Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. "Leveraging Africa’s Global Diasporas for the Continent’s Development", African Diaspora 11, 1-2 (2019): 144-161, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/18725465-01101002

The paper analyses some of the challenges that undermine more productive engagements between the diasporas and their countries or regions of origin. The paper concludes by focusing an academic initiatives that aim to strengthen the project of engaging African diasporas for Africa’s sustainable development, namely, the Carnegie African Diaspora Fellowship Program.

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Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “Obama’s Africa Policy: The Limits of Symbolic Power.” African Studies Review 56, no. 2 (2013): 165–78. http://www.jstor.org/stable/43904934.

The election of Barack Obama as the first African-descended president of the United States in 2008 was greeted with euphoria in the U.S. and around the world, including Africa. Little, however, changed in the substance of U.S.–Africa relations. This underscores the limits of the symbolic politics of race and presidential personalities in the face of the structural imperatives of U.S. power and foreign policy in which African interests remain marginal and subordinate to U.S. interests. The article explores the structural contexts of foreign policymaking in the United States and what might be expected from the second Obama administration.

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Zeleza, Paul Tiyambe. “Africa’s Struggles for Decolonization: From Achebe to Mandela.” Research in African Literatures 45, no. 4 (2014): 121–39. https://doi.org/10.2979/reseafrilite.45.4.121.

This essay commemorates the large historical lives of Chinua Achebe and Nelson Mandela, both of whom died in 2013. It is noted that the nature of African and world reactions to the deaths of the two men undoubtedly reflected their different biographies, the relative valuations of the political and the artistic in the popular imagination, the oscillation of ideas and action in the praxis and political economy of social struggle, and the assorted demands and terms of literary and political combat. It is argued that underlying the different remembrances were the thick braids of the twists and turns of modern African history, of the continent’s struggles for the triple dreams of African nationalism—decolonization, democracy, and development—that intersected the lives of the two men. Achebe’s and Mandela’s significance arises out of the manner in which their stories embodied and bore witness to Africa’s protracted drama for historical and humanistic agency, for the reclamation, reconstitution, reaffirmation, and self representation of Africa and its peoples from the existential, economic, and epistemic violence of Europe that began with the depravities of the Atlantic slave trade and intensified with the depredations of colonialism. Also, their lifetimes reflected the profound complexities, contradictions, and changes of colonial and postcolonial Africa, the development of African worlds—its cultures, arts, polities, economies, societies, and ecologies—out of the interconnections, intersectionalities, and intertextualities of Africa and Europe, as well as Africa and the world mediated by the diaspora and globalization. The essay explores the historical journeys and meanings of Achebe’s and Mandela’s lives placed in the expansive context of African nationalism. In this intriguing story, their two countries bookend each other.

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Olukoshi, Adebayo O. “Beyond the State : Nigeria’s Search for Positive Leadership.” Ibadan, Nigeria: Ibadan University Press, 2005.

This book was commissioned as part of a research project, located in the Centre for Social Science Research and Development, an independent research organisation based in Ikorodu, Nigeria, with the intention of building knowledge about positive leadership in Nigeria. Supported by the Ford Foundation, it is part of a global initiative to encourage a diversified understanding of leadership beyond State and public actors, giving prominence to new ideas, and recognising leaders in various communities whose work have contributed to positive social change.

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Olukoshi, Adebayo O. “Economy and Politics in the Nigerian Transition.” African Journal of Political Science / Revue Africaine de Science Politique 5, no. 2 (2000): 5–29. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23495078.

This essay is an attempt to offer a general overview of the range of political and economic problems that served as the context for the transition to elected forms of governance in Nigeria after some sixteen years of military rule. These problems, even where they did not originate in military rule, were exacerbated by the years of political exclusion, chicanery, and repression as well as the continuing decline in the national economy and deep-seated corruption associated with prolonged military rule. It is suggested that a serious-minded effort at tackling these problems and the kinds of success recorded will be central to the viability of the Fourth Republic and the restoration of the confidence of the populace in public office holders. Several of the problems that need redressing are of a "nuts and bolts " kind and the fact that they arose at all is indicative of the depth to which Nigeria sank during the military years; others are far more profound and challenge the very basis on which state-society relations as well as nation-territorial administration are presently constituted. Whether basic or profound, they will tax all the commitment and leadership qualities of the elected politicians of the Fourth Republic.

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Olukoshi, Adebayo. “African Scholars and African Studies.” Development in Practice 16, no. 6 (November 1, 2006): 533–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/09614520600958116.

This article focuses on the development of African Studies, principally in post-1945 Europe and North America, and its counterpart in post-independence Africa. African Studies enjoys an increasingly close connection with bilateral and multilateral development co-operation, providing research and researchers (along with their own conceptual frameworks and concerns)to assist in defining and providing direction for aid and related policies. This is leading to unhealthy practices, whereby African research is ignored in the formulation of international policies towards the continent; while external Africanists assume the function of interpreting the world to Africa, and vice versa. This dynamic reinforces existing asymmetries in capacity and influence, especially given the crisis of higher education in most African countries. It also undermines Africa’s research community, in particular the scope for cross-national and international exchange and the engagement in broader development debates, with the result that those social scientists who have not succumbed to the consultancy market or sought career opportunities elsewhere are encouraged to focus on narrow empirical studies. This political division of intellectual labour needs to be replaced with one that allows for the free expression and exchange of ideas not only by Africans on Africa, but with the wider international community who share the same broad thematic and/or theoretical preoccupations as the African scholars with whom they are in contact.

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