Ghana welcomed survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre Viola Ford Fletcher who is 107 years old and her brother Hughes Van Ellis, 100 years old.
The two are the last known living survivors of the 1921 racist massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
This is the first time they step on African soil for a tour in Ghana. The visit is part of a “homecoming” campaign organized by the social media platform Our Black Truth.
“I think this one of the biggest historic African diasporas that has come back to us. When the president made the announcement on Beyond the Return, 2018 in DC and celebrating the Beyond the Return in 2019, we never thought that one of our siblings who was taken away generation from that, 107 years old and have the passion and interest to visit Ghana. Not only by herself but also bringing along the younger brother along who is 100 years old,” Nadia Adongo Musah, deputy director of Diaspora Office, Office of the President said.
On May 31, 1921, a group of Black men went to the Tulsa courthouse to defend a young African American man accused of assaulting a white woman. They found themselves facing a mob of hundreds of furious white people.
Tensions spiked and shots were fired, and the African Americans retreated to their neighborhood, Greenwood.
The next day, at dawn, white men looted and burned the neighborhood, at the time so prosperous it was called Black Wall Street.
In 2001, a commission created to study the tragedy concluded that Tulsa authorities themselves had armed some of the white rioters.
Historians say that as many as 300 African American residents lost their lives, and nearly 10,000 people were left homeless in the 1921 incident that drew the white against the black.
This final piece marks Zeleza’s end of term as Vice Chancellor of United States International University in Kenya.
PART A
THE INTERVIEW
(Unedited Transcript)
What other roles have you played in promoting African higher education that you’re proud of?
I am most proud of four things. First, my scholarship on higher education, which I believe has had some influence. My interest in higher education started when I was at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, as part of my burgeoning interest in intellectual history—the history of ideas and of knowledge producing institutions. This interest was sparked and sharpened by my efforts to understand the epistemic dynamics and discourses of African studies when I became center director.
The first part of my foray into intellectual history culminated in my participation in a huge project, as Associate Editor of the six-volume encyclopedia, New Dictionary of the History of Ideas published in New York in 2005, in which we looked at the evolution of major ideas and intellectual trends and their different iterations around the world. The institutional dimension received considerable boost from a conference the center organized jointly with CODESRIA in April, 2002 on “African Universities in the Twenty-First Century.” The conference was held simultaneously at UIUC and in Dakar, and the two sites were connected by video for about three hours a day, which was quite a novelty in those pre-Zoom days.
The result was a two volume collection that Adebayo Olukoshi, CODESRIA’s Executive Secretary, and I co-edited, African Universities in the 21st Century. Volume 1: Liberalization and Internationalization, and Volume 2: Knowledge and Society. In 2015, I had the privilege of being contracted to produce the framing paper for the 1st African Higher Education Summit held in Dakar, March 10-12, as well as the draft of the Summit Declaration and Action Plan. My knowledge of the state of African higher education was an asset when I became Vice Chancellor.
Second, I’m proud of the Carnegie African Diaspora Program. It has been gratifying to see one of my research projects turn into a transformative program. To date, CADFP has funded 465 fellowships hosted by more than 150 universities in nine African countries. Altogether, the program has received 1,100 project requests from 206 accredited African universities. Data shows that the program has helped to build the capacities of African higher education institutions by increasing curriculum offerings, graduate programming, and research production. Surveys completed show that the average fellowship contributed two to three courses to host institutions. After participating in the CADFP, alumni continued to co-develop curricula with African institutions, collaborate in research and joint applications for funding. Many inter-institutional partnerships have also been set up between the home and host institutions of the fellows.
Third, I am proud of my membership of various higher education boards, on which I try to make contributions. Besides CADFP whose Advisory Council I chair, I currently serve on the Administrative Board of the International Association of Universities (IAU) as one of two representatives for Africa; the Advisory Board of the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP); I chair the Board of Trustees of the Kenya Education Network (KENET); and I am a member of the University of Ghana Council.
The IAU represents and serves the full spectrum of higher education institutions and their associations and works to enhance the higher education community’s role and actions in advancing societies worldwide. Its hub of resources include the World Higher Education Database, the most comprehensive database on higher education, reference publications including a journal, an international handbook of universities, a global survey of Internationalization, a magazine, and specialized reports.
The AAP was launched in 2016 as a consortium of Michigan State University and nine African universities in Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Malawi, South Africa, Botswana, Nigeria, and Senegal. It provides funding for research some of which targets women and early career scholars, as well as strategic funding for institutional transformation.
KENET promotes the use of ICT in teaching, learning and research in higher education institutions in Kenya and interconnects universities, tertiary and research institutions, facilitates electronic communication in member institutions, and promotes the sharing of learning and teaching resources. The University of Ghana, one of Africa’s premier universities, allows for one Vice Chancellor from an African university to sit on its Council.
Finally, I’m proud of my fundraising efforts especially for student scholarships. Most recently, in July 2020, USIU-Africa signed a $63.2 million partnership with the Mastercard Foundation for 1,000 talented, yet economically disadvantaged young people at our university to receive quality education and leadership development over the next 10 years. It targets 70 percent young women, 25 percent displaced youth, and 10 percent young people living with disabilities. When I imagine the transformative future that awaits these young people, for themselves, their families and communities, and for the continent, I am filled with a deep sense of gratitude that I made a small contribution to that future.
You have published extensively, how would you characterize the scope of your work?
As evident from what we have discussed thus far my scholarship, like anyone’s scholarship, has been framed by the itineraries of my historical geography, that is, the changing locations in time and space for me as a person and a professional. Clearly, the places and institutions and temporal contexts of each have framed the broad contours and shifts in my academic work. As I know from my studies in intellectual history, there are four crucial dynamics of knowledge production: first, intellectual, which refers to the prevailing paradigms in one’s field, space and time; second, ideological, in terms of the dominant ideologies; third, institutional, as far as the nature of institutions one is affiliated with is concerned; and finally, individual, one’s social biography with reference to gender, race, nationality, class, religion, etc.
Looking back, I think there are four key academic and social contexts that have shaped my scholarly work. First, is the fact that I was educated in three countries on three continents in different fields—Malawi where I received my undergraduate education majoring in English and history; the United Kingdom where I studied for my masters degree in history and international relations; and Canada where I concentrated on economic history. I have worked in five countries: two in Africa—Malawi and Kenya; two in North America—Canada and the United States; and one in the Caribbean—Jamaica.
Second, I’ve worked in a diversity of institutions in terms of their relative size, research intensity, in both public and private, secular and religious affiliated. Also important is the fact that I’ve had appointments in disciplinary and interdisciplinary units. When I started my academic career at the University of the West Indies I was simply a historian with an appointment in the history department. It was the same at Kenyatta University. It was at Trent that I began to straddle more than one unit. While my appointment remained in the history department, I also taught in the department of development studies, an interdisciplinary unit. When I relocated to the United States all my appointments were joint.
At UIUC, I was Professor of History and African Studies; at Penn State Professor of African and African American Studies and History; at UIC Professor of African American Studies and History; at LMU Professor of African American Studies and History; at Quinnipiac University I returned to being Professor of History; and at USIU-Africa I was appointed Professor of the Humanities and Social Sciences, perhaps because there’s no department of history or African studies! My transnational appointments have similarly been interdisciplinary. I was appointed Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town in 2006 and affiliated with the department of history, the African Gender Institute, and the Center for African Studies. In 2019 I was appointed Honorary Professor, Chair for Critical Studies Higher Education Transformation at Nelson Mandela University.
Third, my career has spanned the immediate post-colonial era, the Cold War era, and the first two decades of the 21st century. Each of these periods had its dominant political economies, ecologies and discourses; they were conjunctures that conditioned the parameters of research and the rhythms of my intellectual life. Finally, it is clear my academic trajectories emerged out of the changing intellectual influences, ideological proclivities, institutional locations, and individual circumstances including aging! There were of course some enduring key drivers throughout, most critically an abiding curiosity and a deep sense of ignorance that generated lasting voracious reading habits. My scholarship has also been propelled by enduring passion for social justice and transformation.
These, I believe, are contexts that explain my main intellectual preoccupations since the 1970s. If I were to summarize them, eight thematic areas would stand out. Altogether, I have published more than 300 journal articles, book chapters, reviews, short stories and online essays, and authored or edited 28 books, several of which have won international awards. I have presented nearly 250 keynote addresses, papers, and public lectures at leading universities and international conferences in 32 countries. I have also served on the editorial boards of more than two dozen journals and book series, and currently serve as Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online in African Studies.
The first thematic area is literature. As noted earlier, I started creative writing as an undergraduate student. I have published two collections of short stories and a novel. Several of my short stories have appeared in literary magazines and collections of African and African Canadian short stories. My interest in literature later extended to literary criticism in which I have published several essays including some on the works of specific writers such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Nurrudin Farah, Ben Okri, Buchi Emecheta, Mariama Ba, and Yvonne Vera, to mention a few, as well literary critics such as Edward Said. My interest in literature later morphed into cultural studies. An example includes a co-edited book, Leisure in Urban Africa, in addition to several articles.
The second area for which I became known is economic history, especially for the book A Modern Economic History of Africa, Vol. I: The Nineteenth Century that in 1994 won the Noma Award.. I am still working on Volume II on the twentieth century! Out of this grew my work in development studies in which I have published numerous essays and three books, Sacred Spaces and Public Quarrels: African Cultural and Economic Landscapes; Rethinking Africa’s Globalization, Volume1: The Intellectual Challenges, and Africa’s Resurgence: Domestic, Global and Diaspora Transformations.
The third area is gender studies, which was inspired by my fascination with the matrilineal cultural underpinnings of the communities my parents hailed from and the patriarchal realities of the colonial and postcolonial society I grew up in. In fact, my first published academic book was on Women in the Kenyan Economy and Labor Movement, and later I co-wrote a book on Women in African Studies Scholarly Publishing. In addition, I wrote a series of essays on gender. Perhaps one of the most well is “Gender Biases in African Historiography,” in a landmark volume published by CODESRIA, Engendering the Social Sciences in Africa. In all my scholarly work I try to integrate a gendered analysis. Perhaps because of this work in 2003 I was invited to join a nine-member Gender Advisory Group, as one of two men, formed by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, to produce a report on the implementation of gender reforms and mainstreaming agreed at the 1995 UN Women’s Conference held in Beijing. Out of the project came Gender Equality: Striving for Justice in an Unequal World, which was launched at the UN headquarters in 2005.
Fourth, I became quite prolific in publications on intellectual history. Besides numerous essays, I have published six books dealing with various aspects of the history of ideas, universities, and the development of the disciplines and interdisciplinary fields and the construction of knowledges on Africa. My first book in this endeavor was Manufacturing African Studies and Crises which received the Special Commendation of the Noma Award in 1998. This was followed by 2 volumes of African Universities in the 21st Century. In 2016, I published The Transformation of Global Higher Education, 1945-2015, the first book I’m aware of by a single scholar looking at the development of higher education on every continent over 70 years after World War II. On a more global level, I mentioned earlier that I served as one of the associate editors of the six-volume New Dictionary of the History of Ideas.
The fifth area of my scholarship informed by my political activism is human rights studies. Again, in addition to several essays, I’ve published several books dealing with human rights directly and related issues of conflicts. This includes the co-edited collection, Human Rights, the Rule of Law and Development in Africa, and two connected volumes, The Roots of African Conflicts and The Resolution of African Conflicts.
The sixth area that has fascinated me focuses on trying to understand African modernities and transformation due to globalization, and most recently the rise of the Fourth Industrial Revolution as well as the unfolding impact of COVID-19 on the digitilization of various spheres of economic and social life. My first book length publication in this field was, In Search of Modernity: Science and Technology in Africa. Two years ago I made a plenary presentation at the inaugural conference of Universities South Africa on African Universities and the Fourth Industrial Revolution which is included in my recently published and wide ranging essay collection, Africa and the Disruptions of the Twenty-First Century. Last December, 2020 I co-authored a paper that I mentioned earlier on “Enhancing the Digital Transformation of African Universities: COVID-19 as Accelerator” that will be published in the Journal of African Higher Education.
The seventh area that I’ve focused my scholarly work on is diaspora studies. I discussed earlier the personal, family, and social contexts that drove me to this exciting field. In preparation for and during my global diaspora project I wrote a series of theoretical essays on the diaspora paradigm, such as “Rewriting the African Diaspora: Beyond the Black Atlantic,” “Africa and Its Diasporas: Remembering South America,” “Reconceptualizing African Diasporas: Notes from an Historian,” “Dancing to the Beat of the Diaspora: Musical Exchanges between Africa and its Diasporas,” and “African Diasporas: Towards a Global History,” which I gave as my presidential address at the ASA Annual Meeting in 2010. As noted earlier, my research travels resulted in the book, In Search of African Diasporas: Testimonies and Encounters. Prior to that I had published a book, Barack Obama and African Diasporas: Dialogues and Dissensions, which examined the meaning of the Obama candidacy and presidential victory for the Pan-African world. The comprehensive study from the research project is yet to be written.
Capping all this is, finally, the production of what I would call academic service work and public intellectual work. The first refers to such work as encyclopedias and school textbooks or adolescent texts, of which I’ve done about five. At the turn of the new century, I edited the Encyclopedia of Twentieth Century African History by Routledge. My public intellectual work consists of essays I write for public audiences and publish as blogs, newspaper articles, and essays in popular magazines. Some of my blogs have ended up being published in my essay collections. Since I returned to the continent in December 2015, Kenyan and Malawian newspapers have carried several of my commentaries and interviews on national and global events. Over the years University World News has published several of my essays on higher education. And more recently, I’ve discovered the world of podcasts!
I see these outlets as a critical part of my role as a public intellectual, to translate research and share ideas in the public realm; to participate in ongoing popular conversations outside the often convoluted and self-referential confines of the academy, with their incomprehensible and cultish discourses to disciplinary or theoretical outsiders.
PART B
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS BY TOYIN FALOLA
The Economy of Transnational Teaching and Publishing (9 & 10)
Teaching is a natural assignment where everyone is tasked with the responsibility of defeating their ignorance so that they could become valuable to themselves and their society. However, that is the concept of teaching in the most innocent and basic form. Teaching requires something more. It demands that teachers first be identified as incurably curious and must show insatiable interest in the things of the world to develop appropriate skills and methodologies to hand their knowledge to the succeeding generations. Nevertheless, the quality of teaching lies in the intellectual coverage of expansive educational fields that determine what one can give to people at a particular moment. Therefore, people who would be considered teachers must be versatile and programmatically eclectic as this would influence what and how they teach. In contemporary times, however, there is a need to understand the changing dynamics of knowledge production. Globalization has necessitated that people improve their understanding of the world around them, which continues to be expansive and complex because this is the prerequisite to expose learners to the diverse sociocultural identities of the world and, therefore, imbue them on ways to navigate the complex politics of the world.
Between Africa and the world is an umbilical cord facilitated by two different experiences– the phenomenon of slavery and enslavement and the expediency of migration. A careful observation of these two factors would reveal that they belong to the same origin. Irrespective of the flexibility of human relationships in recent times, it is not easy to talk about the history or prospect of transnational knowledge production and sharing without touching on the different histories that brought about the sociopolitical and sociocultural miscegenation of the current time. People are mixed despite their varying cultural and religious philosophies. The politics of association bring about the economy of teaching in a globalized world to reinforce the place of human identity and or complexity in sharing knowledge. In essence, human experiences are the accumulated materials that inform the nature of human knowledge. In it lies the information needed to structure their civilization that would protect their said identity and mark them as different from others, despite being in the galaxies of human identities. There are Africans in the Americas and European countries whose sociopolitical experiences have informed expanded sites or research, all of which become the background for improving one’s knowledge about self and the environment.
Undisputedly, Paul Zeleza is one of the most shining icons that transnational knowledge generation and production domain have produced recently. It is not principally ironic that his overseas and offshore experiences have increased his intellectual brilliance and enriched his knowledge about international politics. It is equally amazing that he has made extensive contributions in building a worthwhile image for the African diaspora in numerous ways. There is the paucity of information or knowledge of Africans by the external cultures and civilizations, and their knowledge gap about the said people have always been substituted with arrogant generalizations and many unfounded conclusions that have always demanded deconstruction from intelligent individuals who would come with a strong evidentiary foundation to counter different assumptions against Africans. We are aware that the West is steps ahead in their documentation of human experience, and they have always leveraged this to make newfangled projections about Africans.
Being well-bred in historical scholarship, Zeleza has been a committed member of the intellectual community who offer their knowledge to construct an encyclopedia of history for the people. This would serve different important purposes–the revaluation of African identity and the revitalization of their cultural traditions in contemporary times. Without knowing any more about a people, making unreal projections about them cannot be helped. Zeleza did not only teach in diaspora communities, his teaching also facilitated the rebirth of African identity. He has been an important voice in the topics of African identity in the diaspora, and this is observed in his participation and contribution to papers and writings that have anything to do with knowledge productions about Africa.
Precisely because there has been a misconception of the African people circulated unduly to external cultures and civilizations, there has been the desire for erudite scholars, who are familiar with the African epistemological terrain and who also consciously improve themselves as a commitment to advance human knowledge, to offer their perspective to the issues of identity and human relationships. While they uplift their continent of birth in the process of this self-discovery, they simultaneously improve their educational competence needed in different areas of human existence.
The age-long transnational teaching experience propelled Zeleza into writing a book that serves as the material for developing a course of study. For example, the Carnegie African Diaspora Program has appropriated one of his research projects as the bedrock of creating a transformative program. Due to the existence of this program, numerous scholars have been funded by the same group, each of them expected to expand the horizon of international knowledge productions. In this regard, Zeleza has comfortably added to the school of academics in the art of teaching and researching. He has been introduced to a mélange of opportunities to represent Africa by coordinating many of the joint knowledge generation and production.
Serving as an administrative board member in the International Association of Universities (IAU) means his services as an impressive academic have been noticed. He is equally serving on the Advisory Board of the Alliance for African Partnership (AAP) as a representative of the continent and as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Kenya Education Network (KENET). These are the results of having transnational teaching experience because his expertise and informed knowledge won him the opportunity to represent at these levels. Meanwhile, the essence of being a member or representing in these capacities is to draw from their academic experience and the knowledge gathered in the process of teaching, as this is very valuable in enhancing the progress of the people and the society generally. Teaching in America, Canada, and also Africa has given him the necessary foundation for diagnosing the educational problems facing the people and the corresponding ways they can be surmounted. The fruit of this is very outstanding.
One of the innovations that the exposure to diaspora knowledge systems and its generation brings is the introduction of ICT as a medium of academic development in modern time, and Zeleza is exploring this in relation to growth in African knowledge production. The benefits of transnational teaching are immense because apart from animating the values of the teachers involved in the exercise, it also opens a door of opportunity to various individuals. His impact in the international space has given several students in Africa access to funds and collaboration that would improve their situations and make them valuable to their immediate society. One such occasion was the award of $63.2 million by USIU-Africa, in partnership with the MasterCard Foundation, that would benefit exactly 1000 students, most of whom are females and socially disadvantaged. This is one important significance of continued dedication to the academic struggles on the home front and the international environment.
A teacher of such status and caliber belongs to the research community, digging ferociously deeply into their sociopolitical and socioeconomic affairs to educate the world about areas that need utmost intellectual and political attention to enhance collective advancement. The world is educated daily on why there should be expediency to extend help and concerns to people collectively considered disadvantaged. This is because they are not only important in the process of securing an environment habitable for all, but their lack of access to economic and political opportunities is also a threat to the well-being of others who have it.
The crucible of Paul Zeleza’s academic adventure is the accumulation of socio-educational and trans-Atlantic experiences that are acquired in the continuously changing world. He is unfixed, and this progressive mobility has informed his knowledge generation and provided the materials around which his academic brilliance hovers. Whereas being in the state of flux can be generally seen as psychologically disturbing because it keeps moving and changing the perception of the individual and makes them entirely unfixed, for people who exude that great level of human sagacity such as Zeleza, they usually make the best use of the experience to build something impressive. This is what describes Zeleza as a scholar and a progressive individual. In tasting and testing different cultural traditions and being exposed to multivariate ideas, he built a knowledge identity and systems that are constantly sought out today in human academic endeavors. We are driven to the wide range of research engagements that scholars have undertaken about transnational studies, and we are, therefore, educated about how cross-country trade and trans-Atlantic experience has changed the course of different people, including Africans who were victims of enslavement and races like India with a similar fate.
To arrive at the respectful state of knowledge production that Zeleza is known for in contemporary times requires more than being an intellectually informed individual; it demands that one is conscious about self-growth. Zeleza’s growth has been such an amazing one because he determined that he would be exceptional in his endeavor. He chose eclecticism from time immemorial, and while striving to make himself relevant in academic matters, his social history keeps bringing complex experiences into his adventure, and fortunately, he has satisfactorily brought everything under his control. He got his academic dexterity from tasting different cultural traditions and varying fields, recording success in them beyond what could be attained by ordinary individuals.
As an undergraduate, he majored in English and History, and it was exceptional that he became one of the most credible candidates to have graduated from his alma mater. After this, he went to the United Kingdom for a different course of study, which complemented and sharpened his undergraduate and formative education a little more. The study of History and International Studies prepared him for a bigger academic responsibility in the diaspora as he served not only as an instrument to bring about or facilitate stronger relationships between African countries and the international world, but he is also a deciding force on the production of knowledge for the people within his academic space. His Ph.D. in Canada was in the area of economic history, which assisted him to better understand the sidelined history of African people, especially before and during colonization and the eventual consequences.
The promiscuity of his academic engagement has facilitated a constantly evolving teaching and researching career that he developed as an individual and a scholar. He has worked as a dignified researcher in three continents—Africa, Europe, and America. Functioning as professor of History and African Studies at UIUC, Professor of African and African American Studies and History at Penn State University, Professor of African American Studies and History at LMU, and a figure of coordinate significance in very many other important schools and academic societies indicate that Zeleza is a man of diverse identities. The attainment of these feats is ascribed to his insatiable quest for knowledge.
Zeleza is a man who is not tired of breaking boundaries, and irrespective of how demanding a new pursuit seems, he always gives his commitment to the extent that he achieved something invaluable from his embarkation. He is not a rigid human, and he has always opened his arms to knowledge, challenging himself whenever he realized that there are grounds to cover. He would always bring out fresh perspective to even over-flogged or over-researched academic fields. On a certain occasion, he was drawn to consider a field he has not covered because a curious student innocently asked about the economic history of Africa before the ascension of Europeans. While he gave an unsatisfactory response to the question, he took the challenge and delved into the virgin academic territory, producing something worthwhile years later.
As the African world continues to change because of the consequences of colonial structures imposed by Europeans that still linger on in postcolonial time, the academic engagement of intellectuals also changes to accommodate the rhythms. After the various agitations of various state nationalists that birthed African independence in the 1960s, African countries immediately entered into an economic surplus that came as a relief and gave the impression of a beautiful future. However, the relief was short-lived and was immediately replaced by a cloud of uncertainties after the euphoria of feigned economic buoyance died a natural death. Succeeding decades are unveiling in their exposure to the accumulated misfortunes waiting to greet the Africa future earlier believed to be well-secured. Therefore, the unfolding events suggest that the consequences would not only be felt on the people’s economy, but it would also indefinitely spread to their knowledge generation and production. This is where the academic community understand that they have an important role to play in examining and evaluating African sociopolitical ecologies, so that appropriate philosophy and ideology would be constructed for the enhancement of collective success. People like Zeleza have touched this aspect in their concentration on diagnosing African problems.
All of these have been the context of his preoccupation for approximately fifty years, and results show in the complexion of his academic engagement and knowledge productions altogether. Zeleza has authored books, published journal articles, and contributed to book chapters. He has delivered many keynote addresses and contributed immensely to online and offline academic engagements within this relatively short period of his involvement and engagements. Perhaps his academic dexterity and knowledge diversity are products of his constantly evolving teaching experience; nonetheless, it is outstanding that the man whose academic background was found on history would grow up to challenge himself in different fields and make impressive additions and contributions to these areas of intellectual engagements. Of course, he is successful in his forage into economic history, and he remains a renowned egghead in international history and politics, including but not limited to African-American sociocultural and sociopolitical conditions and experiences in the past and contemporary time. However, he added another feather to his cap by venturing into literary engagement, which eventually morphed into cultural studies.
It would be comforting to know that Paul Zeleza did not refuse to cover gender topics in discursive engagement to represent the experiences of women who are confronted with the challenges of marginalization and suppression of their identity in a world that is affected by the complex politics of neoliberal economy. Meanwhile, the African society from where he was raised is usually identified as being essentially patriarchal, but despite this, he was able to interrogate the matrilineal cultural underpinnings associated with the same society. It, therefore, makes enough sense to consider the said society as a good scope of research that would enrich the academic culture of the international community, especially in areas of social structuration along patriarchal and matriarchal lines. African societies that are expressly patriarchal have social configurations that ensure that women have a reasonable level of influence in their configuration. Family members relate with their matrilineal background than they do to the other end. All these are key issues that inform Paul Zeleza’s research and also his academic publications.
Despite all of these involvements, he remains a committed activist who dedicates himself to the course of justice. By constantly giving his voice to the rampaging topic of rights abuses that have almost become synonymous with the African political system, Zeleza has also singled himself out as an outstanding individual and an instrument of social renegotiation. Like most scholars of his time and age, he understands that conflicts are inevitable in a fledging continent like Africa, as they are incubated by the various actions and inactions of colonial structures and the ascension of the elite class who are more vindictive than productive. They have seized the opportunity to amass common wealth at their rise into power in post-independence and without making sufficient efforts on the ways to set the people free from the impending economic doom to greet the life after colonialism. As such, conflicts are not avertible but the most important thing to do in this situation is to ensure that efforts are made to facilitate resolution in the case of erupting controversies. Zeleza has done this by leveraging his academic engagement and teaching experience, as a teacher and an administrator, to offer informed solutions to the countless challenges facing people in the society. We cannot pretend that Paul Zeleza is immensely valuable to Africa’s academic and political stewardship, for he has offered contributions that continue to speak volumes of his intellectual brilliance.
VIRTUAL “SUMMIT FOR DEMOCRACY” IN DECEMBER: Remember that in-person Summit for Democracy promised by President Joe Biden? The administration is making other arrangements. Expect it to be a virtual summit in December thanks to the Delta variant, reports Alex Ward.
JOIN GLOBAL TRANSLATIONS TODAY: Join Ryan Heath, Karen DeYoung and Carla Robbins for this week’sWorld Review hosted by the Chicago Council 11am ET / 10am CT. Register here.
Don’t expect any good news: Instead, expect the scientists to explain the harsh realities of the world’s “carbon budget” if it intends to stick to the Paris Climate Agreement (the previous report in 2013 led directly to the Paris agreement).
Why this report matters: The IPCC provides the intellectual fuel for global climate action. It enabled the original climate summit (Kyoto in 1997) to agree on the need to limit emissions, and in Paris in 2015, the world set a target to tackle the problem. This coming November, in Glasgow, countries are supposed to agree on how to hit the target of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees celsius.
THE DOOM AND GLOOM OF JOHN KERRY: The weather is “apocalyptic” and still “some key nations are just unwilling to do their part,’ Kerry told David Remnick, “that includes China, Russia, India, South Africa, Brazil.”
TREE PLANTING WON’T SAVE US: By now you’ve heard about the trend of big companies and countries declaring they’re committed to “net zero emissions,” most commonly by 2050. Less common is campaign groups labeling those announcements as “dangerous distractions.” That’s what Oxfam did this week, saying that current climate efforts “could force an 80 percent rise in global food prices and more hunger,” while failing to achieve their intended green outcomes.Collectively, to mitigate the rise in emissions, the world would need to plant new forests twice the size of Australia, and fossil fuel producers alone would need to create a second Amazon forest to get to net zero. Oxfam says emissions simply need to come down over the next decade — a bold plan for 2050 is too late.
REALITY CHECKS
China’s coal plan makes a mockery of its climate target: China says it wants to get to net zero but its coal production capacity is three times what the entire world should limit itself to, if we’re to keep global warming below 2 degrees celsius.
ESG assets are likely to surpass $50 trillion by 2025. That’s according to Bloomberg Intelligence. You have to wonder what the point of these classifications are if $50 trillion can’t buy us some meaningful emissions reductions.
IS THIS A BIPARTISAN CLIMATE DEAL? No, at least not between America’s two political parties. But Democrats and the auto industry are finding common ground. Flipping their position from several years back, Ford, GM and Stellantis yesterday backed the White House goal of half of all light vehicle sales being electric by 2030. Foreign-owned auto-makers BMW, Honda, Ford, Volkswagen and Volvo announced their support in a joint statement. A Rhodium Group analysis forecasts that EV sales would reach 27-39 percent of new car purchases in 2030, even without this new policy.
Meager fuel efficiency target: Biden’s policy will essentially reinstate an Obama-era directive. The problem: Europe, China and the climate problem have moved forward since the Obama years.The EU has mandated an average fuel economy of about 57 U.S. mpg in 2021 (about where the U.S. will be in 2026 under Biden’s plan) and 92 U.S. mpg by 2030.
Reality check: The White House saysthe two announcements put the U.S. “on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from new passenger vehicle sales by more than 60 percent in 2030” compared to 2020. But since U.S. vehicle sales were down 15 percent in 2020, linked to Covid, the better comparison is with 2019. By that measure, Biden’s plan would put U.S. emissions on track to fall by a little under half, rather than “more than 60 percent” by 2030.
WHO WANTS TO BAN COVID BOOSTER SHOTS FOR NOW
It’s one thing to vaccinate your own people first. The World Health Organization says it’s another thing to keep topping them up before most of the world has received its first dose. The U.N. health body wants a ban on booster shots to make sure at least 10 percent of people in every country (roughly the most vulnerable groups) are vaccinated first.
Where do we stand: More than half of the United States, Canada, the European Union and U.K. are vaccinated. In Africa, it’s less than 3 percent.
Africa breakthrough: South African President Cyril Ramaphosa announced Thursday that monthly African Union vaccine shipments of 400 million single-shot Johnson & Johnson vaccine doses have commenced. Just 6.4 million of the collectively purchased doses will ship to the continent’s capitals in August, but that will rise to 25 million per month by January. UNICEF is providing logistical and delivery services. The bulk purchase will eventually immunize one in three Africans.
BELARUSAT BOILING POINT: Belarus was rocked by mass protests last summer and this year the drama is returning to fever pitch. The trials ofregime opponents Maria Kalesnikava and Maxim Znakare underway behind closed doors: 12 years jail time is the likely outcome. Activist Vitaly Shishov was found dead in a park in the Ukrainian capital, and his partner Bazhena Zholud called on Belarusians to take up arms against Lukashenko’s regime: “I ask you all, stop walking around with flowers, posters. Yesterday it happened to Vitaly, and tomorrow it will happen to you,” Zholud said through tears. “Start non-peaceful protests,” she urged. The country’s authoritarian leader Alexander Lukashenko is actively encouraging migrants from Iraq, Syria and African countries to cross the border into the EU, using them as a bargaining chip to avoid new EU sanctions.
In happier news, Belarusian athlete Krystsina Tsimanouskayaarrived safely in Warsaw on Wednesday evening, after traveling from Tokyo via Vienna to escape Belarussian Olympic officials who tried to send her home forcibly.
RUSSIA — INTERNATIONAL ELECTION OBSERVERS PULL OUT AFTER INTERFERENCE: The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), the leading international election observation body, will not monitor the upcoming Russian parliamentary election, scheduled for Sept. 17 to 19. The decision follows Russian authorities limiting the number of observers to 60 (they would have to cover Russia’s nine time zones and approximately 70 million votes cast), well short of the 500 observers the OSCE planned to send. OSCE has until now monitored Russian elections without interruption since 1993.
CHINA — BEIJING FREAKING OUT ABOUT TALIBAN RISE IN AFGHANISTAN: My colleague Phelim Kine writes that “China’s nightmare is that a Taliban victory might embolden the Uyghur armed insurgency group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, to launch attacks in China. Foreign Minister Wang Yi has repeatedly sought to counter speculation of a possible future U.S.-style military intervention.
TAIWAN — ON THE MAP: The Senate Foreign Relations Committee unanimously passed a bill that instructs the State Department to create a pathway for Taiwan to regain observer status at the World Health Organization’s World Health Assembly (China got them kicked out in 2016). Meanwhile, H.R. 4373 amendment, sponsored by Rep. Tom Tiffany (R-Wisc.), prohibits spending of tax dollars to purchase, create or display any map of the People’s Republic of China that includes Taiwan as part of its territory.
MALAYSIA — THE KING’S GAMBIT: Malaysia’s kings are like no other, drawn from a group of nine Sultans; they take 5-year turns at the helm and they generally stay in the political background. Not King Sultan Abdullah: he pushed for the country’s suspended Parliament to resume sitting and accused the government of bypassing him in its Covid emergency policies. Now Malaysia’s political parties are pushing for Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin to resign. That includes the unlikely pair of opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim and former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad — remarkable because Mohamed had Ibrahim jailed on trumped-up sodomy and corruption charges two decades ago.
AUSTRALIA — ONE PART PRISON, ONE PART HUMAN RIGHTS CRUSADE: Returning Australians citizens who live abroad will now need permission to leave Australia (Australian residents already need permission to leave). The policy risks keeping up to half of Australia’s families separated because of Covid: one in four Australians were born in another country and another 1 million live abroad permanently. “I feel abandoned and helpless,” Lucy Symons-Jones, an Australian energy executive married to a British member of Parliament, told Global Translations.
Australian government promises Magnitsky Laws by end 2021: While the Australian government appears unbothered by limiting its own citizens rights, it has an equal opportunity to crackdowns, also promising one against foreign human rights abusers.
ANGOLA — AN END TO IMPUNITY: Isabel dos Santos, once Africa’s wealthiest woman, must surrender one of her last remaining major assets, a stake in an energy company she obtained when it was overseen by her father, then-President José Eduardo dos Santos. A Dutch-based tribunal ruled the deal “cannot be explained but for grand corruption” and declared it “null and void.”
ITALY — DRAGHI GAMBLES ON A SECOND “WHATEVER IT TAKES”: As Europe’s central banker Mario Draghi made sure investors knew he would stop at nothing to save the Euro during the global financial crisis. Draghi’s second act sees him transforming into a fiscal dove: his success or failure will decide the future of European budgeting, argues Jean Pisani-Ferry. His next stress test: selling the world’s oldest bank.
EQUITY IN THE INFRASTRUCTURE PACKAGE: S&P’s Mike Ferguson told Global Translations the package may help reduce social disparities in the U.S.: read his report. A majority of Republican voters (ranging from 52 percent for Amtrak cash to 79 percent for bridge upgrades) support each of the major elements of the package according to a new poll from POLITICO and Morning Consult.
Here’s where the package would do most to level-up America:
Low-cost broadband requirement: Companies gettingfunding to expand broadband would be required to offer a low-cost plan to consumers.
Lead water pipes will be removed nationwide including in Chicago, Milwaukee, and Newark.
Public transit and Amtrak: Asian American and African American workers commute by public transit at nearly four times the rate of white workers, per the White House. The $65 billion for Amtrak and roughly $50 billion for transit would deliver the federal government’s biggest-ever investment in reducing commuting times.
AMBASSADOR FOR EVERYWHERE FILES: If Linda Thomas-Greenfield (LTG) reaches lifetime platinum status on America’s airlines by the end of her term as U.N. Ambassador, she’ll have Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to thank. He’s blocking Biden’s ambassador nominees from Senate hearings, leaving LTG to run one presidential delegation after another. This time it’s a trip to the Tokyo Olympics closing ceremony and meetings with Japanese officials, followed by a stopover in Thailand, where Covid and Myanmar will top the meeting agenda.
7 MORE AMERICAN AMBASSADORS — MAYBE, EVENTUALLY: Africa is once again the subject of the most nominations this week: Elizabeth Anne Noseworthy Fitzsimmons (Togolese Republic), Brian Shukan (Benin), David Young (Malawi) and Oren Whyche-Shaw, Nominee for U.S. Director of the African Development Bank.
Also nominated were Mark Brzezinski (Poland), Adriana Kugler, (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) and Rebecca Eliza Gonzales, (Director of the Office of Foreign Missions, with the rank of Ambassador).
U.S. PLANS TO REQUIRE COVID-19 SHOTS FOR FOREIGN TRAVELERS: No timeline has yet been determined. The U.S. has banned entry for most travelers from the U.K., the EU, China, India, South Africa, Iran and Brazil. EU officials have previously expressed “huge disappointment” in the lack of reciprocity from the U.S. given they allow fully vaccinated Americans to visit, without quarantining.
KNOWING THE WHITE HOUSE PRESS OFFICE: “These millennial and Gen Z staffers are part of Jen Psaki‘s 11-person army that keeps the White House on message,” by Insider’s Robin Bravender, Nicole Gaudiano and Kayla Epstein: “Their pay ranges from $62,500 to $180,000 a year.
THIRSTY FOR ANSWERS: “A $5,800 Bottle of Japanese Whiskey Given to Mike Pompeo Is Missing,” by William Mauldin. Pompeo said he knows nothing about it.
F*** YOU, PAY ME: It’s an app with an unprintable name that wants to force brands to pay up. Welcome to the murky world of social media product placement.
PODCAST — KREMLIN FILE: Episode 1 features Masha Gessen on Putin’s early days in St Petersburg, his grab on power, and how his inner circle took control of Russia and its resources
PLATFORM — CITIZENS CONNECT: An online non-partisan platform that connects Americans to civic events and more than 400 organizations matching their interests
African Universities and African Future: The Meeting Point
PART A
THE INTERVIEW
By Totin Falola
(Unedited Transcript)
What do you see as the major challenges and opportunities facing African universities?
Based on my extensive research on higher education and administrative experience, especially as Vice Chancellor of an African University, I would say the challenges and opportunities facing African universities center on ten key dimensions, namely, institutional supply, financial resources, human capital, research output, physical and technological infrastructures, leadership and governance, academic cultures, quality of graduates, patterns of internationalization, and global rankings.
In terms of institutional supply, in 1969, there were only 170 universities across the continent, 35 of which were private. The number of universities increased to 446 in 1989, out of which 112 were private. In the 1990s, 338 new institutions were established and in the 2000s another 647. By 2015, private universities outnumbered public universities, 972 to 707. In 2018, according to the World Higher Education Database, there were 1,682 universities in Africa. The majority were private. Clearly, this was nothing short of phenomenal. Yet, in global terms, Africa had the smallest number of universities of any region, except Oceania. Africa’s share of the world’s 18,772 higher education institutions was 8.9%, compared to 37% for Asia, 21.9% for Europe, 20.4% for North America, and 12% for Latin America and the Caribbean.
In the meantime, the total number of students in African higher education institutions in 2017 stood at 14,654,667.7 million, out of 220,704,239.5 million worldwide, or 6.6%, which was less than the continent’s share of institutions. North Africa accounted for 45% of the African students. To put it more graphically, Indonesia had nearly as many students in higher education institutions as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa (7.98 million to 8.03 million). Thus, Africa’s enrollment ratios remain exceptionally low. In 2017, the world’s average enrollment ratio was 37.88%, compared to 8.98% in sub-Saharan Africa and 33.75% in northern Africa. The enrollment ratio of the high-income countries was 77.13%, for upper-middle-income countries 52.07%, for the middle-income countries 35.59%, and for lower-middle-income countries 24.41%.
African higher education has enormous opportunities to expand, to meet the huge demands of its historic youth bulge, and turn it into a demographic dividend. Africa is the only major world region that will continue to enjoy population growth for much of the 21st century. It is expected to have 1.7 billion people in 2030, 2.5 billion in 2050, and 4.5 billion in 2100, representing 19.9%, 25.9%, and 40% of the world’s population, respectively. In contrast, many of the developed countries and China are facing the demographic squeeze of aging populations and declining tertiary pipeline that threatens the survival of many universities. Thus, in the course of this century Africa is destined to have the world’s largest pool of potential tertiary students and productive labour force. This is an opportunity of historic and global proportions.
Financial resources remain the Achilles heel of African universities. Currently, all five major sources of university funding are grossly inadequate—tuition fees, auxiliary income, government subventions, philanthropic donations, and concessionary loans. Most universities especially the private ones are tuition dependent. Yet, students’ capacity to pay remains relatively low, and student aid and loan schemes are underdeveloped. In many countries, universities have failed to keep up with facilities including hostels, an important source of auxiliary revenues, so that students are forced to live in often dilapidated and dangerous neighborhoods.
Since the days of structural adjustment programs in the “lost decades” of the 1980s and 1990s, government subventions per student have declined sharply and various “cost sharing” measures adopted thereby transferring the financial burden to students and their families. Institutional philanthropic cultures and national educational aid and commercial bank loan schemes remain undeveloped in most countries, save for a few such as South Africa.
The opportunities lie in developing more sophisticated and comprehensive tuition pricing strategies and targeted student aid policies using data analytics. Partnerships between universities and private and public entities can provide much needed resources for facilities development. Universities have to become more savvy in negotiating such public private partnerships to avoid getting burned.
Also promising is the potential of philanthropic support for universities in view of the exponential growth of high net worth individuals (those with assets of more than $1 million). According to the World Wealth Report 2020, the number of high net worth individuals in Africa doubled from 100,000 in 2012 to 200,000 in 2017 (out of a global total of 12 million and 19.6 million, respectively), and their collective wealth increased from US$1.2 trillion in 2012 to US$1.7 trillion in 2017 (out of a global total of US$46.2 trillion and US$74 trillion, respectively). No less impressive is the growth of the African middle classes.
The culture of philanthropy in terms of supporting family members and even religious and political organizations is well developed across Africa, but it is not for tertiary educational institutions. Universities have to cultivate institutional capacities in terms of personnel, data systems, and cultures of giving among students, alumni, and their governing bodies. The middle classes and rich elites have to be socialized into institutional giving for universities, which is not easy as I know from personal experience as a Vice Chancellor who has put enormous efforts on fundraising. In addition to western philanthropic foundations, African foundations are growing, which can be tapped into. The provision of support and creation of concessionary loan instruments for universities by national financial institutions, and international and intergovernmental agencies deserves increased attention as well.
Human capital is in short supply. There is a severe shortage of faculty in many African countries. There are many reasons for this. Not enough doctoral degrees are being produced. For example, in Kenya only 700 are churned out each year, which is lower than doctoral graduates from a large American university. Consequently, only 34% of faculty in Kenya’s 74 universities have terminal degrees (USIU-Africa is an outlier with 76%). This reflects limited graduate supervision capacity. Interest in academic careers has declined among the best and brightest students who prefer more remunerative and prestigious professions.
The progressive devaluation of academic labor means that unlike in the early 1970s when I was an undergraduate student, currently academics in many countries are barely hanging with their fingertips to the middle class. I once asked students in the class I teach at USIU-Africa how many wanted to become academics. Not a single hand went up. When I asked them why, many laughed, the professors are poor, they said, they drive battered cars and dress badly. The quality of the recipients of doctoral degrees can also be questionable. The Cabinet Secretary for Education in Kenya once lamented that less than 10% of PhD holders were qualified. This can partly be attributed to the proliferation of contract cheating, an industry in which Kenya is a major global player.
In many African universities, staff recruitment processes, performance management systems, staff development programs, and succession planning tend to be ad hoc and weak. The specters of tribalism, nepotism and corruption in hiring, promotion, and rewards cast a dysfunctional pall on many universities. The professionalization of talent development and management is imperative for institutional growth, effectiveness, and resilience.
The faculty shortage can be addressed at the national, regional and continental levels by embracing what the Dakar Summit’s Declaration called, “diversification, differentiation and harmonization of higher education systems.” African governments and regional economic communities need to designate some universities as research universities that produce faculty and drive the higher education sector. Moreover, it is critical to promote academic mobility for students, academic staff, credit transfer, and mutual recognition of academic and professional qualifications.
Beyond the continent, African universities need to take seriously mobilizing academic capital from the diaspora, and developing effective strategies to import excess academic labor from the global North much as universities in the global North aggressively import students from the global South. Governments and regional organizations could facilitate this by developing time-bound programs of well-funded transnational exchange with their counterparts in the global North, a kind of CADFP and Academics Without Borders writ large.
Research output in most African countries and universities is abysmal. Data from a few years ago shows that Africa as a whole accounted for 1.3% of global Research & Development (R&D). The continent’s R&D expenditure as a share of GDP was 0.5% compared to a world average of 1.7%, and 2.7% for North America, 1.8% for Europe and 1.6% for Asia. Its share of world researchers was 2.3%, compared to 42.8% for Asia, 31.0% for Europe, and 22.2% for the Americas.
Equally low was the continent’s share of scientific publications, which stood at 2.6% in 2014, compared to 39.5% for Asia, 39.3% for Europe, and 32.9% for the Americas. The only area in which Africa led was in the proportion of publications with international authors. While the world average was 24.9%, for Africa it was 64.6%, compared to 26.1% for Asia, 42.1% for Europe, and 38.2% for the Americas. Thus, like our economies, African scholarship suffers from excessive external dependence.
Strengthening African research capacities at national and institutional levels is imperative if the continent is to become a major player in generating knowledges and solutions to pressing global challenges. For too long, we’ve been reduced to importers of epistemological systems, consumers of knowledges and technologies from Euroamerica and elsewhere. This has reinforced our role as pawns rather than players in the international division of intellectual labor and the modern world system since its construction half a millennium ago.
During the First Industrial Revolution Africa exported enslaved labor for which it received trinkets; during the second it was colonized and trapped by the unequal exchange of raw material exports; and for the third the neocolonial dependencies were strangled by the neo-liberalism of SAPs and were sold “appropriate technology”. What role will the continent play under the Fourth Industrial Revolution encompassing the digitalization of all spheres of economic, social and political life?
As noted by the World Economic Forum no sector remains immune to digitalization from manufacturing and production; consumer industries; energy, materials and infrastructure; financial and monetary systems; health and healthcare; investing; media, entertainment and sport; mobility through the creation of autonomous vehicles; and trade and global economic interdependence. Already, the signs are not good: in 2017, Africa’s total capacity for high performance computing was a miserable 0.2% (mostly in South Africa) compared to 33.8% for the United States, 32% for China, 6.6% for Japan, 5.6% for Germany, and 3.4% each for France and Britain.
Not surprisingly, the continent is already paying dearly for the privilege of exporting its data for it to be stored and processed elsewhere! Clearly, African countries and universities must invest heavily in the unfolding technological revolution if the continent is to avoid its dismal fate during the previous three industrial revolutions. Africa has about a decade to speed up and expand its technological innovation footprint to shed its historical subordination as a pawn and become a player. The danger of remaining peripheral to the Fourth Industrial Revolution for Africa is not exploitation and marginalization, but historical irrelevance, becoming a landmass of disposable people.
The state of physical and technological infrastructures on many African campuses is disheartening. The huge backlog of deferred maintenance shows itself in dilapidated buildings. Technological poverty became cruelly evident following the outbreak of COVID-19 when many universities were unable to pivot from face to face to remote teaching and learning using online platforms (at USIU-Africa we did so the day following the closure of the campus for we had invested heavily in IT infrastructure, had a robust business continuity plan, and put in place a comprehensive mitigation strategy to manage the effects of the coronavirus outbreak).
The pandemic revealed glaring inequalities among and within countries and institutions, between administrators, faculty, staff and students in access to broadband, electronic gadgets, data costs, digital literacy and preparedness, and so on. As with any crisis, the flip side is opportunities, and the bigger the crisis the bigger the lessons and possibilities for reform and transformation. Over the past year I’ve written extensively on how Africa in general, and universities in particular, can adopt, adapt and develop their technological infrastructures, training capabilities, and innovation in their core functions of teaching and learning, research and scholarship, and public service and engagement.
In a paper I recently co-authored with Paul Okanda, the Director of ICT and USIU-Africa, forthcoming in Journal of African Higher Education in Africa, we outline a twelve point agenda for the digital transformation of African universities, as well as an agenda for building national and regional research, innovation, and technological infrastructures. Being the realist optimist I am, I believe a brighter technological future for Africa broadly, and its universities comprising face-to-face, online and blended modalities for pedagogical, operational, and service delivery, is indeed possible.
Equally problematic in many African universities is leadership and governance. Despite reforms in recent decades in public universities spawned by democratization, state interference remains rampant. The power of the exchequer often translates into stringent rules and excessive intervention in the appointment of Vice Chancellors and other senior academic leaders. In Kenya, the Public Service Commission conducts interviews of VCs of public universities. University Councils are appointed by the government. Ironically, the expansion of public universities has spread the cancer of tribalism in which university leaders are increasingly expected to hail from where the university is located.
The mushrooming private universities suffer from their own ills. Often established by religious bodies or rich individuals the founders tend to behave as business proprietors and exercise capricious controls over management and even faculty and staff appointments. Many are run as for profit enterprises and focus on lowly marketable programs more befitting vocational schools.
Furthermore, opportunities for leadership development are sorely lacking. The principles and practices of effective shared governance are usually poorly understood by the key stakeholders including ill-prepared members of governing boards who seek to exercise misguided political or corporate executive power, administrators prone to authoritarian control, and faculty, staff and student councils who like to flex their activist muscles through strikes, demonstrations, media agitation, and litigation.
There is need to develop more opportunities for transparent and robust executive searches and leadership development within institutions and for the higher education sector as a whole at national and regional levels. As the number of higher education institutions and demands and pressures for highly skilled leadership grow, professionalized leadership recruitment, retention, and retooling at all levels from department chairs and college deans, to vice chancellors and governing board members becomes more imperative. The establishment of the Higher Education Leadership Management program by Universities South Africa, a consortium of the country’s 26 public universities, is a move in the right direction. More such bodies including higher education executive search and consultancy firms are essential.
Increasingly academic cultures are characterized by complexity, change and contestations as universities become more diverse in their internal and external constituencies, and respond to escalating academic, co-curricular, public and market demands. Sexism, misogyny, and sexual harassment are rampant on many African campuses. So is ethnocentricism, xenophobia, religious intolerance, and marginalization and discrimination against the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community and persons living with disability. It is vital to promote inclusion along the divisive lines of gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, sexuality, ability and so on through formal institutional policies, awareness raising campaigns, and behavioral modeling by leaders and influencers.
One often hears that universities have increasingly become corporatized, which is a dirty word among many academics. It is true that corporate business practices have become more prevalent in the academy. This has been driven by pressures to manage complex and tight university budgets, as well as appointment of corporate executives to university governing boards for fundraising purposes. Faculty in particular tend to complain about the erosion of shared governance.
Thus, it is critical to raise collective institutional understanding and adherence to shared governance by putting in place appropriate policies, procedures, and practices to safeguard and promote it. Research shows that universities that enjoy a strong sense of shared governance have managed COVID-19 better than those that don’t; effective shared governance fosters the social capital of trust. This is true of nations as well. In an era of heightened struggles for diversity and inclusion, counterposed by angry populisms, partisanship and polarization, collegiality and civility become casualties, yet there are more essential than ever if African universities are to overcome the intractable challenges they face.
The quality of graduates lies at the heart of the value proposition of university education. Employability serves as a powerful measure of that quality, notwithstanding the lofty claims by universities as oases for contemplation, knowledge generation, and the cultivation of enlightened humanity. The evidence across Africa, indeed in many parts of the world, is quite troubling as mismatches persist, and in some cases appear to be growing, between the quality of graduates and the needs of the economy. This often results in graduate underemployment and unemployment, which in many parts of Africa is higher than for high school graduates. A scathing report on the subject in East Africa, noted that 63% of graduates in Uganda, 61% in Tanzania, 55% in Burundi, 52% in Rwanda, and 51% in Kenya, were found to lack job market skills.
Employability is not coterminous with salaried employment. A report we did at USIU-Africa in 2017 noted employability refers to the provision and acquisition of skills necessary to undertake self-employment opportunities, creation of innovative opportunities, as well as acquiring and maintaining salaried employment. Employability skills can be gained in and out of the classroom and depend also on the quality of education gained by the individuals before entry into the university. For African universities, the challenge is the extent to which they provide an education with essential employability qualities. This entails a holistic education that offers subject and technical knowledges, experiential learning opportunities, liberal arts competencies, and equips students with soft and lifelong learning skills.
Promoting student employability skills and capacities is a continuous process that should take into account rapidly changing occupational landscapes, and shifting generations of students with ever changing learning styles. African universities have to invest the necessary resources in faculty development for teaching and learning, and raise student rigor and expectations through the promotion of high impact pedagogical practices, such as problem-based, work-based, and interdisciplinary learning, undergraduate student research, and study abroad.
Some universities have embraced reforms in teaching and learning by establishing centers of teaching excellence, student living and learning communities, and popularizing curricula and co-curricula e-portfolios and transcripts. Technology makes it easier to offer personalized teaching and learning. The integration of the classroom, campus, and community as learning spaces must be intentional. The good news is strategies for improving teaching and learning and strengthening the quality of graduates are well-known. The bad news is many universities and faculty are resistant to change.
Internationalization has always been a challenge and an opportunity for African universities. Despite the fact university education in some parts of Africa goes back more than a millennium, the few African universities established during the colonial period were modeled on those in the imperial metropoles. They left a lasting legacy of external institutional, intellectual and ideological dependence. Since independence there have of course been countervailing struggles for decolonization.
The challenge is to forge productive synergies between the forces and pressures of internationalization and indigenization and sustain universities that are both global and deeply rooted in African epistemological and ontological imperatives, socioeconomic and cultural landscapes, and political ecologies. This requires promoting internationalization within Africa, pluralizing engagements beyond the West to the global South especially Asia, and within each region to embrace African diaspora knowledges that are particularly powerful in the West and are often counter-hegemonic.
As part of the internationalization agenda, African universities have to become more discerning in their overseas inter-institutional partnerships. I am often struck how they tend to jump at every solicitation they get from abroad even from third and fourth rate institutions, or sign agreements that do not always serve their best interests. This is where brokerage by African higher education think tanks and consultancy firms and the diaspora can be useful. Similarly, African universities and policy makers for higher education have to be judicious in their engagements with international and intergovernmental organizations such as the World Bank that play an outsize role in African higher education policy development.
Further, caution needs to be exercised in relations with international foundations, overseas national agencies and university associations that influence and fund a disproportionate amount of research. In my dealings with foundations I’ve been particularly impressed by the Mastercard Foundation that eschews the language and edicts of haughty donors and believes and practices co-creation on projects with its African partners, as I’ve witnessed first hand at USIU-Africa.
Finally, African universities do not fare well in international higher education rankings. For example, in the Times Higher Education 2021 World University Rankings, only 60 African universities are included among the 1,500 listed, led by Egypt with 21, followed by South Africa with 10, Algeria 8, Nigeria 6, Morocco and Tunisia 5 each, and a few such as Kenya, Uganda and Ghana with 1 each. Out of the top ten African universities South Africa leads with 4, and only one, UCT is in the top 200, followed by University of Witwatersrand in the top 250, and Stellenbosch in the top 300.
I’m critical of rankings. They serve to establish hegemonic norms of excellence to influence, incentivize and change institutional behavior. They reflect and reinforce inter-institutional competition in an endless ‘reputational’ and ‘positional’ race that sanctifies the supremacy of already dominant institutions. However, I also understand that they are powerful marketing tools because of their material impact in influencing the flows of students, faculty, and resources. Globalization turned higher education into a strategic industry critical in the intense competition for the construction of the knowledge economies and societies of the 21st century.
Since existing global rankings don’t seem to serve African universities that well, some advocate boycotting them altogether and creating their own. This smacks of the “appropriate technology” discourse of the 1970s and 1980s. The real issue is for African universities to continue pursuing inclusive academic, operational, and service excellence. After all, this was possible when I attended college in the early to mid-1970s. My generation is a living testimony that high quality and globally competitive education can be maintained on the continent.
Relatively early in your career you entered administration, why did you take that path?
Like many turning points in our lives, this happened by accident. I had never envisaged becoming an administrator until it actually happened. I first became an administrator at Trent University in Canada in 1994. Two colleges were looking for principals. Several colleagues approached me whether I would consider applying for the position in their college. I initially laughed it off. Me an administrator, what a cruel joke? Administrators are insufferable paper pushers who spend their time puffing their egos and plotting to make the lives of the indispensable faculty miserable.
But my interlocutors to the dark side of the academy persisted. They flattered me. I was organized and collegial and would make a good principal, they said. They threw in the incentives. I would live in the Principal’s Lodge for free and rent out my house in town and save on the mortgage. They pulled on my heartstrings as a professor, I would live among and mentor students. They even threw in my daughter, she would have lots of baby sitters and engage inspiring young people. What was not mentioned is that as the only Black faculty member at the University, I would bring a little diversity to the senior administration. I succumbed. I interviewed for both colleges, was selected by both, and chose Lady Eaton College.
As College Principal, I was responsible for supervising the welfare of faculty, students and staff in the college, setting the college budget and policy, overseeing co-curricular activities, and representing the College to internal university and external constituencies. Soon after I assumed the position, I was asked to assume another position as the Acting Director of Trent International Program that was responsible for the recruitment and advising of foreign students and organizing study abroad opportunities for our students.
I thoroughly enjoyed both positions, discovered a knack for organizing events, bringing in exciting visitors to the college, living and getting to know students and faculty and staff from different departments more closely than I had ever done before. Above all, I began to understand how the university really worked, that university administration is hard work, that administrators are by and large preoccupied with addressing problems and improving the lives of all members of the academic community. I was hooked.
Hardly had I sunk my administrative teeth at Trent when a new administrative opportunity arose. One day I got a sudden phone call from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Would I be willing to come and participate in their annual spring symposium which was in a couple of week’s time in place of Thandika Mkandawire who couldn’t come? Thandika had recommended me as his possible replacement and they were also fond of my work. I had never attended an academic conference in the US before, so I said to myself why not. I quickly prepared a paper on publishing practices in leading African studies journals, a subject that built on my interest in the publishing dimensions of knowledge production, dissemination and consumption.
It was a fascinating conference. I quickly noticed the tensions among the Africanists at the university. In the evening after my presentation, three of them approached me and asked whether I would be interested in applying for the position of Director of the Center for African Studies at the university. I had never thought of working in the US, which in my anti-imperialist posture I despised for its global aggression, unsavory history of subverting African liberation leaders and movements, and enduring abuses of African Americans whose unpaid labor for three centuries had helped build the country. So I scoffed at the suggestion.
After I returned to Canada, the emissaries from UIUC persisted. They solicited some of my friends including Thandika to try to persuade me to apply. I began to review my antipathy to moving to the US. Unlike Trent where I was the sole Black faculty members answerable for events and developments in the entire Pan-African world, I would be a part of a sizable Black academic community at Illinois, and retrieve my individuality. For example, in 1991-1992 my colleagues at Trent expected me to have special insights on the coup in Haiti, the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, the war in Ethiopia, and the crisis in Chad, and in 1994 the Rwanda genocide and prospects for post-apartheid South Africa.
At Illinois I would be liberated from the tyranny of the ubiquitous Black spokesman. I would also be freed from the excesses of representation on every imaginable committee. And I would have Africanists with who to share and discuss my academic work. But I couldn’t bring myself to apply, so I asked for a compromise. I would send my CV without an application letter, in homage to my fading resistance to going to the US if I got the job. Another powerful motive was personal, my first marriage was falling apart, and new beginnings in another country might prove restorative.
So I went for the interviews when I was shortlisted. It was not the most auspicious way to interview as I came straight from Japan where I had spent two weeks together with several distinguished African scholars who had been invited by the Japanese government for a tour of Japanese universities—Michere Mugo, Njabulo Ndebele, and Kole Omotoso. The time difference was punishing. However, I managed to pull it off and received an offer. I moved in august 1995.
I was sad to leave Trent as well as Peterborough which I liked for its closeness to Toronto, one of the world’s great cosmopolitan and multicultural cities. I had gradually warmed up to living in the United States and looked forward to new experiences at UIUC, one of the finest public research universities in the nation. The Center for African Studies was also one of the largest with more than 80 faculty in 28 departments and nine colleges. However, I had no illusions about what I was getting myself into. The Africanist community was bitterly divided over ideology, resources, governance and personalities. As if to prove the point, once I was appointed director two delegations drove separately to Trent to meet with me. Each group tried to convince me of its position and badmouth the opposing group.
I learned an invaluable administrative lesson from this factionalism. I decided to take time to study, almost like an ethnographer, each faculty member affiliated with the Center by asking them to meet with me individually. Prior to the meetings I asked each one to share with me some of their most important writings. So the conversations were about their intellectual passions and their suggestions for strengthening and moving the center forward. Academics love to discuss their work, and to see it taken seriously. I also began to research on the development of African studies at the university since the center was formed in 1970 and in the United States more broadly. The latter was prompted by an acrimonious debate at the African Studies Association (ASA) annual meeting in November 1995 in Orlando, Florida. This was the first ASA meeting I attended on American soil. The 1994 ASA meeting had been held in Toronto which I attended and in fact organized a cultural event for it.
The debate was over an op-Ed in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Philip Curtin entitled “The Ghettoization of African History,” in which he claimed standards in the teaching and scholarship of African history in the United States were dropping because of the entry into the field of more African and African Americans. It was incendiary. I read it while still at Trent and was among those who signed a rebuttal. At the ASA forum in Orlando, I came to fully appreciate the deep racial divides and antagonisms in African studies in the United States. My research on the field resulted in a series of journal articles and books beginning with Manufacturing African Studies and Crises, which was later followed by two volume edited collection, entitled The Study of Africa.
As I better understood the center at Illinois and African studies in the US, we instituted a number of reforms. Instead of holding only one spring symposium over which everyone fought for their favorite topic or theme, we established a series of conferences and forums in addition to the spring symposium and weekly brown bag series, namely, the Fall Colloquium, African Business Workshop, the African Media Workshop, the Interdisciplinary Seminar Series, and the Graduate Students Conference. We also created the Annual W.E.B. Lecture jointly with the African American Studies Program. I met my current wife, Cassandra Rachel Veney, at the inaugural lecture, which was given by the anthropologist and then President of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, one of the oldest HBCUs, Niara Sudarkasa.
The business and media workshops were held jointly with the colleges of business and communication on campus and the World Trade Center and Northwestern University’s school of journalism as part of building the center’s intra- and inter-institutional partnerships. For the inaugural business workshop held in Chicago which focused on the transport industry, we attracted chief executives from such leading companies as United and Boeing, the World Trade Center in Johannesburg, ministers of transport from Africa and the Clinton Administration’s Secretary of Transport, Ron Slater, who gave the keynote address. Besides bringing policy makers, we designed the business and media conferences also to bring practitioners and academics on the topic for a three-way dialogue. The graduate student conference rotated among African studies centers in the Midwest. The contentious spring symposium itself was repositioned to focus on a collaborative theme with one of the university’s colleges from law to engineering.
The center became a vibrant space of robust intellectual, cultural and social engagement. Over the years we brought in hundreds of prominent scholars, writers, journalists, business executives, ambassadors, government officials, activists, and even former presidents. Among the most memorable was the visit by former President Kaunda who played his famous guitar during the reception in his honor at my house; the riveting public lectures of Wole Soyinka and Randall Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica; the captivating performances of the accomplished Black Nova Scotian poet and scholar, George Eliot Clarke; and the consummate Pan-African Orchestra from Ghana. And there was the unforgettable Africa Fete that rocked Urbana -Champaign with the exquisite and soaring sounds of Selif Keita from Mali, Pepa Wemba from the DRC, Cheikh Lo of Senegal, and Maryam Mursal of Somalia.
For the 1999 spring symposium on “Human Rights and Development in Africa—Establishing the Rule of Law,” we brought in the who’s who of legal and human rights scholars and activists, such as from Nigeria Yemi Osibanjo who later became the country’s Vice President, from South Africa Pansy Tlakula who became head of the Independent Electoral Commission and Barney Pityana Chair of the South African Human Rights Commission, and from Kenya Monica Juma who became Minister of Foreign Affairs and later Minister of Defense and Willy Mutunga who became Chief Justice and President of the Supreme Court, just to mention a few.
We also changed governance by moving from the appointment of members to center committees by the director to election by center members. To deal with resource challenges we embarked on a program of aggressive fundraising not only from the traditional source of funding from the US Department of Education’s Title VI program, but also from the leading philanthropic foundations, and other donors. On campus I negotiated more funding from the College of Arts and Sciences, our institutional home, and collaborated with various departments in the college and other colleges to hire Africanists by making academic arguments and demonstrating student demand for African studies courses in their areas that we would initially launch in the center.
The eight years I spent at UIUC were perhaps the most fulfilling in my intellectual and professional life. As a low level administrator I enjoyed the freedom to organize activities and events that appealed to me and my colleagues in the center. I also enjoyed teaching. I taught one undergraduate class and one masters class and supervised doctoral students. One of the gratifications of the teaching career is watching your former students become successful professionals. Some are currently in academe serving as professors, department chairs, college deans, vice provosts, and one became a vice chancellor. Others are pursuing important careers in the public sector, diplomatic service, security services, the private sector, philanthropic foundations, international and intergovernmental agencies, NGOs and community based organizations, or are self-employed entrepreneurs.
The hyperactive intellectual environment at the center translated for me into unprecedented research and scholarly productivity. It is at UIUC that I became a truly interdisciplinary scholar. I published edited and co-edited books from the numerous conferences we held at the center. From teaching an MA class on African studies I published numerous journal articles and book chapters, culminating in an edited two volume compendium of how Africa has been constructed in all the major humanities and social science disciplines and interdisciplinary fields, as well in different world regions and transnational paradigms. The essays were written by scholars from the Americas, Europe and Asia that I invited to the class. On the eve of the class we would host intellectual salon dinners at my home or the homes of my colleagues in the center.
It was not easy to leave this intellectual paradise. But personal considerations prevailed. My wife and I wanted to be in the same institution. She preferred us to be closer to her parents and relatives on the East Coast. Our daughter had left home for college. And I wanted to leave administration for a while and focus on teaching and research.
An opportunity soon presented itself. One of my colleagues from the College of Law, Phill McConnaughay, with who I co-organized the conference mentioned earlier on law and development and co-edited the book from the conference was appointed Dean of the Law School at the Pennsylvania State University. As it happened one of my oldest friends from secondary school, Tiyanjana Maluwa, an eminent lawyer then working as legal counsel at the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva, prior to which he served as the chief legal counsel at the AU and professor at the universities of Malawi, Botswana and Cape Town, had been offered a position at Illinois. Phil wanted Tiya to join him at Penn State. In the meantime, the College of the Liberal Arts at Penn State was looking for a senior scholar in the Department of African and African Studies (AFAM). So the three of us Tiya, my wife and I found ourselves interviewing at Penn State and we were offered tenured positions. We were excited and bought houses in State College.
But the euphoria proved short lived. My misgivings started during orientation for new faculty. It was so well choreographed and over the top that it seemed like an induction into a cult. I had a joint appointment in AFAM and History. The latter was alright as far history departments go. AFAM was a huge challenge. It was riven by dissensions along four axes. First, in terms of nationality between African Americans, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans. Second, in terms of gender. There was toxic masculinity and sexism perpetrated by some of the men. Third, there was the struggle for authenticity among the “scholars” and the “activists”. Fourth, there were fierce disagreements about the curriculum and faculty hiring.
As a Pan-Africanist I had no sympathy for the nationalist antagonisms; as a feminist I was appalled by the sexism; as a “scholar-activist” I didn’t see the two as separate but interlinked and synergistic; and as an interdisciplinary scholar I didn’t appreciate the curricula and hiring turf battles. Unfortunately, the college administration seemed indifferent at best, and quite tolerant at worst as some kind of perverse affirmation of the inherent dysfunctionalities of ethnic studies programs created as polite concessions to Black agitators and political correctness, rather than the imperative of academic inquiry and rigor. I shifted the bulk of my line to the history department where I found considerable peace.
It became clearer to my wife and me that we needed to work in a healthier environment. Ironically, we had some of our best times socially at Penn State. As an “intercultural” couple our home became party central as we hosted get togethers of our colleagues both Black and White. The parties were quite popular as there was little to do in State College. We also enjoyed the scenic three hour drive to visit my in-laws in Columbia, Maryland and taking part in family events from weddings to funerals and family reunions, and above all just hanging out with the parents on the weekends or during public holidays.
Personally, I withdrew into my teaching, research and writing. I had bright and eager undergraduate students, and brilliant PhD students that I worked with from several departments. And I’ve never travelled as much as I did while at Penn State. In some years I would visit up to a dozen countries in an academic year. In July 2004, for example, I went to Seoul, South Korea for a UNESCO conference, flew back to New York and a few hours later flew to South Africa. I loved it for it took me away from the petty academic politics at Penn State.
After three and half years my wife and went back to Illinois, this time to the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC). The Dean tried her best to convince me to stay at Penn State by giving me a generous “retention offer”—higher salary and a title of Research Professor. Earlier in the year, I had been named the recipient of the Class of 1933: Distinction in the Humanities Award. The entreaties fell on deaf ears.
I was excited getting back into administration, this time as Chair of the Department of African American Studies. It was as if I wanted to prove that so-called ethnic studies departments can be intellectually and administratively “normal”. This was of course the case at UIC. As part of the appointment, I was promised an honorific title, which I received after it was approved by the college and university. I became the first to be named the Liberal Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor. I had to give a university-wide public lecture as part of the award.
The African American Studies department had a healthy gender balance and discourse. I was hired despite being an Africanist not an African Americanist. One reason being that they wanted the department to be diasporic. My departmental colleagues such as the renowned historian, Barbara Ransby, and distinguished sociologist, Beth Richie, were scholar-activists para excellence. They are first rate scholars who have been involved in institutional, city, state-wide and national struggles for diversity, inclusion and equality for decades. They were supportive and critical of the Obama presidency, as they knew the man and had worked with him in Chicago and Illinois politics.
It was at UIC that my gravitation to diaspora studies solidified. By then I had already started working on a major global project on African diasporas funded by the Ford Foundation in Nairobi. Surrounded by African American colleagues in the department and across the university more generally, immersed me more deeply in African American studies and the studies of other African diasporas. As I did when I joined the center at UIUC, I read the major publications of all the faculty members in the department. I was impressed by the breadth and depth of their individual and collective scholarship. The department also engaged in extensive outreach programs in Chicago and collaborated with other African American studies programs in several Chicago universities. My colleagues had extensive academic and political networks that benefited the department in its intellectual life and co-curricular activities.
There was reputational rivalry between the UIC and UIUC campuses. Having been at both, I thought the competition and hierarchy between the two was misplaced and I was keen to connect the two in our areas of study. One avenue was through the History Makers project. Created in 1999 by a visionary arts and media professional and entrepreneur, Julieanna L. Richardson, as a national non-profit research and educational institution, it is “committed to recording African American oral histories to refashion a more inclusive record of American history and to educate and enlighten millions worldwide.” The department also garnered university wide support in hosting the 2008 Annual African Studies Meeting held in Chicago at which I assumed the presidency of the ASA. I invited my old mentor, Prof Ogot to give that year’s Bashorun MKO Abiola Lecture.
In 2009, I was nominated for a Deanship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles (LMU). I had been nominated to such a position before. The position was at one of the nation’s leading private universities in Texas. I made it to the final two candidates and even did the tantalizing finalists’ visit with the provost with my spouse and his partner. The search company told me I was trumped by the other candidate who had more administrative experience as department chair and Dean at a leading private university in Atlanta. I chalked it to practice for a future opportunity. And that’s what happened with LMU.
In preparation for the series of interviews I consulted my friends and colleagues who were or had been college deans, including Dwight McBride who was my boss as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at UIC. He had previously been Chair of the department I was heading, after which he went to Northwestern University before returning to UIC. He is currently President of the New School in New York. I got excellent advice for I did well in the interviews and was offered the position which I accepted. My wife was given a tenured appointment in the Political Science department.
Moving to Los Angeles was like moving to another country. The weather and vegetation reminded me of Malawi. The traffic jams were legendary. The people seemed to have a laissez faire cheerfulness. The entertainment industry cast its spell over the city that seemed to attract those searching for stardom or self-reinvention. Sumptuous homes often lined the expansive golden sand beaches and the hills that enveloped parts of the sprawling city. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway in my Lexus convertible that I had bought in Chicago in 2008 was absolutely delightful.
LMU itself, sitting on a bluff, had splendid views of parts of the city and the Pacific Ocean. The campus boasted postcard beauty. University Hall where the Bellarmone College of Liberal Arts is located was spectacular with its wide corridors, indoor plants, and the open spaces outside the departments with with comfortable chairs called “villages” where students often mingled. From my spacious office I could see parts of Santa Monica and Malibu. There are a few cities I’ve lived that I liked as much as Los Angeles. My daughter loved it, too. She came to visit on every little pretext. Revealingly, she never visited us in any other city where we worked after she left home, not State College in Pennsylvania, Cheshire in Connecticut, or Nairobi in Kenya. For our part, we stopped going on long vacations, preferring instead to visit the string of beautiful coastal towns between Los Angeles and San Diego.
I found being Dean both demanding and delightful. The college had about 15 academic departments and almost an equal number of institutes and centers, more than 150 tenure track faculty and a slightly larger number of adjunct faculty. The university had grown rapidly in the previous decade so part of my job was continuing to put systems, policies, and procedures in place to match the growth. We strengthened and established new college wide committees, tenure review processes, faculty recognition initiatives, and internal and external communications, and the modalities of formal and informal engagements between my office and the various college constituencies.
As Dean of the largest college in the University I worked closely with the other deans and often led in university-wide organizational change on such matters as general education, accreditation, and strategic planning. I worked well with the two provosts and two presidents I served under during the four years I spent at Trent. Three aspects of my job as Dean were particularly rewarding.
First, was overseeing the faculty tenure process. At the college level, only the Dean had authority; there was no tenure committee. I introduced committees for the second and fourth year reviews, and spent time advising and mentoring junior faculty on the tenure clock to ensure their success. Second, I was responsible for faculty appointments in the college, so besides the departmental interviews, I interviewed every job candidate. Altogether, during my tenure we hired more than three dozen faculty notwithstanding the financial squeeze brought about by the Great Recession, so I interviewed more than a hundred job candidates. I used to call the interviews free seminars, for I was exposed to cutting edge analyses in each candidate’s respective discipline. I couldn’t have wished for a more intense intellectual encounter as the one hour I normally spent with each candidate in my office. My interdisciplinary scope expanded exponentially.
Finally, while I had raised money before mostly for my own research and from government agencies and foundations when I was center director and to a smaller extent as department chair, as college Dean we were expected to spend at least a third of our time on fundraising. The university was then in a $400 million capital campaign, and each college was given a target. My predecessor as Dean who moved to Santa Clara University as President had left a good foundation, mostly in the appointment of the college’s remarkable development director, Donna Gray. Donna patiently taught me the ropes of development, took me for training sessions, gave me detailed briefings about each potential donor we met, and travelled with me across California and Arizona to meet alumni and raise funds for the college.
It was a new world for me meeting real multimillionaires and billionaires, who were remarkably cordial and hard nosed. They could smell bullshit a mile away. I learned fundraising is really about friend making, marrying the donor’s passions and the institution’s needs. I think I became good at it. I certainly became quite friendly with some of them such as Michael Segal who run the famous Santa Monica apparel firm, Fred Segal; Michael Huntington, the renowned California politician, filmmaker and businessman who generously funded the Huffington Ecumenical Institute in the college and invited my wife and I to his 65th birthday; Jim and Tisch Wood who my wife and I visited several times at their home in Long Beach, and John Kilroy, the real estate tycoon and his wife, Nelly, just to mention a few. At the end of the capital campaign, we had surpassed the campaign goal of $25 million.
This being Los Angeles the university sometimes participated in development events in famous entertainment centers. One of the most fun was a scholarships fundraising event for needy students held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion that was often attended by famous film stars and musicians. At one such event, while making a speech I couldn’t help telling Ms. Cicely Tyson, the inimitable actress who died on January 28, 2021 at 96, who was sitting in the front row next to Smokey Robinson and other stars, that after the event I was going to call my mother-in-law that I had met her hero in person to impress her that her son-in-law knew people. Ms. Tyson cracked up.
The time-consuming pressures of the Deanship left little room for research and scholarship. In 2012, I even reluctantly decided to close my website, The Zeleza Post, which I had established in 2004 and became quite popular, often getting more than 25,000 unique visitors each month. The site published provocative essays by a team of young African and diaspora academics such as the late Pius Adesanmi from Nigeria, and Wandia Njoya from Kenya. It also publicized conferences, hosted e-symposia, and provided newsfeeds from the major newspaper that I read regularly from the US, Canada, Britain, and South Africa. However, I was able to write and publish a few journal articles. From my own essays on the site, I published two books of essay collections.
However, my academic life at LMU remained rich. Departments in the college organized seminars that I attended whenever time allowed. The college itself hosted a two-day conference every year, the Bellarmine Forum, and brought prominent speakers. To my pleasant surprise when I joined the university, I found that Wole Soyinka had a position there. He was a President’s Professor, the most prestigious honorific title at LMU and he gave several university-wide presentations a year. I was the only administrator who was given the title of President’s Professor.
I was truly sad to leave LMU and Los Angeles. That’s one place I wouldn’t mind returning to. Like many careers, the higher you rise in academic administration the more you’re on the Rolodex of head hunters. And so it was that I was approached by an executive search firm for a position of Vice President of Academic Affairs at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. Once I got it, my wife and I trekked back East. Connecticut is a small, pretty state mostly comprised of quaint little towns that we loved driving to. One of its attractions is its closeness to New York City which my wife and I visited quite often to go to Broadway shows, restaurants, shop, or just hang out. And we occasionally drove to Maryland to visit family.
My new professional life started well enough. I immediately developed a liking for the Deans of the eight colleges and schools of Arts and Sciences, Business, Communication, Health Sciences, Law, Medicine, Nursing, and Education. But I soon became disillusioned. The long-serving president sought to control everything. When student numbers fell and revenues dropped in my second year more than thirty-faculty were unceremoniously let go and one of the Deans who protested was shown the door. At senior leadership meetings I immediately noticed everyone looked afraid and hardly spoke unless called to. It was bizarre. I was quite happy to leave for another job. Out of the three positions I was offered in 2015, a provostship in Maryland, as founding CEO of the African Research Universities Alliance, and Vice Chancellor (president) of the United States International University-Africa in Nairobi, I chose the last one after long deliberations with my wife and closest friends. I withdrew from a search for a senior position at one of the world’s largest foundations where I was one of the last two candidates.
Where do you think our continent, Africa, is headed?
As a trained historian I’m more comfortable dissecting the messy past than deciphering the unpredictable future. I recall in October 1981, there was a conference on North Africa and the Middle East at Dalhousie by futurists in disciplines that like modeling reality into tiny boxes to make facile predictions. Anwar Sadat loomed large in the deliberations on the first day. The next day he was assassinated! In the early 1980s, I used to get into heated debates with the isolated defenders of apartheid South Africa in Jamaica who dismissed the prospects of the end of apartheid in our lifetime. A few years later it was over, the ANC took power, and Nelson Mandela became the first democratically elected president of the rainbow nation. And more recently, in January 2020, who could have predicted the devastating impact of the novel Coronavirus, that it would unleash the worst health and economic crisis in a century?
However as humans we don’t just live in the past and present, we also live in the future by anticipating and envisioning it, trying to change, control and recreate it. As a thinking species, we always plan; we intuitively expect the future to be different, worse for the pessimists, better for the optimists, and more of the same for the agnostics. I tend to be an optimist, not in the idealistic or delusional sense, but out of a profound belief in human agency. In the 1970s, disappointed by the deeply compromised postcolonial states and inspired by the radical liberation movements, many of us latched on to Marxism, and Marx’s injunction that “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” This gave rise to what we termed the pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will; the need for cold hearted analysis of conditions as they are, and ironclad conviction of the agency we possess to bring about change.
This has been my mantra ever since, that in our analysis of Africa we should indulge in neither blissful wishful thinking nor faddish dismissal of the possibilities of change. We must first, undertake rigorous analysis of things as they really are, and second, identify the social forces that can remake things as they should be. In the 1980s and 1990s, many of us in our generation railed against Afro-pessimism perpetrated by Africa’s eternal detractors and Africa’s own disillusioned cynics. When Afro-pessimism gave rise to Afro-optimism as African economies began to recover and resume the growth trajectory of the early post-independence years and democratization spread, some of us resisted the newfound euphoria. In this sense, I’m not an unbridled Afro-pessimist or Afro-optimist, rather I would classify myself as an Afro-realist.
We must resist the dangers of oversimplification, of seeing the fate of an entire continent as moving in lockstep. One of the most heinous legacies of Eurocentricism is the dehumanization, dehistoricization and homogenization of Africa, the tendency to strip the continent and its peoples of their bewildering complexities, contradictions, and continuous trajectories of change. Historically, there have always been uneven development across Africa, different political economies, diverse cultures, and divergent performances in the endless story of human progress and possibility on this ancient home of our species as humans.
All this is to say that the pattens and processes of political, economic, social, cultural, and ecological change across the continent will continue to vary reflecting the volatile constellation of regimes, socioeconomic conditions, and social movements. Overall, having lived in Kenya, which doesn’t represent all of Africa, of course, I’ve become less defensive or dismissive of critiques that used to rankle me when I lived in the diaspora. It’s partly because I haven’t had to live with the daily dehumanizing assaults and indignities of racism. It’s also because I confront the huge developmental and democratic deficits of a postcolonial society on a daily basis.
I’m appalled by the crassness and corruption of the elites that have infected the entire society, creating debilitating ethical deficiencies. I’m disheartened by the tribalism, sexism, xenophobia, and intolerance I often see. However, I’m also encouraged by the indefatigable work of the human rights, environmental, and gender equality activists. I’m deeply moved when I see young people anxious to learn, honest people who fend for their families against great odds, ordinary people who are fascinated to meet me as a foreigner and are curious about my country of origin and what I think of their country.
It is in this maelstrom and messy mix of social, economic, cultural, and political realities that the future of Kenya is being constructed, contested, and recreated every day, week, month, and year. Our challenge as scholars, progressive scholars, is to understand our societies, truly understand them, and help craft new and empowering languages of hope, change, and transformation.
I certainly look forward to taking more control over the rhythms of my daily life, getting enough sleep, and indulging in my favorite pastimes of eating out, walking in parks, traveling, attending arts shows from musical and theater performances to visiting art galleries and museums in different cities and countries. Particularly endearing will be the opportunity to spend more time with my family.
So I’m likely to be very busy, but I expect it to be a different kind of busy, one whose pace I’m at greater liberty to set, and whose demands and consequences are more limited compared to the exactions of being
VC!
What are your plans after you’re done being Vice Chancellor at USIU-Africa?
Being VC has been one of the great highlights of my professional life. It is the apex of the university system. It has been exhilarating to contribute to institutional growth and transformation and the lives of faculty and staff, although employees are always critical of administrators, and especially to make a difference in the lives of the thousands of students who have studied at USIU-Africa during my tenure. In fact, it’s for students that many of us do what do, why we entered the academy in the first place, to educate and enlighten young people, prepare them for lives of professional success, personal satisfaction, and civic engagement as ethical citizens. In that sense, higher education for me is not a job or just a career that has provided me a living, which of course it has, but a special calling, a sacred vocation
In so far I had a life before I became a VC, I’ll of course have a life after I leave the position. I’m not one of those people who wishes to serve on and on. We’ve enough trouble with our political leaders or corporate chief executives who hate and flout term limits believing they’re indispensable. No one is. Actually, the higher your position is in a country or an organization the quicker you’ve to be replaced if anything happens to you. So I believe it’s good to leave when you still have the energy and inclination to do something else, to reinvent yourself.
Thus, I very much look forward to the time I leave the position of Vice Chancellor. It will be going back to the future, to more robust teaching and learning, research and scholarship, public service and engagement than I’ve been able to do as VC, indeed as an administrator since 1994. I’ve several unfinished book projects and a whole range of new ones that have been kept in my mental drawers. Given my extensive and diverse administrative experiences and knowledge of higher education I also think I’ve a lot to contribute to mentoring younger faculty and administrators in a particular institution or institutions, as well as think tanks and consultancies on universities including those in Africa.
I certainly look forward to taking more control over the rhythms of my daily life, getting enough sleep, and indulging in my favorite pastimes of eating out, walking in parks, traveling, attending arts shows from musical and theater performances to visiting art galleries and museums in different cities and countries. Particularly endearing will be the opportunity to spend more time with my family.
So I’m likely to be very busy, but I expect it to be a different kind of busy, one whose pace I’m at greater liberty to set, and whose demands and consequences are more limited compared to the exactions of being VC!
Thank you, Toyin, for this invaluable opportunity to reflect and share my personal, professional, intellectual, and political life and passions.
PART B
INTERVIEW ANALYSIS AND REFLECTIONS BY TOYIN FALOLA
African Universities and African Future: The Meeting Point
Humans are special not only because they live in the present or are bound to the past but also because they have the ability to create the future using their current or past experiences as tools in the recreation process. The human past and their present are the two most important materials that can be used to anticipate what the future would be. Moreover, because humans can provide the necessary information required to predict what could come later, they make conscious efforts and choices to mitigate potential havoc that can come with the unknown future. Concerning their past experiences, the African present has been a product of their compromised past, even though the future can be unpredictable because nature can sometimes be complex to understand. Despite our inability to make accurate predictions about the African future, however, we are convinced that the future of Africa exclusively rests on the investment they make in education, university education precisely. The exactitude of our prediction is not up for debate because the relations between education and the development of a people is not something to be contested. Education molds individuals and the academic environment where they are nurtured and developed to use their latent talent to their advantage and society’s benefit.
In essence, the future of Africa and the African universities are mutually dependent because quality education or a substandard one would always be assessed based on how a society thrives or the direction they move. Thus, while education is critical to the continent’s future, the form and quality of education produced and shared to the people, which is largely dependent on the investment made into the education sector, would reflect what positions they are in the comity of nations. Every African would always envision a great future for the continent because they have suffered substantial dehumanization and experienced unmatched cultural deracination in the last one thousand years, but the prospect of success cannot be achieved through wishful thinking. Success is the concrete result of consciously invested efforts. This means that if Africans fail to invest their energies and resources into what would ensure their financial, political, cultural, and social emancipation in the future, they may continue to experience the usual stagnation that has cast doubts on their individual capacity to bring about desired changes.
To understand Africa’s probable future, Paul Zeleza discusses the challenges that face African universities, and then touches on those opportunities that lie ahead. In-between, he recommends the needed solutions that will catalyze their progression. There may be questions such as: “What are the impending challenges that frustrate African universities from being at par with their contemporaries in other parts of the world?” Zeleza gave a very educative insight into the ravaging challenges facing African tertiary institutions, banking on his professional experiences and academic sagacity. Very incisively, he identified ten key dimensions of the challenges and opportunities that can be associated with the African universities: institutional supply, financial resources, human capital, research output, physical and technological infrastructures, leadership and governance, academic cultures, quality of graduates, patterns of internationalization, and global rankings. In the order of chronology, these are elucidated in what follows.
One of the inhibiting challenges choking Africa from meeting up with the contemporary time is the reduced enrollment figures in their universities. And because people are not enrolled in these institutions, the number of university institutions available in Africa cannot be compared to those available in other continents. Therefore, the huge institutional deficit associated with African schools has been a notorious impediment for rendering African universities valuable to their social demands. Other continents make provisions for their people to acquire education at all costs so that they would produce vibrant individuals who would use their intellectual competence to develop a formidable civilization. Ironically, Africa is one of the continents that produce youths in a geometrical capacity. Regrettably, however, they have not made adequate preparation for the enrollment of the demographic bulge into their university education system because of the paucity of institutions. More sardonic is that in the post-independence period, private universities outnumber public-owned institutions in Africa, yet they are unable to proffer solutions to this enduring problem. These statistics show the diminishing interest of the government to invest in education.
Next is financial resources. This has remained a mountainous clog in the wheel of the progress of African universities. Generally, fundraising sources for African universities are strictly underwhelming, and the existing ones are losing their strength. Universities are created either by an individual or by the government establishment; however, the funding of schools is a collective responsibility. Philanthropic donations, government financial interventions, internally generated revenues, among others, are the usually known sources for African institutions, and the condition is even compromised by the fact that they do not flow as expected. The challenges persist in the understanding that private universities that have more numbers of universities depend on mono-source income generation—the tuition fees. Different factors are responsible for this problem. Most of the successful alumni of African universities, both private and public, have a questionable source of wealth and would not be involved in the project of supporting their alma mater because of the fear of public backlash or criticism. However, once schools can get adequate funding for their establishment, it would influence students’ intake.
Similarly, Zeleza addresses human capital in relation to African universities. He argues that the reduction in the production of Ph.D. candidates contributes largely to this scourge. The average number of Ph.D. graduates produced in some African countries cannot match what is produced in a single university in some American universities. Interestingly, people are aware of this development and see African universities from a different perspective. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the lack of energy from Ph.D. graduates drains the enthusiasm of people interested in pursuing a greater academic certificate, and the discouragement is evident in the lack of adequate personnel to handle some departments or courses in these African universities. Consequently, many facilities and departments are not available in these universities, which has combined to produce the weak academic output associated with African schools in contemporary times. In addition to this challenge is that the teachers, who should have been physical evidence of the usefulness of academics, are poorly remunerated. In essence, upcoming Africans do not see them are models to follow but as roads to pass through in their process of becoming.
Research output follows. Research and development records from data statistics in Africa show a woeful performance when compared to other continents. There is a progressive decline in the quality of research investment by the government (and even non-governmental organizations), and the domino effect this has on the development of a competitive university education cannot be overemphasized. Not producing researchers comes with very devastating consequences, including the revalidation of the Eurocentric biases that Africans are epistemologically weak to contribute to global solutions to intransigent challenges. This results in the indirect affirmation of the assumption that Africans deserve continuous colonization by “stronger” civilizations. The inability to produce researchers who would provide effective solutions to the myriad challenges confronting Africa has necessitated their overdependence on importing abstract ideas and concrete productions from the international community.
In addition to the already long list of challenges facing the continent, physical and technological infrastructures are twin challenges on the verge of consuming the continent holistically. It is practically cringe-worthy to realize that African universities lack dependable infrastructure that fits into the contemporary academic market, and this situation is compounded by the ubiquity of technological poverty in the Ivory Towers. From a distance, the available infrastructure in many African universities is proof of sapped and poorly managed erections that cannot function according to the modern requirements of a knowledge production center. A university is naturally expected to be where people go to for ideas and reinvigoration of their individual philosophy, and in situations where the physical appearances of the inherent infrastructure are woeful and bad, it does not only show the indecent disconnection between the government and education generally, it discourages all potential academics from embarking on that project of pursuing education. Although the world is investing heavily in ICT, the African university managers do not even consider this as a second thought.
As it is generally known that leadership and governance are directly important to the actualization of a people’s dreams, the lack of a purposeful one is a stumbling block. The African university sector faces a big problem today because of the poor leadership and governance demonstrated at their highest offices. Quite similar to what obtains at the political domain of many African countries, the cancer of tribalism has been very infectious in recent time, and its location of damage is the African universities. Even when the Public Service Commission chooses the administrators of these universities, the arbitrary tribal politics of ensuring that the administrator of a university comes from the school’s geographical location has crawled its way into the system, and the results are eternally foreboding. For the most part, it creates a culture of division unsuitable for the enhancement of egalitarianism where qualified individuals are offered decent opportunities to serve in administrative positions. Members with the executive authority poorly understand the principles and practices of representational leadership to select these candidates, and their poor knowledge usually costs the quality delivery expected of a university.
One rather unfortunate problem that is least expected to expand its ugly territory into the school environment is the horrible academic culture of discrimination in contemporary times. Sexism is still a common problem in African universities, xenophobia still looms large, misogyny is a perpetual crisis, sexual harassment has continued to surge high, and ethnocentrism has practically escalated in unexpected geometry. The combined consequences of these can be very worrying because they create a divisive atmosphere not suitable for learning. Closely linked with this is the corporatization of African universities, which places unhealthy pressure on administrators to seek financial alternatives under stringent conditions. If this is the case, shared governance would be impossible and will continue to frustrate efforts to produce desired outcomes in academic engagements. Essentially, the cleavages of division along gender, religious, ethnic, and cultural lines should be managed and adequately considered in the scheme of things if Africa wants to move forward. Promoting inclusion would facilitate a spiral development expected within the academic community in order to provide necessary solutions to the counterposing challenges.
Also, the quality of graduates produced in African universities contributes to the issues on ground. It is bewildering that quite a number of graduates produced in these universities in modern times lack the requisite skills needed for the transformation of the economy. Their condition is worsened because they are rendered dysfunctional by the inability to change the economic environment to their taste through opportunities creation. As this is the situation, the effects show in the growing numbers of unemployed graduates, leading to the underemployment of the products that have passed through the academic system. It becomes a source of worry for intellectuals because when employability remains a nagging problem, the dwindling economic system of the continent will remain its brainchild. Employability should not be measured by salaried employment but by the ability to solve problems in an environment where there are chains of opportunities that will come through problem-solving. In essence, employability is the ability to be contextually innovative about and be responsive to the challenges of the environment to undertake these opportunities to one’s advantage. However, this is a problem in Africa because the produced graduates are of lower academic quality.
It is important to note that the patterns of internationalization have always been another notorious challenge and, ironically, a prospect for African university education. At the inception of the colonial enterprise, there are troubling agitations that Africans have an epistemological deficit, and as a result, they must be educated in the Western way. This is despite the fact that university education in the continent spanned more than a millennium ago. Thus, the sets of universities built by Westerners, especially during the colonization era, imported their content and academic culture into the African environment, making these universities reliant on the West. It would eventually be deciphered that its sustenance is impossible because such education institutions condemned African knowledge episteme. Hence, decolonization became the next wave of activist actions in the post-independence era. Meanwhile, rather than uprooting the western influence on these universities entirely, they can force a productive synergy between the forces of internationalization and indigenization, where it would be possible to build universities that would be global in approach while being rooted in African epistemology.
According to Paul Zeleza’s final analysis, African universities’ global rankings prove that the continent still has a long way to go. Even when there is a consensus that such rankings validate already institutionalized bias, it does not excuse the fact that these African countries are underperforming in their statutory duties. For African universities to attain the position of respect, it becomes imperative that they improve their productivity of excellence and place a premium on quality assurance. Despite the growing politicization of the education industry, the academic stakeholders should develop the appropriate strategies to save the continent from the claws of political jobbers who have no understanding of education’s cardinality and its centrality to communal development. These universities should draw inspiration from the understanding that Africa has produced graduates with valuable content in the past and that these products are exceptionally fine in their different countries of residence today, which means that quality can actually be achieved. Once the university education system in the continent is allowed to run independently, it would usher in a restorative agenda that would catapult the continent to its deserved position.
Although there is substantial evidence that the African future is doomed and defies redemption, the fact remains that predicting the future based on these circumstances can be erroneous. This is because nature continuously proves humans wrong with events that defy scientific predictions in recent times. For example, the world’s scientific community could not predict something as socially reconfiguring and economically re-constructing as Covid-19, whose emergence has changed the traditional methods and systems of several people and nations. As pointed out by Zeleza, humans can continuously engage their present situation, analyze them, and make projections based on the findings already done by the people in the academic community. However, what should be resisted is the temptation to predict with exactitude what would happen to a people in the future. This is outrageously dangerous, and there have been unsuccessful efforts in the past to predict the African future. The crux of the matter is that these predictions cast some level of doubt and create fear in the people, preventing them from achieving their potentials maximally, even when these predictions are eventually wrong.
Paul Zeleza believes that the continent’s future rests substantially on the investment in the education system, especially the tertiary institutions. Corruption in the public domain must not be allowed to spread into the academic community as this would have a substantial effect on the educational culture of the continent. More regrettably, if the tentacles of corruption are allowed to spread to the intellectual community, corrupt practices and the moralization of decadence would be restrategized because intellectuals would have created morally appealing reasons for perpetrating corruption. Meanwhile, the products that graduate from these corruption-infested intellectual societies would be unleashed to function in different public positions. The resulting afflictions of this scourge would be the declination of ethical standards of the society and the promulgation of substandard products that are incapable of challenging global academic excellence. In effect, the African dream would be very difficult to achieve in such an atmosphere. Scholars are meant to be solution providers to the myriad of challenges facing the society, and when they do not function maximally in this capacity, there is a deficit somewhere.
The writer is a Researcher with the Peace Operations and Conflict Management Programme at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI)
Female peacekeepers from South Africa on patrol in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. July 2021. Credit: MONUSCO/Michael Ali
STOCKHOLM / THE HAGUE, Aug 4 2021 (IPS) – The first year of the Covid-19 pandemic saw wide-ranging impacts on multilateral peace operations.
The crisis simultaneously affected all operations, host nations, headquarters and contributing countries. It caused major disruption—from the political-strategic level where mandates are drawn up, down to the operational and tactical levels.
Operations were forced to adapt in order to preserve continuity as far as was possible. While some of the effects of the pandemic are clearly reflected in the data—most notably in mission mortality rates—others are not.
For example, SIPRI data on personnel deployments cannot always capture delays in troop rotations or whether mission personnel were evacuated or working remotely for part of the year.
However, there is some evidence that Covid considerations did affect deployments, as is noted below.
Operations close in Guinea-Bissau and Sudan
There were 62 multilateral peace operations active in 2020, the same number as in 2019. The largest share of these (21) were conducted by the UN. Regional organizations such as the African Union (AU) and the European Union (EU) and alliances (such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, NATO) together conducted 36 operations. Ad hoc coalitions of states conducted 5 peace operations in 2020.
Two small operations in Guinea-Bissau closed in 2020. One was conducted by the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): the ECOWAS Mission in Guinea-Bissau (ECOMIB), the other by the UN: the UN Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau (UNIOGBIS).
One other operation that closed during the year was the AU–UN Hybrid Operation in Darfur (UNAMID), which was launched in 2007. UNAMID had deployed between 20 000 and 25 000 international personnel at its height in 2009–14, and it still deployed around 6500 in 2020.
A small political mission based in Khartoum, the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in the Sudan (UNITAMS), opened on 1 January 2021.
UNAMID’s closure is a landmark in contemporary peacekeeping. It is the fourth major UN peacekeeping operation to close since 2017; the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) and the UN Operation in Côte d’Ivoire (UNOCI) both closed in 2017 and the UN Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) in 2018.
Only seven operations comprising more than 5000 international personnel were still active at the start of 2021, and no operation deploying more than 1500 international personnel has been launched since 2014.
The AU Military Observers Mission to the CAR (MOUACA) was authorized in July 2020 to help monitor implementation of the agreement.
The EU Advisory Mission in the CAR (EUAM RCA), mandated to support security sector reform, had been established in December 2019 but was not launched until August 2020. Both operations have an authorized strength below 100 international personnel.
The AU Mission in Libya, the third new operation, was established by a decision of the AU Assembly in February 2020 to ‘upgrade’ the AU Liaison Office in Libya ‘to the level of mission’.
The Covid-19 pandemic seems to have complicated the deployment and build-up of these operations. In fact, while EUAM RCA was up and running at the end of 2020, albeit not at full capacity, there is little public information available on the status and activities of MOUACA or the AU Mission in Libya.
The latest edition of SIPRI’s Map of Multilateral Peace Operations shows all operations active as of 1 May 2021—including some that are outside the scope of SIPRI’s definition, such as the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) against Boko Haram, the Joint Force of the Group of Five for the Sahel (JF-G5S) and the EU Naval Force in the Mediterranean Sea (Operation Irini).
Personnel deployments fall
The number of international personnel deployed in multilateral peace operations globally fell by 7.7 per cent, from 137 781 in 2019 to 127 124 in 2020.
This was the largest year-on-year decrease since the drawdown of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan in 2012–14. Around 87 per cent were military personnel, roughly the same proportion as in 2019.
Almost two-thirds of the deployed personnel in 2020 were serving in UN peace operations (66 per cent on average over the year). Almost three-quarters (74 per cent at the end of the year) were deployed in sub-Saharan Africa (both UN and non-UN operations).
The number of personnel deployed in UN peace operations globally and in multilateral peace operations (UN and non-UN) in sub-Saharan Africa declined for the fifth year in a row.
Both had peaked in 2015–16 following a period of rapid growth driven by the establishment of major operations in CAR and Mali and the expansion of major operations in Somalia and South Sudan.
The number of personnel deployed in UN peace operations fell by 2.4 per cent between 2019 and 2020 (from 88 849 to 86 712), reaching its lowest level since 2007.
Meanwhile, the number of personnel deployed in multilateral peace operations in sub-Saharan Africa decreased by 3.4 per cent (from 97 519 on 31 December 2019 to 94 201 on 31 December 2020), reaching its lowest level since December 2012.
Women continued to be under-represented among multilateral peace operations personnel in 2020, as reported in a SIPRI publication prepared for the 20th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security last year.
Afghanistan: The end of NATO deployments imminent
The development that contributed most to the net reduction of peace operations personnel deployments last year was the agreement reached on 29 February 2020 between the United States Government and the Taliban on the withdrawal of all US forces from Afghanistan within 14 months.
Due to the subsequent drawdown of most US troops, the NATO-led Resolute Support Mission (RSM) shrank from 16 551 to 9592 personnel over the course of 2020.
The RSM was launched on 1 January 2015 and was mandated to train, advise and assist the Afghan National Security and Defense Forces following the departure of ISAF, which had been active from 2001 to 2014.
The new operation was originally supposed to end on 31 December 2016, but it was not until April 2021 that NATO leaders formally announced their intention to terminate the RSM. The decision came shortly after US President Joe Biden had ordered the withdrawal of the remaining US troops from Afghanistan by 11 September 2021.
As a result of the withdrawal of most US troops from the RSM, the USA started 2020 as the second largest troop contributor to multilateral peace operations (after Ethiopia) and ended the year as the tenth largest.
Fewer blue helmets killed in action, more by illness than in previous years
In 2020, UN peace operations lost 78 uniformed personnel, 13 international civilian personnel and 32 local staff. The fatality rate for uniformed personnel was 0.9 per 1000.
This was noticeably higher than in 2018 and 2019, but around the average for the period 2011–20.
Despite this, the rate of hostile deaths (i.e. deaths caused by malicious acts) among uniformed personnel was at its lowest since 2011, at 0.15 per 1000.
This decline could conceivably be partly an effect of the pandemic, for example because peacekeepers were not able to patrol as much as usual or were otherwise less exposed to the risk of violence due to pandemic-related restrictions.
Meanwhile, the number of deaths due to illness among international and local personnel in UN peace operations in 2020 was almost double that in 2019 (83 compared to 42), with most of these deaths occurring between June and September 2020.
This difference is almost certainly linked in large part to the Covid-19 pandemic and its impacts, which contributed to a record number of deaths across the UN during the year.
UNITED NATIONS, Aug 2 2021 (IPS) – Ed Koch, a sharp-tongued Mayor of New York city (1978-89), once stopped short of using a four-letter word to denounce the United Nations.
Instead, he opted for a five-letter word dismissing the UN as a “sewer” relegating it to the lower depths of degradation.
In a bygone era, some of the most vociferous rightwing, conservative US politicians never ceased to denounce the world body primarily because of a rash of UN resolutions condemning Israel for human rights violations in the occupied territories or for resolutions mis-perceived as anti-American.
The late Senator Jesse Helms, a Republican chairman of the powerful US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, once said “providing funds to the UN was like pouring money into a rat hole.”
“I disagree with the premises upon which the United Nations is built and with the illusion that it propagates,” Senator Helms, said in a letter to the World Federalist Association. “It would be one thing if the United Nations were just an international side show, but it plays a greater role. It is a vast engine for the promotion of socialism, and to promote this purpose the U.S. provides a quarter of its budget,” he said.
Helms, said he has long called for “our country’s departure from this Organization, and vice versa.”
Charles Lichtenstein, a former U.S. Deputy Permanent Representative to the U.N. Mission, once said he would urge members of the United Nations to move out of New York if they did not like the treatment they were receiving in the United States.
Helms — with tongue firmly entrenched in cheek — said he would join Lichtenstein in waving goodbye to U.N. member- states “as they sail away into the sunset.”
When the 193-member UN General Assembly elected some of the so-called “repressive regimes” as members of the Human Rights Commission (later the Human Rights Council), Congressman Dana Rohrabacher (Republican of California) hollered: “The inmates have taken over the asylum. And I don’t plan to give the lunatics any more American tax dollars to play with.”
And more recently, former President Donald Trump not only decried multilateralism and challenged the effectiveness of the world body but also dismissed it as “a club for people to get together, talk and have a good time.”
Trump pulled out of two historic international agreements: the Paris climate change agreement and the nuclear deal with Iran.
But things have dramatically changed since he was ousted from the White House— and the US is gradually returning to the UN, whose primary home is New York, even though most of its agencies are based outside the US, including in Geneva, Rome, Vienna, Paris, Bonn and Nairobi.
The administration of President Joe Biden, which took over from the Trump administration about six months ago, has not only returned to multilateralism but has also pledged to re-engage both with the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in Paris.
Additionally, the US has agreed to restore funding to the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), both of which suffered funding cuts under Trump.
Last April, the Biden’s administration said it plans to provide $235 million to Palestinians, restoring part of the assistance cut by Trump. Two-thirds will go to UNRWA, which has suffered a financial crisis since it lost $360 million of US funding in 2018.
In 2016, UNFPA received $69 million in funding from the U.S. And in July 2019, UNFPA expressed concerns over US withholding funds for the third consecutive year The Biden administration is expected to restore US funding.
Former US Secretary of State John Kerry, accompanied by his grand-daughter, signs the Paris Agreement at UN headquarters in April 2016. Credit: UN Photo/Amanda Voisard
Penny Abeywardena, Commissioner for International Affairs at the Office of the New York city Mayor Bill de Blasio, welcomed the move by the United Nations to gradually return to near-normal after a 16-month pandemic lock down.
She said “the UN General Assembly has for decades been a staple of Fall in New York and as Host City to the UN, we have always been proud to welcome the international community who gather here”.
Kul Gautam, a former UN assistant secretary-general, told IPS the whole world, including the United Nations, breathed a sigh of relief at the advent of the Joe Biden administration in the US, following four years of the erratic and unpredictable Donald Trump presidency.
Mirroring Trump’s “America First” bravado, his senior diplomatic team, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Ambassador Niki Haley showed little regard or diplomatic finesse in dealing with the complex issues high on the UN’s agenda, he pointed out.
Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton had so little respect for the UN that as the US Ambassador to the UN, he had once proclaimed that if the UN Secretariat building in New York “lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” said Gautam, a former deputy executive director of the UN children’s agency UNICEF.
Similarly, his Trump-era successor Niki Haley told a Republican National Convention that the “UN was a place where dictators, murderers and thieves denounce America, and demand that we pay their bills.”
Gautam said in contrast to the Trump-era narrative of the UN being a largely bureaucratic and profligate anti-American organization, dominated by China and Third World countries, the Biden administration quickly proclaimed that “America was back” at the UN and would provide constructive leadership and support a multilateral approach to solving the world’s most pressing issues from COVID-19 to climate change.
Not only is Joe Biden himself a seasoned statesman in international affairs, said Gautam, but his senior aides, including Secretary of State Tony Blinken, UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan and Special Envoy John Kerry are all consummate diplomats who believe in multilateralism.
Mandeep S. Tiwana, Chief Programmes Officer at CIVICUS, a global alliance of civil society organizations (CSOs) , told IPS the United States played a key role in establishing the UN Charter who’s opening words, ‘We the Peoples’, mirror the opening words of the US Constitution. Eleanor Roosevelt stewarded the drafting of what is arguably the UN’s finest achievement – adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
“The Trump administration’s disdain for the UN devalued these historical achievements. Traditionally, the United States has been a supporter of rights and democratic values at the UN as core pillars of its foreign policy,” he said.
The Biden administration’s commitment to re-engage at the UN is being welcomed by many in civil society working to challenge discrimination and oppression, he said, pointing out, that it’s a step in the right direction for people-centered multilateralism which lies at the core of the UN’s founding.
Tiwana also said the Biden administration has an opportunity not just to repair the damage of the Trump years but to demonstrate commitment to laying the ground work for the ambitious advancement of justice, equality and sustainability for future generations.
Gautam said while Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was severely constrained from taking some bold initiatives during his first term due to fear of the veto-wielding and chest-thumping Trump administration’s non-cooperation, he should, in his second term, feel more empowered to act more decisively to push for the kind of bold vision he outlined in July 2020 in his Nelson Mandela Lecture: “Tackling the Inequality Pandemic: A New Social Contract for a New Era”.
The early and quick gestures of the Biden administration rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization, the UN Human Rights Council, funding for UNFPA and COVAX and paying outstanding US arrears to the UN peace-keeping budget are all encouraging signs, he noted.
“The ball is now in Guterres’ —and his senior management team’s– court to harness the potential of the Biden administration’s goodwill to assert UN’s proactive role to help tackle the most pressing global challenges of our times”, said Gautam, author of “Global Citizen from Gulmi: My Journey from the Hills of Nepal to the Halls of the United Nations” (Nepalaya Publications 2018)
Thalif Deen, Senior Editor and Director at the UN Bureau of Inter Press Service (IPS) news agency, is the author of a newly-released book on the United Nations titled “No Comment -– and Don’t Quote Me on That.” Peppered with scores of anecdotes-– from the serious to the hilarious-– the book is available on Amazon worldwide. The link to Amazon via the author’s website follows: https://www.rodericgrigson.com/no-comment-by-thalif-deen/
