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Intellectuals in politics

 

From generation to generation, a segment of the society has always concerned itself with the business of public debate and advancement of specific position on topical issues.

 

This segment of the society is known for its analytical and deeply persuasive agglutination of problems and prescription of solutions to contemporary concerns. In most cases than not, they have often served as springboards for radical social changes with enduring implications.

 

Most times, they serve as social change agenda-setters through vigorous pursuit of a new cause and an agitation to reinvent and innovate from an unworkable experience. Where they are not professional academics themselves, they help to kick-start academic conversation around issues they seek to put in the front burner for public discourse.

 

Historically, dating back to the Classical Age, Socrates and his students, especially Plato who was reputed for his rigorous appraisal of public concern in a deeply philosophical and academic manner, were deeply concerned with public affairs as intellectuals. Plato’s The Republic clearly attested to the role of a public intellectual in a polity.

 

One of the favourite quotations that is often associated with Plato in The Republic is his riposte that:

 

“Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils – no, nor the human race, as I believe, – and then only will our State have a possibility of life and behold the light of day – Plato (427-347 B.C.)” There is no doubt that Socrates was a thought-leader, a public intellectual and a philosopher who had a tremendous influence on his contemporary society and beyond.

 

Plato, his student who helped to record most of what is known of Socrates devoted much of his attention to the challenge of intellectual content in the administration of Athens. In fact, the word “Academy” came to be known as we know it today, because of the Academy he founded in the olive grove of Acamemus where he propagated the Pythagorean ideology he came about in Sicily.

 

Aristotle who served his tutelage under Plato went on to further expound the many subjects of enquiry which had engaged the attention of his academic forebears. He is remembered for giving academic definitions and distinctions to many of the enduring field of academic studies as we know them today.

 

The two of them are mostly celebrated for their influence on western thought and philosophy which are the pillars upon which western systems are erected. Even though Plato was deeply interested in the politics of his time, especially the circumstances that led to the execution of Socrates, he vigorously spoke against democracy but advocated a system of government which he propagated in his book, Plato’s Communism, where he argued that only the well informed in the society should be involved in the affairs of State. In other words, Plato believed only the well-educated and public-spirited intellectuals should be in charge of the governance of the people.

 

While this is definitely inconsistent with the universal suffrage and popular representation that we have today, it only headlines the importance that was attached to public intellect in the society. In other clime and during another epoch, intellectuals have not only served as moral compass and conscience, they have played pre-eminent roles in the political life of their country.

 

In Great Britain, for instance, John Donne (1571-1631) a celebrated metaphysical poet, lawyer, theologian, priest and social critic was also a public intellectual in government as he served as a diplomat, Member of Parliament and Secretary of the Lord of the Keeper of the Seal in the government of the United Kingdom. John Milton was an excellent poet, public servant and more importantly, the father of freedom of speech during his time. His critics were wont of calling him an acrimonious and surly republican because of his opposition to monarchy and vehement advocacy for republican ideology. Edmund Burke (1729-1794) was another great poet and social commentator who was also a distinguished Member of Parliament. Another great example is Richard B. Sheridan (1751-1816), a playwright and politician. He was not only a socialite, public commentator but one of the finest parliamentary debaters of his era. In the United State of America, founding fathers such as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison were vociferous campaigners against British government policy in the American colonies. They used the instrumentality of public intellectualism

 

such as pamphleteering, debates and ideological propagation to give the New World the constitutional and governmental system that has become the pride of the United State of America.

 

This tradition also manifested in the colonial Africa as many of the forerunners in the anticolonial movements were first and foremost, public intellectuals who mobilised their compatriots through debates, conferences, writings, and other forms of public campaigns.

 

Many of the founding fathers were either teachers, lawyers or journalists – professions that were historically associated with public intellectuals because of the proximity of their profession to public spheres where they could influence opinion as moral agents. Notable among these public intellectuals were Herbert Macaulay, Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana among others.

Similarly, you had such other Nigerian nationalists who were public intellectuals and politicians. Chief among them are Chief Obafemi Awolowo, a first class thinker, ideological intellectual, prolific writer, stenographer, lawyer, businessman and publisher; Dr. Russel Aliyu Barau Dikko, first medical doctor from the North,

 

former minister, public affairs mobiliser and one of the founders of Northern People’s Congress; Sir Tafawa Balewa, whom Time Magazine of London of November 10, 1958 described as a scholarly parliamentarian because of his unequalled eloquence and brilliance and Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, an engaging orator, prolific writer, journalist and publisher.

 

These great forerunners fit into the definition of public intellectuals in politics. In Ekiti, where scholarship and learning are highly valued, many of our political leaders of notable reckoning were mostly recruited from the classroom.

 

So, we are a society that pays great values on academic achievement and celebrate intellectuals in leadership. In the First Republic, we had great men such as Chief Joel Babatola, a distinguished educationist and towering personality and Chief Oduola Osuntokun, another teacher who was a First Republic Minister.

Professors Banji Akintoye and Sam Aluko, renowned historian and economist and public intellectuals were some of the eggheads that defined and gave the ideological identity to the Unity Party of Nigeria.

 

In fact, political leadership recruitment in Ekiti had always drawn from the academia. In the Second Republic, out of the three senators that represented Ekiti, two were university lecturers. Prof. Banji Akintoye and Prof. David Oke; the third person, Senator Ayo Fasanmi was a renowned pharmacist. Dr. Bode Olowoporoku, a university teacher, was a minister in 1983.

 

In recent time, Prof. Tunde Adeniran and late Prof. Babalola Borisade were ministers of education from Ekiti, they served in the government of President Olusegun Obasanjo. They represent some of the academic intellectuals that have held political positions in recent times.

 

So, we have always had them in public office and at the risk of sounding immodest, yours sincerely, standing here before you, is another eloquent proof of this tradition. Intellectuals and political participation As noted by Thomas Sowell (2011), the work of the intellectuals is based on certain principles – of logic, evidence and perhaps moral values or social concerns.

 

But the most important duty of an intellectual is to serve as a thinker, a visionary, a gatekeeper, a mobiliser and a watchman.

 

He is therefore, ultimately a social philosopher who is able to aggregate and distil complex contemporary challenges and proffer workable solutions, some of which may be far reaching and revolutionary.

 

It must, however, be pointed out that intellectuals do not just abstract isolated opinions on public concerns, some of which are not even apparent and discernible to the everyday person, they opine based on their conceptualization of the prevailing reality by digging into both historical and longitudinal analysis of contemporary challenges, sometimes from the benefit of scholarship or from the force of logical intuition.

 

The first duty of an intellectual is to problematize conflicting forces of thoughts and to coalesce them into an organic definition that clearly identifies areas of convergence and divergence.

 

He diagnoses the insets, outsets and the subsets before providing a prognosis which the agency of state will be expected to adopt for the progress of all. Sadly, however, intellectuals often fall into the danger of the impunity of caste binary and social piety which goad them into wanting to do nothing than excogitate probable formula to articulated problems without wanting to be stained with the brush of practical politics.

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Intellectuals in politics

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