Are Africa’s ruling classes afraid of intellectual scrutiny?

New academic reflections about the crisis facing postcolonial African higher education are shedding more light on the role of political, economic and social influences on struggles and strained relations between the African ruling elites and public universities, staff unions and students.

Invited to comment on a 2024 article titled ‘African universities and the challenge of postcolonial development’, by Jeremiah Arowosegbe, a Nigerian academic teaching political science at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom, several academics responded. Their insights were published in the February issue of Africa, a journal published by Cambridge University Press and which also carried Arowosegbe’s initial article.

Arowosegbe’s paper highlighted how the postcolonial state continues to shape crises in African universities regarding funding, quality, academic freedom and intellectualism. It also spotlights tensions between academics and ruling elites and the impact of external global forces on African higher education.

Impact of ideological contradictions

However, in his key viewpoint, Dr Ayodeji Ladipo Alabi, a lecturer in political science at Nigeria’s Redeemer’s University, argued that Arowosegbe’s analysis ignored the impact of ideological contradictions on society’s political stability and socio-economic development in Africa.

He noted that, whereas the governing ruling elites had entrenched the state’s role in economic relations at independence, by the 1980s, they had gradually surrendered to free market capitalism.

According to Alabi, from the early 1990s, the ruling elites progressively embraced neoliberalism, resulting in the gradual retrenchment of the state from the economy. Neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies that include eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, and lowering trade barriers, primarily through privatisation, and reducing state influence on the economy.

On the contrary, according to Alabi, public universities, especially academic staff and their unions, had continued with the politics of resistance.

“In the 1980s and early 1990s, public universities’ academic staff unions drew on socialist ideas to champion issues that impinged on both the socio-economic and political affairs of their respective countries and those of university systems in the areas of salary, autonomy and funding, to confront the capitalist inclinations of Africa’s governing elites,” says Alabi.

In his reply titled, ‘Africa’s postcolonial states, universities and situated ideologies’, Alabi says that, although by the late 1990s, academic staff had retracted from most of their socialist standpoints, their loud advocacy for a welfare state that intervenes in economic relations to protect the poor continued to clash with the neoliberal policies of Africa’s governing elites.

In this regard, Alabi alludes that the confusion created by the conflicting ideological clashes between the fixation with the welfare of the poor and inclinations towards free-market economies can be perceived as central to the hardline confrontations between academia and the ruling elites.

“The position here is that the social contradiction created by that ideological impasse fundamentally contributes to the challenge of postcolonial development,” said Alabi in his analysis.

Alabi thinks the challenge of postcolonial development in Africa and the predicaments of Africa’s universities are interlocked, especially when the ruling cadres regard themselves as the custodians of state power and seem to detest the general acclamation that universities constitute the knowledge estate.

To Alabi, that appears to have continued to drive the two sides further apart and detracted attention from the problems public universities face in navigating the changing and challenging fields of academic autonomy and opportunities – amid tumultuous African politics, unfavourable cheap labour practices, and the economic exploitation associated with neocolonialism and neoliberalism.

Leading universities ‘have come through the fire’

However, Andrew Ivaska, an associate professor of African history at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, dismisses Arowosegbe’s thesis on the crisis facing African universities as a lament about what it is like to try to build robust academic institutions amid poverty, inequality and the authoritarian rule of governmental elites who wield power to control universities and their faculty, staff and students.

In his critique, ‘Beyond crisis: African universities’ global presence before and after structural adjustment,’ Ivaska rejects Arowosegbe’s articulations that the dependence of African intellectuals and scholars on the state reduces academic freedom in Africa to mere rhetoric.

“In its sweeping nature, that argument is highly debatable, considering the work produced by different generations of locally based African scholars,” stated Ivaska.

He noted how the first generation of professors and students at African universities produced works that challenged their governments and, in doing so, shaped some social scientific theories of the failure of the African ruling elites and the international capitalist system to decolonise after nominal independence.

Ivaska cited the University of Dar es Salaam, whose scholars argued that the government’s economic policies, as presented in the Arusha Declaration (1967) (Azimio la Arusha in Kiswahili), which was Julius Nyerere’s manifesto on African socialism and its applications in Tanzania were inadequate to counter the international capitalist system.

“Professor Issa Shivji’s 1976 book, Class Struggles in Tanzania, concluded with a powerful takedown of the country’s supposedly socialist political class as amounting to a bureaucratic bourgeoisie devoted to using their offices to enrich themselves,” Ivaska stated.

According to Ivaska, African universities such as Uganda’s Makerere, Nigeria’s Ibadan, Tanzania’s Dar es Salaam, and others that in the 1960s and 1970s were among the world’s most exciting universities, but were on the brink of collapse in the 1980s because of austerity measures imposed by the World Bank, are on the rise again. To Ivaska, these universities have come through the fire of this collapse and have emerged with new life that cannot be reduced to what he calls “mere tendrils”.

“The continent’s top dozen universities are producing students who will likely become the world’s next generation of humanists, social scientists and hard scientists focused on Africa, and beyond,” said Ivaska.

In this regard, Ivaska rejects what he calls Arowosegbe’s determination to depict the relationship with an anti-intellectual state as the root of the problems afflicting Africa-based academics, but appears to agree that the frequent and unproductive dance between the ruling elites and faculty unions on perpetual strikes, especially in public universities in Nigeria, as ‘predictable festivals’ that ultimately harm students most.

Idea of ongoing decline of universities rejected

Similarly, Pedro Monaville, an associate professor of modern African history at McGill University in Canada, dismisses the idea that African universities have experienced a continuous decline that started quickly after a foregone ‘golden age’ of institutional development and serious intellectual progress.

Drawing from the ideas of James Scott (1936-2024), an American political scientist and said to be an informant of the Central Intelligence Agency, or CIA, who in the early 1960s went to Kinshasa (then Leopoldville) to speak to students of the Lovanium University (now the University of Kinshasa) and gauge their political consciousness, Monaville says Scott was happy to see many students distancing themselves from active politics.

Scott praised the students’ moderation and approvingly commented that they made fun of Patrice Lumumba because of his supposed lack of sophistication. But Scott’s belief that these young educated Congolese would emerge collectively as a force of moderation was shattered when the Congolese student movement turned to the left, with most students embracing strong anti-imperialist and socialist positions.

Citing Scott’s disappointments in his response to Arowosegbe’s position on the current status of African universities, Monaville says African universities were always highly politicised in relation to nation-building.

But, beyond the stand of African universities on questions about decolonisation, intellectualism, academic freedom, and knowledge production processes, Monaville thinks students and other academic cadres need to consider practical ideas on achieving political and social change in African societies.

He argued that, whereas state funding for higher education in postcolonial countries did experience a severe decline, at the same time, the number of university students has continued to grow exponentially.

Highlighting the Congolese situation, Monaville pointed out that, whereas Joseph Mobutu repressed student movements violently in 1971, the dictator also brought about a reform agenda that was praised by some academics.

“Regardless of one’s judgment about its nature, the reform did clearly lead to an era of intellectual productivity relatively unmatched before or since, particularly at the Lubumbashi campus of the national university,” said Monaville.

He stressed that, while some elites within the African political class could probably be sympathetic to the students’ denunciation of neocolonialism and socio-economic inequalities, they could also be worried about the potentially subversive nature of student politics.

However, in his 2022 book, Students of the World: Global 1968 and Decolonization in the Congo, Monaville says he is not suggesting that Mobutu’s policies in Zaire offer a model that could be replicated today but critiques their legacy for Congolese academia.

How can universities drive economic development?

So far, there seems to be no middle ground, as suggested by Toyin Falola, a Nigerian historian and a professor of African studies at the University of Texas, Austin in the United States, who, in his contribution, ‘Reflections on the future of African universities’, calls for a more in-depth exploration of the role universities can play in driving the continent’s economic development and fostering innovation.

But for now, Arowosegbe and like-minded academics appear to stand firm in their belief that African ruling elites are still anti-intellectual and afraid of the intellectual scrutiny that could come from robust and autonomous universities, while the defenders of the African postcolonial state have an uphill task to show the ruling elites’ genuine interest in the development of academia that they cannot control.