By Tunji Olaopa
The past few weeks have been dedicated to the news of the demise of elder intellectual and scholar, the late Professor Biodun Jeyifo, and to the celebration of his towering legacies in scholarship and activism.
BJ, as he was fondly called, is one of the few intellectuals whose scholarship comes attached with an imperative of active participation in the critique of government in ways that connect the benefits of scholarship to the dividends of governance. BJ was a Marxist, and a very dedicated one to the end. That makes him a formidable member of a progressive left that is not so formidable any longer. Hence the title of this piece.
I know BJ only by his significant reputation as a Marxist scholar and an activist. The spate of discussions and discourses that attended his passing attests to his colossal stature as someone who understands the enduring significance of Marxism as a theoretical means of social analysis and social transformation.
That is one lesson I took away from my political theory classes as a graduate student of political science. And so, with the legacy of Biodun Jeyifo, we are able to deploy the fundamental importance of radical scholarship for the understanding of Nigeria’s postcolonial predicament.
With the late Biodun Jeyifo, we can connect the subtext of radical analytical criticism that Marxism provides with the malaise of postcolonial underdevelopment in Nigeria, and the role that Nigeria’s higher educational sector ought to play in the wings of ASUU activism, of which BJ was a founding part.
Firmly grounded in performance studies, literary criticism and cultural studies, BJ had a firm grasp of material realities in postcolonial contexts to be able to ignite political activism. And that radical scholarship and political engagement, nurtured within the cauldron of the walls of a postcolonial university in Nigeria, was to become a lifelong passion and pursuit. From a critical engagement with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Wole Soyinka’s The Man Died to Ngugi wa Thiong’o on language, BJ began blazing scholarly paths that have critical implications for how we understand the dynamics of human society.
BJ was more than a teacher who basked in abstraction; on the contrary, his understanding of political economy and Marxism gave him so much basis for the analysis of sociohistorical and material realities.
The university was the hotbed of radical and revolutionary activities that gave birth to the Nigerian left—the group of Marxist scholars, teachers and intellectuals, from Edwin Madunagu, Eskor Toyo, Bala Usman, Bala Takaya, and G. G. Darah to Claude Ake, Bade Onimode. Akin Oyebode and BJ himself.
The university was then a critical commencement condition for the formation and maturation of many Naija Marxists. It was the point at which the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) received its first ideological inspiration from BJ as its first president. And ASUU took on a new lease of life as an association that was concerned not just with earning a living wage for its members but also with taking on the cause of higher education, and transforming the ivory towers into the context for radical thought.
The universities became the watering holes for the establishment and emergence of the Marxist and socialist traditions in Nigeria, and the coalition of the progressives—the Nigerian left made possible by the very dismal condition of postcolonial Nigeria itself: the huge and severe divide between the rich and the poor, the increasing income and gender gaps, the deepening of mass impoverishment of millions of Nigerians, the listlessness of the governance dynamics, the dismal unemployment statistics, etc.
All of these, and the multiplying literature on Nigerian Marxism—from Bala Usman to Claude Ake, as well as the socialist activism enabled by the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Marxist analyses of strike actions in Nigeria—constituted the academic grist for our vigorous analyses in the political theory classes at the University of Ibadan. The various and complex analyses of Nigeria’s political economy, in the grip of capitalist modernity, were our intellectual compass for navigating a deep understanding of where Nigeria stands in terms of governance and development. And we were able to funnel our academic understanding through the live action of labour and academic industrial actions by the NLC and ASUU.
However, following the crumbling of the former USSR, and what Francis Fukuyama considers to be the ideological victory of neoliberalism as The End of History, Marxism seems to have beaten a hasty retreat from the intellectual space of global ideological contestations. This is not only facilitated by the internal rivalries between the various tendencies and schools of thought like Trotskyites, Jacobins, Stalinists, Maoists, Leninists, Bolsheviks, and Western Marxism, but also the various intellectual iterations of what is now regarded as neo-Marxism.
The increasing strength of neoliberal capitalism on a global scale, facilitated by the Bretton Woods institutions (the World Bank and the IMF), as well as the ideological pull of the Washington Consensus, seemsto have put the final nails in the coffin of Marxism. And yet, Nigeria’s postcolonial condition both implicates the reign of neoliberalism as well as the necessity of a Marxian resurgence in social analysis.
But then, the exit of the titan BJ reinforces the pessimism about the continuing decimation of the Nigerian left, and the unfinished and seemingly unfinishable task of making Nigeria work. This is not a mere lament. Biodun Jeyifo was an unrepentant and incorrigible Marxist. The fortune or misfortune of Marxism on the global scale, or even its internal rivalry, could not dent his intellectual ardour.
In “Who is Afraid of Biodun Jeyifo’s Marxism”—an essay he wrote to explain his continuing and obdurate attachment to Marxism—BJ outlines his understanding of Marxism as a critical stance that allowed him to pursue redistributive justice in a world that isbeing undermined by capitalism and its economic and political dynamics. And BJ is not to be mistaken for an orthodox Marxist grounded in a doctrinaire tradition that fails to see emerging realities or even the possibility that a Marxist could also be wrong in his analysis.
Such intellectual honesty and flexibility is demonstrated in BJ’s relations with Wole Soyinka’s work. From his initial critique of Soyinka’s “bourgeois aesthetics” to his acknowledgement of the complexity inherent in his work, BJ leaves us with a sense of a humanist’s humane and delicate understanding of human nature.
Biodun Jeyifo has died, the world is on fire, and Nigeria is still burning. And the Nigerian left is being decimated either by death, by calculated silence or by pragmatic withdrawal.
While the global engagement with neoliberal capitalism has generated significant contributions from Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Thomas Pickety, Amartya Sen, Muhammad Yunus, Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo, Paul Collier, Daren Acemoglu, James Robinson, Hernando de Soto, Ha-Joon Chang, and significant others, there is no longer any active Marxist intellectuals who is sufficiently formidable and courageous to push bold analysis of how the global relations of capitalism impacts the Nigerian society and how this malaise could be resolved.
The Nigerian society does not need closet Marxists. Nigerian Marxism and the Nigerian left consistently confront the wily Nigerian state and its cooptation tactics. The indefatigable Edwin Madunagu was coopted by the Babangida administration. The Nigerian Labour Congress—from Hassan Sunmonu to Adams Oshiomhole—has since nosedived under the weight of political corruption as realpolitik. And ASUU has been compromised by an inveterate logic of strikes that is bled of all intellectual dynamism and vision.
And this is where the persona of Biodun Jeyifo—as a Marxist thinker and activist—left for us a framework of analysis for the reconstruction of the Nigerian left. BJ’s legacy is founded on the coherent interplay of ideas and actions. Ideas alone cannot win the fight against grand injustices and inequalities in the world, or in Nigeria. The Nigerian state is too strategic in its violence or cooptation tactic.
Ideas and actions are both implicated in the Marxist analysis of the material realities of human society. Intellectual analyses and political engagement piggyback on each other. In fact, I contend, for example, that ASUU needs to commission a study of BJ’s leadership of ASUU, from 1980 to 1982, and the framework of his ideological consistency, administrative strategies, and intellectual framework.
Marxism, for BJ, was a theoretical framework for articulating the idea of human freedom. And intellectual freedom has a fundamental role to play in the understanding and actualisation of social transformation. This is where BJ’s role in academic activism makes sense, and Nigeria’s higher education constitutes a space of legitimate ideological contestation.
This tells us, for instance, that achieving academic freedom is not a means for merely increasing the take-home incentives of the university teachers. It was an ideological contest for opening up the university as a space for rethinking the Nigerian state and society.
Biodun Jeyifo––husband, father, consummate teacher, mentor, unrepentant revolutionary and consistent Marxist––becomes even in death an exemplar. He is the very epitome of what can be right with Nigeria’s intellectual space founded by a constant and consistent flush of radical and humane ideas that could be distributed through flexible pedagogical regimes in Nigerian universities into the minds and intellects of generations of Nigerians.
The epitaph on his grave should become the ringing epigraph that will rouse the comatose Nigerian left to deeds yet unspoken of on behalf of our collective patrimony.
Tunji Olaopa is chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission and Professor of Public Administration.
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