Opinion
Professor Koya Ogen And The Innovations On Women Empowerment
By Toyin Falola
In a world where labels and categories are rampant, it often takes belonging to a marginalised, oppressed, or misrepresented group of people to proffer beneficial solutions for that group or even work assiduously in its defence. This is because, in most cases, an outsider cannot fully conceptualise the experiences of the group the way an insider would. For instance, the majority of Afrocentric historians and Africanists are Africans themselves. While there are, of course, people outside this category who also commit to the cause, it would take someone who has been in the exact shoes of Africans to feel the pains and insist on African perspectives on a daily basis. This is also often the case in advocacies and movements such as feminism, women’s studies, women’s history, and women empowerment. In the same vein, it would take being a Nigerian, having lived among Nigerians, or choosing to live in Nigeria, to contextualise the suffering of the Nigerian people adequately.
Be that as it may, there are outlier cases in all of these categories of movements and advocacies; that is, people who do not necessarily belong to the group but have dedicated their work and focus to defending and seeking solutions. These outlier cases go out of their way to understand things from the perspectives of people who belong to the group, and although they may not fully relate to or represent the experiences of the group of people they are advocating for, their work is impactful enough to drive all-round betterment for the group. These outlier cases include philanthropists whose wealth has funded some of the world’s most significant medical discoveries, although they may not necessarily be affected by the diseases they are battling through the funding. And there is an outlier very much known to me: Professor Koya Ogen.
I have known Professor Koya Ogen for decades. Ours is a relationship that has, over the years, extended beyond the baseline relationship that two historian-academics would generally share. From our initial engagement, Professor Ogen’s wealth of ideas, research acumen, and depth of knowledge in the field was brought to the fore, and it is amazing to see how he has advanced in his career over the years. Schooled first at the now Adeyemi University of Education, Professor Ogen received training not just as a historian but also as a teacher — little wonder he is now doing exploits as an academic. He is also a proud product of the University of Lagos as an academic, as his grounded foundational training at Adeyemi has been instrumental to his output. In his pursuit of excellence, he obtained two successive degrees — a Master’s degree and a Ph.D. — from the University of Lagos, propelling him to a career in academia.
Ogen’s excellence as an academic has earned him several teaching and research fellowships and positions within and outside Nigeria — at the World Bank Institute, University of Ibadan, University of Yaoundé, Fourah Bay College, Obafemi Awolowo University, University of Lagos, the Leeds University Center for African Studies, University of Birmingham, Adeyemi College of Education, and Osun State University, among others. Ogen’s lifelong career interests revolve around exceptional teaching, relentless research, and impacts, and that’s visible in how much of himself he has poured into his work and the roles he has taken on. Being a diligent researcher and scholar myself, I know how taxing and heavy the weight of this type of mindset and approach is, and it is another reason I am always left in awe and admiration of this historian who put all of himself into his work.
Professor Ogen is on a mission to play his part in writing the history of the Yoruba, particularly the scarcely documented Southeastern Yorubaland. He has had an incredible output of work on the Yoruba, cutting across history, religion, empowerment, and culture. His dedication to documenting the Yoruba religion and its growing popularity among peoples of several world cultures is highly commendable. Ogen is an astute teacher and an effective administrator whose work has been marked by quality, accountability, innovation, and inclusive leadership.
I have known Ogen for long enough to consider him as someone who readily rises to the task when the occasion demands, even when others are unsure of how to react or somewhat fearful of how challenging the responsibilities might be. These adopted qualities for administration have been reflected in the positions Ogen has held — during his time as the Provost of Adeyemi College of Education, as part of the TETFund Research Fund Committee, and also as the first Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Osun State University. As an inclusive administrator and educator, Ogen’s leadership recognises and actively engages students, a claim that has been proven in his past administrative positions.
Although he is a man, Professor Ogen’s work, research, and scholarship encompasses women’s empowerment. Suppose you are familiar with Ogen’s astuteness in scholarship and research. In that case, you will know he has worked on ground-breaking research projects, including the “Knowing Each Other Everyday Religious Encounter in Southwest Yorubaland” and the “Globalisation of African Religion and the Post-colonial Resurgence of Yoruba Traditional Religious Practices.” I was delighted but not surprised when, a few days ago, I received the good news that Professor Ogen and his team emerged as one of the 11 winners of the prestigious UNESCO Diversity of Cultural Expressions grant. This means that their project scaled through the rigorous national processes to emerge as Nigeria’s submission, and among the over 600 project proposals submitted to the UNESCO global team, Professor Ogen’s team made it to the 11-project winners’ list.
This victory will give headway to Professor Ogen’s research focus and commitment to women’s empowerment through innovative solutions. In the same vein, it has placed Osun State University on the global map as Nigeria’s first higher institution of learning to be so awarded. As great as this win is for the team of researchers and the university, it is even more glorious when we think of the potential it has to significantly impact young women from the Southwestern part of the country. The “Youth Empowerment, Gender Mainstreaming and Entrepreneurising Yoruba Oral Arts for Sustainable Development in Southwest Nigeria” project is an avenue through which Professor Ogen and his 15-member team will empower young Yoruba women under the aegis of Osun State University.
Considering this project’s conceptualisation, it has many potential applications and ripple implications in academia, governance, culture, and history. To start with, the project will leverage oral arts to empower the proposed 300 trainees. Looking at the history of the Yoruba, orality holds a centre-piece role in the cohesion and unity of Yoruba societies. For the Yoruba, their cognomens, legends, and epics are integral to their identity and existence — for citizens and royals alike. Over the years, these forms of oral art have evolved from being the major source of historical data to serving as prestigious recognition and identity affiliation for the Yoruba people. Although they do not majorly rely on cognomens and other forms of oral art, the Yoruba people of nowadays still associate with these in social bonding and identity formation settings. In that case, I am more likely to be moved during invoking the Isola cognomen, seeing as it is an identity I can affiliate myself with. Similarly, virtually Yoruba people have forms of oral arts that they identify with at different levels — from the personal to the familial.
Oral arts are a vital part of Yoruba culture and identity, which is why I consider the choice of oral arts for women’s empowerment an ingenious move. Through this project, Professor Ogen and his team plan to train 300 young women on praise singing and oral artistry in Yoruba. Beyond that, they will also be training these young women on a novel application of information technology to a widely accepted form of art in Yorubaland and how to deploy and spread their oral creativity through new and digital media, such as cartoons, animations, and videos. The world is increasingly becoming digital, and to save our traditions and histories from the abyss of oblivion, we must embrace innovative media. It will also give the necessary exposure to these artists and their work, as they would have digital footprints and the avenue to spread their work beyond their immediate environment or among the Yoruba alone, thus making it possible to expand the scope of the Yoruba oral artistry’s coverage. Through this project, the Yoruba oral artistry industry, which is largely gerontocratic, will absorb more young people.
Beyond the benefits to the participants, this project is also beneficial to society because it will help save and salvage Yoruba cultural heritages and history by ensuring that they are passed on to the younger generation, as well as spike the younger people’s interest in embracing this form of art by introducing them to a medium they would deeply appreciate: digitisation.
In his pursuit of excellence and unwavering devotion to the promotion and propagation of Yoruba culture and history, Professor Ogen has once again outdone himself, and I am immensely proud of this new feat. I am sure Osun State University is equally proud of this, and so should Nigeria.
By Tunji Olaopa
If I am asked to give a succinct and apt summary of the entire challenge faced by the Nigerian state in terms of her policy architecture and development management, in spite of contestation in the development literature, I will not hesitate in stating clearly and unambiguously that it is the challenge of policy implementation; the whole dynamics of getting things done. By elimination, the implication is that the challenge cannot be located as that of the dearth of development ideas, insights, models and paradigms. Right from her independence, Nigeria has been inundated with several ideas, both local and global, about development policy and frameworks. And yet, policy outcomes keep getting bogged down in the murky waters of political shenanigans. This means that the new administration of Bola Ahmed Tinubu has its challenge mapped out, in red, for it.
There is no shying away from this postcolonial predicament that has limited and kept limiting Nigeria’s capacity to honour the terms of her social contract with Nigerians. Hence, the Tinubu government will soon be inundated with the impatient agitations of Nigerians for a quick and tangible fix that will address their sufferings. And they are justified since they have not been given any real deal for the past sixty-three years of sovereign independence. And the new administration is obligated because that is the reason for seeking office in the first place.
Prof. Olaopa’s new book on public policy and development challenges
How then can we begin to understand this policy execution challenge? It is simple: how can an administration in Nigeria transition from governance vision and policy intention to policy outcomes that elevate and transform the quality of life of its citizens? Failure to understand and give critical and political attention to this question lies at the heart of the governance failures of successive Nigerian administrations. The new Tinubu administration cannot afford such a glaring mistake. And so, a fundamental case must be made out of the question of how policy intentions get circumscribed in the dynamics of policy execution that occasions policy failures in past administrations.
Modern states all across the world are distinguished by the traditional four functions they discharge as part of their administrative responsibilities—security i.e. securing the sovereign territory against lawlessness, policy formulation and implementation, governance regulation and service delivery.The capacity to perform each and all of these functions very well within an integrated framework in the governance context is what delivers the dividends of democratic governance to the citizens, and it enhances the state’s competitive and human development rating in global reckoning. With these functions, we have the metrics to differentiate between high-performing states like China, India, the United States,Botswana, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirate, Germany, Rwanda and the Asian Tigers (Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea), and low- or even under-performing countries like Nigeria that is still cluelessly stuck within a dysfunctional vicious cycle within her arrested development.
From the perspective of governance, there must be something these states are getting right in the connection between leadership, politics, and policy articulation. For instance, there is a trajectory of relationship that links elite bargains to development bargains. In other words, development is a
function of elite nationalism and the extent to which the political class of a state can commit elite suicide and gamble on development on behalf of the people they are leading. In Nigeria, low
manifestation of elite nationalism has made it really difficult for the political class to set aside their personal and egoistic class interests in ways that enable them to clearly and ideologically discern and navigate the deadly developmental landmines strewn all over our governance landscape by the
neoliberal implication of ideological apparatuses and frameworks to which Nigeria is beholden. And here, the factor of development gamble of the Asian Tigers’ elites comes into bold relief. From within the ideological ambit of the developmental state, the leadership of the Asian Tigers were able to define a policy space that consciously and critically weighed the benefits and shortfalls of external influences, especially the type that came from the World Bank, IMF and the other cohorts of the neoliberal policy dynamics. Their developmental circumspection paid off!
Since we cannot argue that Nigeria has been stumped by the lack of vision documents, development plans and blueprints, or even policy expertise, the locus of the new administration’s focus must be directed at the possibility of mustering the political will to undermine the mystified Nigerian Factor, and face the global neoliberal consensus in order to begin the crafting of an enabling policy architecture to drive development. And to achieve this translates to creating the delicate balance between ‘doing the right things’ (a function of decision making quotient) and ‘doing it right’(project and change management effectiveness), and overcoming the various political, cultural, structural and systemic constraints that trapped past well-meaning policies and intentions of Nigerian leaders in the dynamics of implementation.
There is first the conspiracy of elitist interest that ensures there is a poor resource allocation that focuses on elite bargain than development calculations and taking care of the national interest. Other constraints follow: (a) the disconnect between policy design and implementation due to weak implementation planning, risk assessment and incompetent change management strategies; (b) unstable and poorly managed macroeconomic policies; (c) policy and project discontinuity; (d) public service low capability readiness; (e) political interference; and finally (f) deep-seated political and bureaucratic corruption. In essence, development has failed not because Nigeria lacks the blueprint or paradigms to make it happen, but due to the dynamics of the politics that the political elite plays with Nigeria’s development potential.
Let me outline what we can regard as the “politics of policy implementation” that Nigeria has played for many years, a politics the new administration must take into serious consideration if it
does not want to fall into the category of failed administration right before it commences. This politics throws Nigeria’s development and policy non-performance right into the frame of the 2005 World Bank review findings about policy and development projects in Africa. According to the finding, 29% of development projects ever get completed, 45% of on-going projects are rated as satisfactory, while 26% of such projects invariably get cancelled. Such a review can never backstop a solid development project of a developmental state.
The politics of policy implementation in
Nigeria is founded on the following assumptions and practices. One: there is that dangerous presumption, that the new administration must resist, that once policies and development plan are designed, they are automatically implemented by the public service. And such a presumption is against the background of a scant investment in implementation analysis and planning, as well as the failure to facilitate the capability review, determine public
administration system’s capability readiness, and strengthening of the MDAs as the powerhouse of government administrative functionality. The MDAs, that is, are not working according to any
specific theories or praxis of change that can guide the functional integration of blueprints or paradigms. This kind of policy inattention draws attention to the policy contradiction: launching a
national development plan and strategy that are not implementation- ready in terms of adequate capability review of the MDAs integral to ensuring implementation success. Two: this
presumption is compounded by the uncritical reliance of past governments on policy experts and consulting firms who are tasked with designing high-end policies that are then dumped on MDAs whose capability reviews and implementation readiness have been neglected in the first place. The
extroversion of the policy design is then compromised by poor functional integration. The truth is that most of these consulting firms lack the appropriate deep content and solution frameworks that are in tandem with the context of policy dysfunction they are supposed to work with. Three: governance policy or project are hardly subjected to feasibility test determined in terms of scope and expectation that are captured by their framework of time, cost and risk assessments before
they are pushed into implementation. This makes it very difficult to benchmark funding projections for these policies and projects against revenue estimations, as well as facilitating in-built flexibilities that enable the policies and projects to adjust to volatilities and contingencies.
All the issues raised above constitute binding constraint that will undermine any governance possibilities the new administration requires to make a success of democratic governance. Undermining the binding constraints demands returning to the fundamentals. The first and most significant is that the new administration needs to interrogate the framework of how government business is currently being conducted. Governance successes are necessarily a function of how government business engages the complexities of the policy design and execution processes within a results-oriented frame. And that entails undermining the structural gaps between policy objectives, development strategies and policy outcomes. This demands second, setting the public service on a performance curve with the institution of a performance management system. This means that the public service must, for example, unfailingly now deploy KPI-based metrics to replace the cumbersome annual performance evaluation report (APER). And at the backend, it becomes imperative to have a monitoring and evaluation system supported by databases that enable staff and program continuous assessment, human resource development rooted in iterativep performance gap identification, supervisors-staff dialogue and multisource feedback mechanismsf for overall national development policy tracking and reporting.
The governance mantra must be on getting the balance between doing the right things and doing it right. And this cannot be achieved through the wanton multiplication or even duplication of
governance plans, programs and blueprints. What is needed is sequencing the blueprints into a coherent and feasible implementation programme, with the right amount of political will behind it. This gives the success of democratic governance a 95% chance of succeeding. The new administration needs that fighting chance!
. Olaopa, a retired Federal Permanent Secretary, and Professor of Public Administration .
tolaopa2003@gmail.com
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