Scholars must resist intimidation from Industry: A Reply to Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu

My attention has recently been drawn to an article by Dr. Isaac Yae Asiedu making the rounds on social media. It is titled “African Professors must stop counting publications - And start building nations”. While I appreciate Dr. Asiedu’s concern that we all do all that we can to improve the quality of life on our continent, I have real problems with his approach to the issue.

First, what Dr Asiedu calls “nation-building” is properly referred to as “national development”. The former has to do with creating a sense of solidarity in a country, while the latter is about improving the quality of life in such a polity.

Second, Dr. Asiedu’s view that academics should be promoted on the basis of their innovations rather than their publications might appear impressive, but it reduces academia to the servant of industry. Dr. Asiedu’s disdain for theory is manifest, as he articulates the trendy idea of “market-driven courses” thus: “Each paper should be the beginning of a product. Each thesis should end with a tool. Each classroom should be a workshop.” However, such an outlook is a cheapening of academia spearheaded by wealthy college dropouts, many of whose wealth is the result of inheritance and fraud rather than genuine hard work. Tragic that even academics will listen to such while dismissing colleagues offhand.

Third, Dr. Asiedu needs to reflect further on the relationship between theory and practice, and to appreciate that there is often substantial innovation in the formulation of theory. Remember the Roman myth of the two boys who made wings for themselves and had successful flights? It took over two millennia for the two Wright brothers to step into history and invent aircraft. I know that the myth was not theory in the strict sense, but whoever came up with it did some theorising in the wider sense of contemplating a possibility and attempting to identify the means of turning it into reality. Be that as it may, the history of science is replete with theories that seemed impracticable or only minimally useful for centuries, only for them to eventually be put into phenomenal use. The ancient Greeks wrote about atoms, but the atomic bomb only appeared in the twentieth century; Aristotle, and the ancient Egyptians before him, theorised the laws of logic that are the foundation of contemporary computer science; the work of earlier physicists provided Einstein with a basis for working towards his even more all-encompassing relativity theory.

Fourth, how do scholars of the humanities and social sciences relate to Dr. Asiedu’s call to innovations that “change lives”? Does it mean they have no role in society if their work does not yield immediately tangible results? Is this not the thinking through which subjects such as literature, history and philosophy are dismissed as useless simply because they are perceived not to be immediately applicable to “the market”? Is life only about “the market”, and therefore devoid of emotional and social intelligence? Is this piece not simply a diluted latter-day articulation of pragmatism, with all its inherent weaknesses?

Fifth, Dr. Asiedu’s aspiration is for the countries of Africa to “industrialise”, meaning he/she subscribes to the idea that “development” means playing “catch-up” with the West. In this he fails to appreciate that there is substantial literature attesting to the fact that it was the Western imperialists who fabricated this very “development” narrative as part of their exit plan, so that they would re-brand themselves from “colonisers” to “development partners” in the current neo-colonial era.

This philistine narrative about the need for academics to churn out “innovations rather than publications” that address our immediate problems is now choking almost every aspect of our lives – public health, conservation, gender studies, human rights, etc. Even the disgusting question now posed to academics during promotion interviews as to how many grants they have brought to their universities is a manifestation of this sacrilege.

So let academics labour in theorising, and provide immediate solutions when they can identify them, but refuse to be intimidated by so-called “captains of industry” and their facilitators who threaten to send genuine scholarship to its grave.

Poor Leadership, Bad Followership, and Western Imperialism: The Three Sources of our Woes

Quite often, we are told that the problems in the countries of Africa are solely due to bad leadership. However, more recently, others have asserted that our problems are due to bad followership, since it is the followers who elect bad leaders. What if both those elected and those who elected them are not wholly to blame? What if there is a third factor that is seldom highlighted?

I have seen people condemn politicians for corruption, only for they themselves to act terribly corrupt in their own spheres – civil servants stealing stationery at work, teachers and lecturers sexually exploiting their students, middle class families grossly underpaying their househelps, etc. I have seen many people vote for a grossly incompetent and corrupt politician simply because he is from their own community. I have seen people maim or even kill their compatriots simply for holding contrary political opinions. I have heard them say that it is alright for their own to be declared winner even when all the evidence points to the fact that they actually lost but used state power to get themselves declared "winner".

Yet the high primium often placed on electing the right leaders is itself problematic because of the grossly flawed nature of our elections - an exercise riddled with red tape and outrageous requirements for big cash to run for office, reducing the masses to mere voting pawns. I have said much about this in "Elections: A Major Obstacle to Democracy in Kenya" ( https://www.theelephant.info/analysis/2022/09/30/elections-a-major-obstacle-to-democracy-in-kenya/ ).

Most crucially, I disagree with the "leaders-people" dichotomy. I have read theories of leadership and theories of followership, each of them claiming it is the solution to our morass. Nevertheless, both groups of theories ignore neo-colonialism which Kwame Nkrumah explicated in Neo-Colonialism: The Last Phase of Imperialism. Nkrumah pointed out that a neo-colony has all the trappings of sovereignty, but due to its economic dependency, its laws and policies are determined by the erstwhile colonisers. Neglecting to lay blame on neo-colonialism is partly due to the conflation of "independence" and "liberation" which is fuelled by the Kiswahili word "uhuru" used to translate both.

As scholars of decoloniality have pointed out, independence simply gives a country a flag, a national anthem, national anthem national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United Nations (note, for example, that traditional political formations in Africa had no flags and national anthems).

On the other hand, liberation enables a country to decide whether or not it wants a flag, a national anthem, a national currency, a national coat of arms, and a seat at the United nations, etc. In short, many analyses on leadership and followership ignore current geopolitics dominated by the West. For example, we have repeatedly seen leading candidates in presidential races in various countries on our continent dashing to Chatham House to “validate” their candidature.

Yet it is true that if we were more politically conscious, we would put a lot of shenanigans to a stop. Nevertheless, however committed to high political ideals we as citizens were, if the structures of Western imperialism remain intact in the realms of economics, politics, education, religion, etc., we will never get out of the woods. Remember Thomas Sankara telling an OAU meeting that if all countries in Africa rose up against debt slavery they would succeed, but if he alone tried to do it he would not even be alive to attend the next OAU meeting? Point? Western imperialism is always ready to eliminate those of our people who exhibit true, liberating leadership.

So let us be tough on ourselves and on those who hold political offices, demanding the highest standards of ethics from ourselves and from them, but let us not exonerate Western imperialism for the major part it has played, and continues to play, in our woes since the fifteenth century through four hundred years of slavery, about seventy of classical colonialism, and now more than sixty of neo-colonialism. Walter Rodney's How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is an excellent text in this regard.

In sum, it is not only bad leadership or bad followership or even both to blame for our woes, but rather leadership, followership, and, above both, Western imperialism.