Prof. Udenta O. Udenta is a man of many parts. He is a Professor of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing in a number of British Universities with affiliations in Africa. Having written his first book at the age of 13, on his 60th birthday, he published 21 books celebrated in one day. He was the founding National Secretary of Alliance for Democracy. He was a Director with the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution (IPCR) and is a Director with the Centre for Alternative Policy Perspectives and Strategy (CAPPS). In this exclusive interview with PACESETTER in Abuja, he bemoaned the degradation of democratic institutions in Nigeria, among other national issues. Dateline: April 4, 2025.
Your early writings and speech reveal a mind that was not only attuned to the beauty of language but also the power of critical thought. What sparked your interest in Literature, Critical Theory and African Comparative Studies?
How will I say? How will I know? I know in one of my interviews and write-ups, I said ‘there are moments that are magical and there are moments that are equally inscrutable’. There’s no way you can define something you don’t really know much about. When you’re born, you’re born with manifest destiny, some people search for their destiny until they die, some find it early in life, I found mine early, almost before I learnt to walk, I discovered what I was going to be. So, when you start writing at 13 years, that’s the onset of puberty, that’s teen life. Some struggle to understand the meaning of life at 13 but I had written 3 novels, about 3 or 4 collection of short stories, about 3 collections of poems, a philosophical text – social meanings and social commentaries, before 14. That means there’s something magical and mysterious about that. But I do know that as a child I was enchanted of course by many stories told by my mother particularly. My father told a lot less stories but my mom told more stories, about ancient fables and folk tales and village life in those dim ancient times and they’ve made a lot of impression on me. And the civil war, of course I was born before the civil war, but I wasn’t old enough when the war commenced, but I learnt a little bit of life. My father was in what we called then the Biafra Organization of Freedom Fighters (BOFF). So, some evenings they’ll gather, he and his colleague will gather drinking schnapps or gin, my mother would come through, being a nurse we had better than other people during those dark days, and they’ll be singing songs to Biafra, to Ojukwu and so on, and as a child I listened to the stories they told, these stories made a lot of impressions on me and the journey again out of the world was equally very illuminating. These are the things which I found resonance and inspiration for some of the short stories I wrote that period. So, the civil war and all the stories associated with it, of purism, of challenges, of tragedy impacted upon me, my mother’s stories impacted upon me and possibly God’s own divine gift – something implanted in you as a person, and then most crucially, my father had a library, which was very uncommon in those days in the village. He had a very big library that was destroyed during the war, when we came back to our ancestral home by 1970, we discovered that thousands of books have been torn up and used as tissue paper by the soldiers. Within 2 to 3 years he started rebuilding his library and in 5 to 7 years the library was well stocked again so, I found in reading, many availability of books to devour.
You transitioned seamlessly from the realm of academia to active political engagement. How did your political journey begin?
Well in a way, it’s the way I see life in a multi-form complexity, life is not a linear process like when people say “I’m a scholar, I’ m a teacher, I’ m a doctor, I’m a nurse, I don’t know what happens in other sectors”. No, it shouldn’t be like that, there should be some level of inclusion. That’s why one of my books, my first memoir and I tell biography vol. 1 – ‘Democratic Transformation and Change in Nigeria’ but the subtitle is ‘A personal journey from intellectual conscience to practice’. The movement from intellectual life in the average tower to practical life of intervention, going to detention prepared to speak up against injustice and oppression. That’s exactly what I had to do, that’s exactly who I had to be and it started from high school. I remember as a class 5 student, I knew that we came back from school after the holidays and we were tortured with only beans, beans served to the students for about 3 days. I disagreed with it, that’s not the way things should be organized, we paid our fees, and we ought to have variety of food to eat. I mobilized hundreds of students and we poured the entire beans away, we didn’t eat it, we stood our ground, we were punished, I resisted. I was 16 years at the time, I wrote a 16 page letter to the principal that I was prepared to take it to Enugu city and ensure that the school was investigated by a high panel. So, the principal who is like a mentor now, he’s just someone who changed our lives, but then I was contending with him, he said okay because I acted in a play based on South African struggle against apartheid, that I’m seeing the teachers and staff as those who are oppressive. But I didn’t see it that way, I just felt I had to protect the rights of students. Now back in the village, when I enrolled in the university, we felt as though the elders and some of the leaders in the village were constituting themselves as a cog in the wheel of our progress, again we raised a ban of protest and then successfully we defended our position. Being a Marxist from high school, I took it with me to the university and ultimately led the Marxist Movement in the University of Nigeria Nsukka, I’ve led protest upon protest. So, as I read and as I advanced in my scholarship, I was equally advancing in my commitment to social life and practical political struggle. Now till today, I am part of NADECO, Alliance for Democracy, and I’m involved in the conversation about the destiny of Nigeria. This means that as a public intellectual you need to combine both your life as a scholar and your life as a representation of that scholarship in a wider society to improve the life of the people in that society.
Between when you were National Secretary, Alliance for Democracy and now, what changed in our trajectory of democracy?
It’s what can be described as a continuous slide, what can be described as democratic backslide or degeneration of our democracy or democracy that is atrophied. Our democracy is dying and in the hands of President Bola Tinubu and his government. Some time ago, I called it a hybrid regime. It’s part of what is described as ‘competitive authoritarianism’, it is neither democratic nor totally authoritarian, there’s a recourse to constitution but the constitution is readily abused, there’s a recourse to rule of law but it is undermined, there’s a recourse to judicial intervention but the judiciary appears already confiscated by the Executive arm, there’s a democratic recourse to parliament as an arbiter, sometimes between the people and the Executive branch, but parliament seem to have fled – the President of Senate, the speaker and the bunch of characters around them have sold their soul to the President and his people. So, because of these, you’re not going to look at parliament to balance democratic life, you can’t look to the judiciary to find justice for the common people, or those who opposed this government. So, democracy in 1991, was innocent in a way, it wasn’t a hundred percent in what democracy should be but far better than what we have today. Today there’s a much more aggressive push to undermine democratic governance, there’s a much more aggressive push to shut down and dismember the guardrail that uphold democratic practice. The first guardrail is civic liberty and human dignity, which we find constantly under assault, even the unity fountain where they used to have ‘BBOG’ – Bring Back Our Girls (protest), they’ve shut it down, they’ve gated it, and they criminalized the art of protesting there. That was what he (President Tinubu) used to come into power in 2015, only to criminalize that very art of protest. We saw the pictures some months ago, of young people underaged, brought to court, some collapsing there. They’re using the criminal justice system to undermine people’s trust in themselves and ability to protest against the unjust governance structures of the day. You find Labour leaders being accused of terrorism and terror financing, you find media practitioners being hunted from pillar to post, you find political parties fighting for their lives because the government of the day will like to break their pack. So, this government is intentional in its determination to topple almost all those concessions we have been paying to democratic government over the preceding two decades past.
In a previous interview, you suggested the need for a certain alignment, or what you described as a “linkage of affinity” between the judiciary, legislature, and executive. What advantage do you see in such alignment of power and how do you think it will improve democracy and benefit the public interest without affecting political competition?
For me, I think the intent of this government is to create or have one single party that is exuberant, robust, cohesive and coherent, then having the other parties limping, virtually half dead, half alive, that’s like a one party state in anything but the name and when that happens, all the pretence to repair are gone, all the pretense to the norms of that democratic system are gone. So, what you now find is full blown, illiberalism, authoritarianism, it becomes authoritarian if care is not taken. So, multi-party democracy affords the elites an avenue to place checks on one another, different factions of the elite manifesting themselves in different political formations, trying to balance the appetite and greed for power with the wide expectations of the public. When they don’t have that balance in act, when they don’t have that sense of consensus being among the elite pursuant to a single party under the leadership of a single individual, it is frightening, the society is not going to cope. A complex country like Nigeria – multi-religious, multi-ethnic, in essence multi-national and very diverse, will not cope with the strain and stress imposed upon it by this kind of capricious dismantling of democratic governance, in a disguise of disrupting the multi-party rule. In essence all hands must be on deck by Labour centers, civic platforms, legal practitioners, political activists to ensure the survival of democracy by the survival of the multi-party system. That is what is going to work for a federal state like Nigeria and not an existence of a single party infrastructure that will manacle human liberties and muscle civil space.
Beyond issuing advisories, what else would you propose that intellectuals do to salvage the nation and continent? Do you think they should occupy political positions?
Intellectuals don’t really always have to advise in terms of government and politics. The question is, are they really Intellectuals or Technocrats? You know there are technocrats who are out there as private individuals that lend support to the government of the day, either directly or indirectly, provide briefing notes and project reports and so on. But a proper intellectual husbands his or her space jealously, they guide that space jealously because Intellectual is disruptive. By nature an intellectual doesn’t acquiesce, they’re iconoclasts, you need to be transgressive, bold and compelling. We need these not just in government but more on the outside essentially. If you find people in government who can do it and survive, well done to them. But essentially, an intellectual is not just a critic, he or she is an innovator of the mind, somebody who guides society on the part of recovery, who calls out evil the way he or she sees it, someone who speaks truth to power, whose learning and the bearing of his thought are clearly manifest in the passion with which he or she speaks, the thoughts he or she evokes and the courage with which these things are delivered. Those in power, what they do is to have their own system people who watch intellectuals, who read them, who study them, who take from them even when they don’t want to concede that they’re taking from them, who therefore define governance, or governance models or governance methods by these intellectuals. Intellectuals could become activists, not just talking, they act, they carry placards to demonstrate, they hold the ban of freedom to push back on anything they see the government doing that is not in the interest of the people.
The UK parliament has this system of shadow cabinets. This is basically where the opposition leader appoints shadow ministers and senior spokespeople to mirror the cabinet in the government. Each shadow minister is paired with a real ministry and their job is to question, challenge, scrutinize, criticize where necessary, the policies of the main minister. Do you think this is a more effective way to engage in opposition, while the opposition presents itself as an alternative to the government in power?
You find that in the parliamentary system of government, in the presidential system you don’t usually have that, but it’s something that can work. I tried that in 1999 as a Secretary for Alliance for Democracy. We had a change of guard, we had a new Chairman, elected by the party with me still as National Secretary, I was the founding National Secretary and about 3 or 4 Chairmen worked through my tenure. One of the Chairmen who was elected sat down with me and I said let us give Obasanjo’s PDP a run for their money. Let us have spokespersons, not shadow ministers, but spokespersons on various sectors, spokespersons for the party on economy, finance, governance, democracy, environment, foreign policy. This means if you see the program of the government in any of these sectors, the duty of the spokesperson is to study, scrutinize and propose a counter-policy. This is the way we think it should be done and when our party takes power, this is the way we’re going to govern. So, I think it will work, it’s not like a classic shadow government or shadow cabinet but something near enough, so that every sector, every segment, every sphere of life will have a spokesperson that will supervise it.
Recently, you had suggested that in the appointment of an INEC Chairman, the President should recuse himself and cede the power to make the appointment. Wouldn’t you think that if the President recuses himself, some other person he may charge with that responsibility could still set out for self-serving interests? What would your exact recommendations be on this?
I was being idealistic and I said this in that interview, that I know no president, not this president particularly, will recuse himself. Maybe Yar’Adua could have recused himself, maybe Jonathan could have recused himself, because Jonathan said “I didn’t know Prof. Attahiru Jega, he was recommended to me as a brilliant Professor of Political Science and could manage those situations very well and I appointed him without knowing him”. Like I also said in the interview, some Presidents will like to know or be acquainted with the person who is going to be the INEC Chairman, particularly President Bola Tinubu as a President will like to know who the INEC Chairman is, but If I were to be him, I’ll rise to this moral occasion and say I’ll cede this power not just to anybody but the parliament or maybe to the judiciary but I don’t know the legal implications, it may require act of parliament, it may require a new amendment to the constitution, because it’s already constitutionalized that the President will appoint INEC Chairman and the process is detailed. The President can decide to act for the sake of reliable election, acceptable election, transparent and credible election, and say I will not appoint the INEC Chairman, and therefore I raise an executive bill to the National Assembly to amend that section giving me the power to do so and give the power to do so to the parliament, judiciary or an independent agency made up of members of the political parties in addition to about 2 or 3 Justices, probably retired, to come together and have a pool of people to look at and then verify them, for neutrality, objectivity, intellectual and moral strength before they can take that position. That’s expecting too much from a government of this nature that is undermining democracy every day, a government that wants to attain and confiscate power in 2027 by all means possible, so they’ll like to have an INEC Chairman that is compliant, maybe more compliant than the current one who will do their bidding. The duty of civil societies and position of political parties and Labour is to watch for whoever is going to come there as a nominee and scrutinize the credentials and identity of that person and then try to ensure that INEC is reasonably positioned to do the job selflessly, objectively and transparently.
It’s obvious we need a paradigm shift in Africa’s government, leadership system and democracy. If you were to design a standard or model for governance and to rebuild political legitimacy in Nigeria and Africa, what will it be?
It is foundational, this question is a foundational question. Liberal democracy has not only suffered a setback in Nigeria and Africa but has run its muffled course, it virtually have failed miserably, after almost 20 to 30 years reign. Liberal democracy was advertised as almost a ‘cure all’ to African crisis of development and crisis of democracy. Liberal democracy came to cure this and say we now have the system of a representative government in a multi-party framework where there’s a very strong parliament, heavily independent judiciary, vibrant civil society and a very credible media. That hasn’t worked out well for 30 years. Currently there’s a new wave of thought in Africa called de-colonial praxis, which means going back to African traditional knowledge formation system to say colonialism came with these claims of enlightenment and the enlightenment is based on what can be described as colonial modernity, which implies that we were barbaric people when they came, they came to give us clothes to wear, health, education and a tongue to speak, which also implies that we should accept anything they give us, without questioning that mode of epistemologies. How do you form knowledge by what you receive from the people who came to colonize you? Why don’t you go back to the ancient method in which our knowledge systems were formed and then try to drag them into the contemporary stage? That means you can question the very presence of liberal democracy in Africa, find a system that is more Afro-centric or African centered. In 1989, Obasanjo came with Constitution for National Integration and Development, when he formulated the one party state but not the current one-party state that is criticized now, but the one party state that is inclusive like the Chinese communist party model. We need to find a method, it may not just be one party state, but a system that owes more to African logic of civilizational evolution, rather than an imposed western method. The prime problems of western liberal democracy is conflicting legitimacy and legality. Like I said in my last interview, legality means that the elections held, President Bola Tinubu scored 20% of about 93 million people registered to vote with INEC – in essence he has no mandate, but then okay there was an election, more than few people turned out to vote, it was counted and proclaimed and the court ratified him, so it’s legal, but illegitimate in terms of not performing to the expectations of the people. For illiberal democracy, once elections have held, government sworn in, people are coming and going, elections every four years, democracy is assumed to be thriving. What will work will be an African centered method of democratic governance, leveraging on the creative thought of African practitioners in governance, with our scholars, our intellectuals and those in power to begin to think that most of these issues are not settled.