On October 2nd, an online conversation was conducted by the Program of African Studies of Northwestern University between Professor Chris Abani and Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka.1 It was the resumption of a conversation between the two writers and scholars at the New York Public Library in November 2019. In response...
In this talk and related activities, I hope to inspire others to take up one of the greatest challenges of our era: narrowing the governance gap which is at the root of many of Africa’s development and security dilemmas. In view of the emergence of many fragile and failed states,...
In May 1991 the allied armies of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) and the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF) overthrew the 27-year military regime (Dergue) in Ethiopia. During the succeeding 27 years, the EPRDF-dominated government attracted one of the highest per capita levels of external aid in the...
Plenary Address to the African Economic Conference of the African Development Bank and the Economic Commission for Africa Addis Ababa, December 4-6, 2017
This is the text of a public address at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs delivered soon after the inauguration of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic. It identified several priorities after fifteen and a half years of military government. The country’s eroded legislative, judicial, and other state institutions needed to be rebuilt...
This revised version of a paper presented at a conference at M.I.T. on State, Conflict, and Democracy in 1997 pulled together key dimensions of a Nigeria that had drifted far from constitutional and democratic governance. State and society had become increasingly criminalized; the educational system and other social sectors were...
This paper was written at the midway point in the governing of Nigeria by a paradoxical individual, Ibrahim Babangida. It should provoke further studies of his 8-year rule, 1985-1993, that seemed transformative during much of this period but ended in disarray and disappointment. The ideological orientation of the Nigerian economy;...