Professor Richard Joseph of Northwestern University has described Nigeria as one of the Big Messes of Countries in Africa. He made the declaration at the 3rd Achebe Colloquium on Africa going on at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University. Other countries he classified as such are Sudan, Congo and Somalia.
Professor Richard Joseph of Northwestern University has described Nigeria as one of the Big Messes of Countries in Africa. He made the declaration at the 3rd Achebe Colloquium on Africa going on at the Perry and Marty Granoff Center for the Creative Arts at Brown University. Other countries he classified as such are Sudan, Congo and Somalia.
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Professor Joseph was speaking as part of the panel that looked at The Arab Spring: Challenges to Democratization and Nation Building. He suggested that the West should stop viewing Islamists emerging from the Arab Spring as a force to be crushed.
Earlier in the program, the former Secretary General of The Commonwealth, Mr. Emeka Anyaoku said that Africa’s old way has failed and a new order is emerging. In his keynote speak at the event he chronicled Africa’s journey to this new dawn. Tapping into his experience at the Commonwealth, he stated that the absence of good governance is responsible for the economic underdevelopment on the continent. He warned that until politics is seen as a call to service and until anti-corruption agencies stop trapping the small fish while letting the big fish go free, sub-Saharan Africa has a long way to go. “Every African country has to find its own way to a democracy that suits its history and tradition.”
Other contributors in the panel discussion included Daniel Serwer of the Center for Transatlantic Relations at John Hopkins University. He spoke about the unresolved trajectories of the revolution aftermath. He told the participants that the big issue in the emerging Islamic countries is the introduction of Islam not just a religion but as law.
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, coordinator, Democracy and Islamic Program Center for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster chided western and Arab academics for being pessimistic and distrusting of the Arab people. He noted that the academics failed to anticipate what happened and people who were thought to be divided along ethnic, sectarian lines were wrapping themselves in the flag. He observed that only the regimes in Syria and Bahrain were able to successfully divide the people.
Thinking ten years in the future, Chibli Mallat of Harvard Law School presented what he called the three axis of study- non-violence, Democratic dance and challenge of transformation justice.
Ali Mazrui who talked about Arab Spring and the Long Female Winter. He listed the women in Arab history who sowed the seed of the revolution we are seeing. He hoped that Egypt or Tunisia would produce the first female president. Prof. Mazrui complained that in Libya, the opposition was weaponized rapidly. “Ghadafi is a bad Libyan,” he said, “but a good African.”
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