The public intellectual as a polymath: A review essay

April 11, 2017 11:55 am

The enterprise of intellectual leadership in Nigeria and much of the African continent has been much casualised by the pursuit of subsistence. In many of our universities where the idea of ideas should be held sacrosanct, this unique vocation is subverted by a preoccupation with various forms of quid pro quo. Every so often, however, something happens to remind us of what a better world we could have if those who should be committed to the pursuit of ideas in Nigeria were to take that vocation a little more seriously. Professor Anya Oko Anya is one such person and this publication of his selected papers is one of such occasions that should remind us that there is beauty and brilliance; possibility and transcendence in the pursuit of ideas.

This publication takes place 15 years after Professor Anya retired from the university system in which he worked for 29 years as a professor and administrator and in all for 37 years as a teacher. It occurs in his 52nd year of the pursuit of ideas and coincides with his attainment of the earthly landmark of four scores, long after Professor Anya had cemented his credentials as the gold standard of public intellectuals within Nigeria and beyond. After all, he is a winner of the Nigerian National Merit Award (NNMA), perhaps the only prize in Nigeria that is not handed out by Federal Character.

Of course, being an intellectual is not necessarily a nice thing and being thought of as a public one is not universally seen as a virtue. The line “[h]e made love to me like an intellectual” from Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting was not intended as an endearment nor did it mean to flatter the intellectual. AC Grayling reminds us that “that the word ‘intellectual’ made despisers of the term reach for their guns; the term ‘public intellectual’ assuredly makes them reach for a bomb. To critics, the term connotes the cheap and easy option of pontification, of commentary without responsibility, rather like the luxury enjoyed by a political party in opposition—the luxury of having to move nothing but your lips.” Russell Jacoby declaims the public intellectual as a category with “big brains; small impact”.

Big Brains, Big Impact

Professor Anya can hardly be convicted of any of these charges. On the romantic front, he is a Proud Lover – as he makes clear in these volumes – to Mrs. Iyang Anya, a lady to whom he has been married for over half a century and has a doting brood to prove it. He did indeed decline the job of Commissioner to Ukpabi Asika in the old East-Central State because he was “too young to learn how to sell beer or cement.” When he declined the Vice-Chancellorship of the University of Jos in succession to the less-than-peaceful tenure of Professor Onuaguluchi, it was because he “wasn’t interested in having (Onuaguluchi’s) enemies assigned” to him in advance. And, of course, he opted out of being appointed Minister in President Shagari’s second Cabinet in 1983 when he discovered that the process of Parliamentary confirmation for the role would involve bribery.

Yet, for a person whose academic qualifications, including his doctoral work at Cambridge University, were in biology and parasitology, Professor Anya, has ventured into building financial services institutions, pioneering tertiary institutions of learning, being high adviser to successive leaders and one of the stabilisers of Nigeria in times of national crises. He is also the founding Director-General of the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG). Professor Anya sure has lips and brains but, even more, those pale into insignificance in the full glare of his track record. As for the charge of big brains, he must, on the evidence of these volumes, plead guilty and stand convicted but, far from small, however, his impact has been colossal and nearly every page in these volumes is an exhibit in support of this.

Despite the breadth of these volumes across intellectual space and time, there is an astonishing coherence to the thread of thought they enunciate and a consistency to their thesis. Much of Professor Anya’s preoccupation has been with optimizing the possibilities of the African generally, especially in and of Nigeria. In pursuit of this preoccupation, he offers an acuity of diagnosis complemented by articulate solutions at different levels and to different scales of time, space and circumstance.

Five themes recur in and define these volumes: leadership, values, human capital development, education, and science, engineering and technology (SET). The central diagnostic proposition in these volumes is that Nigeria (and indeed Africa) is defined by three failures: “the lack of development, the failure of leadership, and the failure of efforts at national integration.” Far from the present rentier economy preoccupied with sharing captured revenues from natural resources, he argues, the pathways out of Nigeria’s recurring crises lie in innovation and sustainable development of human capital and skills that prioritise investments in education generally and, in particular, SET. In one sentence, the future of Nigeria lies in reinventing a moral ecology for coexistence built on a knowledge economy. This may sound rather obvious but our perennial struggles with achieving minimal take off for these purposes suggests that it is not.

With remarkable prescience, Professor Anya argued 22 years ago that “one of the central failures of Nigerian leadership (is) our impatience with ideas and the rigorous intellectual analysis of problems along with our refusal to admit that the quality of thought and the (depth) of sustained thought and reflection within a leadership is a vital measure of that leadership’s ability…. to achieve its goals.” Emphasising the virtue of both leadership competence and example, he insists that “you cannot teach those you lead beyond your own personal competence and experience.” Turning to responsibility for the Nigerian condition, he is gentle in tone yet uncompressing in his position: “two most consistent causes of economic failures … have been civil wars and military governments, just as excessive government spending on consumption has ultimately undermined economic growth” Despite the underlying leadership failure, “Nigerians love their country and have confidence in her future”, but “the promise of Nigeria remains unfulfilled because there are no Nigerians to build Nigeria.” These are not just throwaway lines or applause-lines of a polemicist. On the contrary, they book-end close argumentation supported with rigorous research.

In the end, he points out, “natural resources do not confer necessarily, any long term and/or intrinsic advantage in terms of the opportunities for development. Rather, the knowledge base and the skills of the population – the human capital – are what confers the competitive advantage in the critical phase of development.” Economies can therefore be classified on this basis as factor-driven (low income); investment-driven (middle income) or innovation-driven (high income). Over two decades ago, Professor Anya predicted the current boom in ICTs. Human capital, he makes clear, “is the most critical ingredient for economic development in the new century.” To build this up, “education, science and technology hold the key and the universities remain the only gateway known to man for the transmission of knowledge and skills that transform and rebuild economies and societies.” To address this, he makes a convincing case for a new partnership between universities, innovation and the private sector.

Bridging Aspirations; Correcting Deficits

Bridging the gap between the aspiration of unity and our deficits of co-existence, he argues, should be the business of a knowledge economy. Volume 1 is devoted to an analysis of the aspiration. Volume two addresses the goals, values and mechanics of realizing the knowledge economy. Navigating the intersections between both themes with skill and nuance, he creates a narrative that is both grounded in comparative philosophy and analytically tailored to the Nigerian context and temperament. However, building a knowledge economy requires firm ethical foundations. Thus, Professor Anya cautions: “integrity is the basis of scholarship. We cannot rebuild the human capital infrastructure …. Unless we tackle head-on the moral issues of examination malpractices, cultism and plagiarism.” In the wider society, he also calls attention to the need to address corruption. In the end, “integrity is so fundamental because trust and confidence in the leader is basic to all aspects of the leader’s relationship because it is the basis of credibility.” Leaders in intellectual and public life, he points out, must be able to replace themselves and mentor successors.

These two volumes collect Professor Anya’s thoughts and papers spanning four and a half decades arranged in 44 chapters. Volume One comprises 27 Chapters. Volume Two contains 17 Chapters. All but two are scientific papers. Two of the 44 chapters are profound interviews granted to journals of record. The collection showcases an intrepid ideas merchant who has addressed the most rarefied halls of knowledge within and beyond Africa. Also contained in these volumes are convocation lectures to universities in every geo-political zone of Nigeria, ideas shared with old students associations of both universities and leading secondary schools, addresses to Governors and the rulers of Nigeria and ruminations with trade and vocational groups.

On the whole, his discursive method is accessible. His tone is persuasive without being unduly prescriptive. He seems almost allergic to the obligatory intellectual bombast, choosing instead to take the reader on a mutually delightful journey of intellectual and sometimes biographical discovery. His writing unfolds with the patience of a committed, life-long teacher. A rich personal archive of experience provides a regular supply of anecdotes that garnish the text with grounded wit and reality. This book is written with the foresight and vision of a man whom Providence endowed with so much foresight, they named him vision squared: in Igbo language from which his name comes, “Anya” is the noun for vision and foresight.

Given the versatility of Professor Anya and reach of these volumes, the editors might usefully have considered beginning each volume with an introduction that should provide a road map through the materials, explaining the structure and organization, highlighting the central ideas and explaining any linkages between them. The vast array of sources cited in both volumes could have been organized as a (rich) bibliography for budding researchers and thinkers if they had been systematized as such by the editors. A list of the various tables in the text would have helped researchers quickly access some of the information boiled down as graphics in different parts of the two volumes. Similarly, editorial presentation would have been greatly assisted by a glossary, especially of abbreviations and acronyms. For instance, lots of younger academics could mistake “DMS” for a new bus-stop in Lagos (it is a reference to Mbaya Kankwenda’s “Development Merchant System”). A few typographical slippages provide evidence of significant pressure of production schedules. An Editors’ preface dated December 2016 suggests that this is a 2017 publication, not 2016. On the whole, the errors that exist are of the type that only committed Anoraks would notice. They do not, therefore, mar an outstanding production. Hopefully, a re-issue or subsequent print-run should be able to address most of these.

The Subliminal Messaging of a Closet Feminist

These all-too-human shortcomings, in any case, pale in comparison to the audacity of these volumes. They showcase a mind of tremendous subtlety, an authority of incredible depth and an expert of peerless breadth of knowledge. They travers disciplines as far afield as natural and biological sciences, economic history and political economy, development studies, ICTs, theories and philosophies of knowledge, public administration, strategic studies, hermeneutics, faith and theology, co-existence studies, as well as cultural history and ethnography of Nigeria. Professor Anya easily traverses these varied fields with the wondrous ease and facility of knowledge, nuance, and inter-dependence of an extraordinarily confident polymath.

In addition to their evident strengths, these volumes are rich in subliminal messaging. In showcasing the various locations in which many of the papers contained in these volumes were initially delivered, they portray a man at home in every part of Nigeria and in every culture of the world. When he says that “there are things an Anya cannot do”, he affirms a personal commitment to the value of integrity, to which these volumes devote considerable attention. Similarly, after a lifetime of teaching and producing university administrators, innovative researchers, leaders of multinationals, and high level public officers, it is hardly surprising that the three editors come from Professor Anya’s rich and steady stable of mentees. Between them, the editors combine qualifications in history and international relations; experimental psychology; and entrepreneurship respectively. They deserve considerable credit for curating these papers and bringing this momentous publication to fruition.

As with most significant things, the most important point in these volumes is made subliminally. For all his erudition and learning, the high point of the book is arguably the lesson he learnt first from his mother’s kitchen and then from his loving wife: “the best economist is the housewife because all those fine principles and jargons in economics are what she practices.” It should not be surprising that Professor Anya Oko Anya, the polymath son of a disinherited widow whose path to greatness was paved by successive scholarships ended up a feminist!

I say this should not be surprising because the path of the public intellectual is, after all, the path of activism for such freedoms as we routinely deny to the disinherited widow or the dignity that we are unwilling to afford to the housewife.

So, to return to where we began, not everyone is necessarily as damning of the public intellectual as A.C. Grayling. Alan Lightman, himself an accomplished public intellectual, describes the species as “the complete person, or the person who embodies all dimensions of human potential and actuality.” In his 1993 Reith Lectures, “Representations of the Intellectual”, Edward Said thought the public intellectual had the role to “advance freedom and knowledge,” at once part of society but outside it and its institutions; with a capacity to balance both private and public, reaching out to the widest possible publics and with a capacity to disturb the status quo.

In answer to his own question “Who is a Public Intellectual?” in the New York Times in June 2008, Barry Gewen responds that s/he is “someone deeply committed to the life of the mind and to its impact on the society at large.” AC Grayling suggests that “[t]here is no bar to anyone’s being a public intellectual other than having nothing to say. One thing this implies is that public intellectuals are, generally speaking, a self-selected group; they are those who step voluntarily forward, as enfranchised citizens of ancient Athens once did in the agora, to make a point.”

But, Alan Lightman says of the public intellectual that s/he is “often trained in a particular discipline, such as linguistics, biology, history, economics, literary criticism, and who is on the faculty of a college or university. When such a person decides to write and speak to a larger audience than their professional colleagues, he or she becomes a “public intellectual.” He distinguishes between three possible hierarchies or classes of public intellectual:

Level I public intellectual speaks and writes for the public exclusively about his or her discipline or field of expertise;
Level II public intellectual speaks and writes about his or her discipline “and how it relates to the social, cultural, and political world around it.”

Lightman recognizes what he calls “[t]he Level III” public intellectual membership of which is “[b]y invitation only”. This category of public intellectual is “a symbol of gentle rationality and human nobility”, and:

‘’….has become elevated to a symbol, a person that stands for something far larger than the discipline from which he or she originated. A Level III intellectual is asked to write and speak about a large range of public issues, not necessarily directly connected to their original field of expertise at all. After he became famous in 1919, Einstein was asked to give public addresses on religion, education, ethics, philosophy, and world politics.”

When a person enters the world of the Level III public intellectual, therefore, s/he “become(s) in a sense, public property because he represents something large to the public … he is an idea himself, a human striving. He has enormous power to influence and change, and he must wield that power with respect.” The Level III public intellectual in this sense is both activist and intellectual. Thus, in his mammoth 2016 biography of perhaps the greatest contemporary public intellectual, Jürgen Habermas, Stefan Müller-Doohm at University of Oldenburg’s Research Centre for the Sociology of Intellectuals, reminds us that the vocation of the public intellectual entails leaving “the protective space of academia in order to assume the role of a participant in controversial debates and, in this way… to influence the national mentality.”

Through these Volumes, Professor Anya is guaranteed to influence Nigeria’s national mentality for a long time. In them, he demonstrates why and how he is a defining Level III public intellectual of his and every other Nigerian generation. He bequeaths an intellectual legacy with few peers in these parts. As such, they assure that as he goes ever so gently into life’s departure lounge, his immortality is guaranteed. Being always with and around us in these volumes, he also challenges the country and successor generations to either implement these ideas or invent more competitive or better ideas. He does not just hope that Nigeria (and Africa) can be better; he challenges us to be better.

As with all ideas in the public domain, the ultimate verdict will be rendered at the end of public contestation. With characteristic foresight, Professor Anya gets in his verdict ahead of the rest, reminding us that: “[N]o Nigerian in public life can be non-controversial for to take a position in Nigeria… is to stir up controversy since there is no existing national ethos or code of common values.” Most people who are able to consume these two volumes would probably discover by the end that any points that merit controversy probably cannot compete in significance with those that compel consensus.