Open, perceptive and public-spirited: A Tribute to Abdul Raufu Mustapha (1954-2017)

For the 37 years I knew him, Abdul Raufu Mustapha, who departed this life on August 8, 2017, lived a life of courage, commitment and fulfilment. A versatile scholar and an internationalist, he had an incredibly open, perceptive and critical mind.  He prioritised the public interest, whether in terms of his persistent questioning of the […]

For the 37 years I knew him, Abdul Raufu Mustapha, who departed this life on August 8, 2017, lived a life of courage, commitment and fulfilment. A versatile scholar and an internationalist, he had an incredibly open, perceptive and critical mind. 

He prioritised the public interest, whether in terms of his persistent questioning of the failure of his country, Nigeria, to live up to its potential in most dimensions of development, or his engagement with scholars in other parts of the world in articulating an agenda of social change. 

He was charming, kind and resolute–personality traits that were a product of his core values of fairness, inclusiveness, equality in all its dimensions, and contempt for corruption and authoritarian habits. 

He always expressed his views clearly and boldly, and was not afraid to call out or challenge injustice, exclusion and oppression. He had a good sense of humour, especially when expressed in the popular Nigerian pidgin. His mother tongue was Yoruba, he spoke Hausa like a native speaker, and could hold a conversation in Igbo, having lived in the eastern Nigeria during part of his formative years. 

Raufu, as he was known among friends and family, studied and taught Political Science at the Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Nigeria in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. He did his doctoral studies in the late 1980s at the Oxford University in the United Kingdom, where he later taught for about 20 years, rising to the rank of Associate Professor. 

His scholarship was inseparable from his personal values and critical engagement with politics in Nigeria, other parts of Africa, and the world at large. Four big themes informed this scholarship: equality and social transformation; ethnicity and the national question; substantive democracy; and religion and social cohesion.

Raufu thought deeply about the structures of domination that stifle the aspirations of ordinary people, leading to grossly unequal outcomes in the political economy. As a student and young lecturer at ABU, he was active in the struggles of the students movement, labour unions and the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), which, in the 1980s, advocated an agenda of social transformation in addressing the problems of inequality, ethnic division and authoritarian rule.

Radical social thought and praxis, influenced by Marxist and dependency theories of development, was rife on Nigerian campuses, especially at ABU, and in sections of the wider society. In the 1979 elections, the People’s Redemption Party, which spoke the language of the commoner, or talakawa, and was committed to radical social change, captured northern Nigeria’s two most important states, Kano and Kaduna. 

A section of the radical-left at the ABU joined the Kaduna State Governor’s Office as advisers. However, it turned out to be a short-lived experience: unlike its Kano counterpart, the PRP in Kaduna did not control the State House of Assembly. The national ruling party, the National Party of Nigeria, which controlled the House, used its raw numbers power to impeach the governor, Balarabe Musa, after less than two years in office. The radical-left intellectuals were sent packing back to the ABU campus.

The PRP experience in Kaduna became a hotly debated subject among academics at the ABU and elsewhere. Even though peasant farmers and other sections of the working poor voted for the party, they were not sufficiently organised or incorporated as active agents in the structures of the party. 

One of the big questions at the time was why the impeachment of the popular governor on false charges was not resisted by the broad mass of the people. This led to another critical question: How effective can social transformation be carried out from Government House without mass mobilisation and building structural ties with the working poor?

Two years after the sacking of the governor, a major international conference was held, in 1983, at ABU on Marxist theory and African development, as part of many global initiatives to commemorate 100 years of Marx’s death. Radical academics were by then divided between the returnees from Government House and their supporters, and those who remained on the campus and were critical of the Government House experiment. 

Raufu, who belonged to the latter group, presented a thoughtful and incisive critique of the PRP experience entitled Critical Notes on the National Question: Practical Politics and the People’s Redemption Party. It was arguably the star paper at the conference, but it did not go down well with the returnees, who dismissed Raufu’s group as armchair theoreticians that did not want to dirty their hands in practical politics. The debate on the paper was passionate and vitriolic. Divisions within the radical scholarly community at ABU deepened irrevocably after that conference.

Raufu’s decision to advance his understanding of peasant life and politics in his academic work may have been partly shaped by this early experience of the failed PRP experiment in Kaduna State. His PhD thesis at Oxford focused on rural differentiation and politics, with field work conducted at Rogo, a rural settlement about 90 kilometres from Kano. I accompanied Raufu to this village a few times during his research and was impressed by the warm rapport he established with the rural folk. He felt very much at home in his surroundings.

With his knowledge on peasant differentiation, rural livelihoods, and research skills, Raufu was invited to contribute to a research project I coordinated in the early 1990s at the UN Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) on economic crisis, structural adjustment, and social change. He provided valuable insights on the project’s core theme on multiple coping strategies, or the tendency of households to diversify sources of incomes as single activities prove insufficient to sustain livelihoods. 

His research paper on the coping strategies of cocoa farmers at Alade in South West Nigeria showed that even though price liberalisation raised incomes and revived accumulation among all categories of farmers in the cocoa economy, prospects for sustainability could have been undermined by the continued fall in international prices and demand, escalating input costs, ageing trees and ecological problems.

Raufu’s other big research interest was ethnicity and the national question. Given the multiple levels of polarisation in the country, ethnicity, federalism, and revenue sharing schemes constituted the bedrock of Nigerian political science. However, radical political economists tended to ignore or underplay their significance, focusing instead on the dynamics of wealth creation and impoverishment, the state’s role in the economy, working class struggles, and popular or subaltern and middle class pressures for social change. 

Raufu was among the few young scholars who broke ranks with this tendency, devoting much of his time in understanding ethnic cleavages and politics in their own right without sacrificing the class dimension of radical scholarship. He published in 1986 “The National Question and Radical Politics in Nigeria”, as a contribution to a special issue on Nigeria in the Review of African Political Economy. 

A number of important publications on ethnicity followed at the turn of the century, including his contributions to the UNRISD project on Ethnic Inequalities and Public Sector Governance, and the large programme on horizontal inequalities and conflict at the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at Queen Elizabeth House, Oxford. In these publications, he demonstrated that Nigeria’s power sharing institutions are bedevilled by sharp ethno-regional and vertical inequalities, which tend to affect the country’s stability and development.

The 1990s was a period of widespread democratisation in Africa and other parts of the world. Nigeria itself has not always neatly followed the two key political trends on the continent: the first trend can be described as early democratisation in the run-up to independence, followed by long periods of miltary or one party rule from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s, and redemocratisation in the 1990s; and the second represented continuous single party dominant, or competitive, democratic politics, as exemplified by Botswana, Mauritius and, to some extent, Senegal. Nigeria’s immediate post-independence democracy, like the first African trend, collapsed in the mid-1960s, but was resurrected in 1979, only for it to collapse again in 1983; the country then experienced the longest transition in Africa. It was a latecomer in the new African wave of democratic politics, even though it sent troops to Sierra Leone to restore a collapsed democracy in 1997; it finally transitioned to democracy in 1999, after an exceptionally brutal military dictatorship and manipulation of transition rules and schedules.