Awolowo argued for a federal system that has the capacity to unite the ethnic cleavages in Nigeria, Dudley perceived how the federal element in the constitution could become the opportunity for ethnic domination and oppression. I even suspect that Awolowo’s entire political corpus was directed at highlighting the danger in not making federalism work in Nigeria. Thus, even though Dudley saw the structural challenges of the federation, Awolowo saw it too. A utopian vision must first feed off a realistic assessment of a political situation.
The theoretical engagement between Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Professor Billy Dudley provides an excellent paradigm of the kind of intellectual relationship that ought to hold between the politician and the political scientist, an ideological sparring that conduces to the urgent needs of the state. The Nigerian state requires both the pragmatic and the theoretical acumen to be able to make sense of its ideological pathway towards economic growth ad development. More significantly, this debate articulates an indictment of the anti-intellectual predisposition of many Nigerian governments and the puerile foundation of policies that are not theoretically strong. There is a growing tendency to shun academic and theoretical input into political roadmaps and blueprints.
Outside of all conceptual trickery, Chief Obafemi Awolowo was not just a consummate politician, he was a deep political theorist who saw the need to ground his understanding of the Nigerian political system within a deep theoretical framework that yielded democratic socialism and a vision of an egalitarian state. If he had had an opportunity to physically engage with Dudley’s critical intervention in his ideological blueprint, I suspect he would have come out even better due to an inherent desire to keep learning even from oppositional critiques. We can imagine that the understanding of the ideological ape and contour of a democratic developmental state, articulated from the Awolowo-Dudley discourse, could only be better than a mere ideological roadmap without any theoretical backbone, or a listless political critique that lacks practical content to feed off. In other words, Nigeria’s political order is too significant to be left to the politicians or the political scientists alone.

*Prof. Tunji Olaopa is the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission Abuja