Elites and the Enlightenment: Reflections on the Question of Progress in Contemporary Nigeria By: Prof. Wale Adebanwi

Metropolitan Club 60th Anniversary Lecture, Lagos, Nigeria, 15 October, 2019.

The President of the Metropolitan Club, Alhaji Femi Okunnu, CON;
Elders of the Club;
The Chairman of the 60th Anniversary Sub-Committee, Chief Gilbert Grant;
Distinguished Members of the Metropolitan Club;
Distinguished guests:

INTRODUCTION
I am honoured by the invitation to give the 60th Anniversary Lecture of this
distinguished Club. Before today, I had the privilege of entering this premises only once.

About one and half decades ago, the illustrious accountant and a notable member of this club,
Basorun J.K. Randle, invited me to join him for lunch at the club. I came here with mild
trepidation about what to expect at lunch with the elite of the Nigerian elites – those, at that
time, I considered to be aristocrats and plutocrats. As a member of that endangered species
called the middle-class in Nigeria, I wondered if partaking of lunch with those that the late
Chief K.O. Mbadiwe would describe as “men of timber and calibre,” was an act of class
betrayal. Yet, as a student of society, particularly one who studied the elites, I thought that a
peep into the hallowed halls of the exclusive club might give me a better insight into the
nature of networking among an important faction of the Nigerian super elite. I might even
end up studying the club in the future, I thought. So, as commanded, I suited-up and headed
for this premises. Though I concluded that there must be a secret room that was out of bounds
to non-members where the real conclave met to decide the fate of the rest of us, I enjoyed a
most sumptuous and free lunch!

Mr President, I am yet to confirm that there is indeed a secret groove in this premises,
but I suspect that by being invited to give the 60th anniversary lecture, I am getting closer to
sighting the door that leads to that groove – or not.
Yet, in a sense, I can claim a measure of affinity with some members of this club. A
significant number of the earliest and current members of the club were or are Oxbridge
alumni. In fact, I feel privileged to note that your second president, the late Hon Justice

1 Adebanwi is the Rhodes Professor of Race Relations, Director of the African Studies Centre and Fellow of St 
Antony’s College, University of Oxford, UK.


Atanda Fatayi Williams, and I are both alumni of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Unfortunately,
that is where all our connections end. While he was a distinguished member of the Body of
Benchers, I have been benched for most of my life.
Let me congratulate the President and members of this noble club on your anniversary. Though you are not the oldest of such clubs in Lagos, there is no doubt that the Metropolitan Club is unique among the clubs in Lagos, and for that matter, in Nigeria. As a club that seeks to reflect the highest values of high society in this most unparalleled conurbation called Lagos, that the Metropolitan Club has survived for 60 years despite the peculiar devastations to sociality wrought by the vicissitudes of Nigeria’s political history, is a testament to the vision, tenacity, and integrity of its founding fathers and those who have sustained this tradition for six decades.

Oloye J.A. Obafemi Olopade, your former president stated in his short history of the
club: “The founding fathers of The Metropolitan Club… were gentlemen some of whom had
spent their formative years in the United Kingdom and had attended very good public schools
and institutions of higher learning and [had] mixed freely and related with some English families. These gentlemen must have imbibed the English culture.

As a result of this, they felt that a Club solely for Gentlemen was of necessity, particularly also as the early politicians [had] taken over the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club. Late Sir Adetokunbo Ademola in his wisdom rallied round some of his colleagues and friends both Black and White to be founders of the
Club we now enjoy today.”

The precepts on which the club was founded and the spirit that has defined the club
over the last six decades demonstrate why the club was so named. Apart from denoting a city
or urban area, the word “metropolitan” is also associated with such words as “sophisticated,”
“cosmopolitan,” “knowledgeable,” “advanced” and “enlightened.” All of these are fitting
attributes of the members of this club. Also the synonyms of your club’s name partly explain
why I have decided to speak to you today about “Elites and the Enlightenment” – while reflecting on the question of progress in contemporary Nigeria.

I want to reflect on the unique and crucial role of the elites within the early Enlightenment movement in Nigeria and the Enlightenment itself – writ large. I do this with the consciousness that, as Roy Porter has noted, “it would be folly to hope to find in the Enlightenment a perfect programme for human progress.

”2 Yet, despite some of the dark 
 2 Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment’, The Guardian, 12 Jun 2001.
sides of the Enlightenment, as the Nigerian philosopher, Olufemi Taiwo,3
reminds us, the 
heritage that constitutes modernity today is to be found in the Enlightenment, as characterised 
by three core elements: subjectivity, reason and progress.

With your kind permission, Mr President, I will like to take you briefly into history; a specific kind of history of the elite formation in Lagos, particularly in terms of the intellectual and political reflections of that elite formation in relation to the question of the Enlightenment. And especially as this elite formation, your forebears and/or predecessors,
reflected and reflected upon what it meant to be human, to have agency, to be rational and
progressive in the context of late 19th and early 20th century state and society which were
being swallowed up by colonial rule.

 I will draw on their reaction to the aborted project of Enlightenment in Abeokuta in the late 19th and early 20th century. Specifically, I want to
point to how the elite in Lagos, those that preceded you, exhibited an evangelical commitment to human liberty, even under conditions of widening colonialism; and spoke truth to power in their visionary battle for human progress. I want to use this as a backdrop to reflect on the role of elites in the context of the Enlightenment. I do this not merely to fantasize about the past or valorise the past, but to remind you of your heritage and to
challenge you to reflect on that heritage in the context of the struggle to remake and perhaps
re-generate what many still consider as the illegitimate political geography imposed in the
heart of Africa by Frederick Lugard.

Another reason why I chose this theme is that the earliest founders and leaders of this club were not only reflections of the career of the Enlightenment in Nigeria, some of their families straddled the career of, and the struggles around, the Enlightenment project in both Lagos and Egbaland in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I am speaking specifically of the late Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, who was the son of Sir Oladapo Ademola, described in your 50th anniversary brochure as “the enlightened Alake of Egbaland,” and whose mother was the elder sister of Sir Adeyemo Alakija – one of the most distinguished Lagos lawyers of the first half of the 20th century, as well as your third president, Chief (Dr) M. A. Majekodunmi, a
Lagosian who hailed from a well-known Egba family.

The choice of this theme is also to serve as a reminder that the multi-pronged battle to
create a more humane polity, one that is wedded to the philosophical conviction of the sanctity of human life, the value of freedom and the inalienable right to self-rule, particularly
in this space called Nigeria, is not new. This battle preceded formal colonial rule but was
intensified from the instant that colonial ramparts were being constructed in the different
parts of what became amalgamated Nigeria. This is particularly true of this great city, Lagos,
which even by 1863, had been described by the British adventurer, Richard Francis Burton,
as the ‘the Queen of West African settlements.’4 The second colonial Governor-General of Nigeria, Hugh Clifford, also acknowledged Lagos in the second decade of the 20th Century as a city that possessed “the most active life and thought of the country,” and a city where the“activities [of government] are exposed to the closest scrutiny and criticism.”

It is not a mere coincidence that among your ranks in the Metropolitan Club is the grand child of one of the members of a group of Lagos elites that opposed the Water Rate Act imposed on the so-called “natives” to bring piped water to only Europeans in early 20th century. This group of Lagos elites also toured Yorubaland to encourage agitation against Governor Frederick Lugard’s plan to declare all land as the property of the government. I am speaking of Dr John Kehinde Randle, a medical doctor who graduated with a Distinction in Medicine from the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1888, and his grandson, Basorun J.K. Randle, who is flying the flag of that illustrious family today.

The Randles’ example is one of many examples of the long tradition of the Enlightenment and commitment to public good that this club represents. Those who preceded you, though they were not organised under a club such as this, were, like you, some of the most committed to the elaboration of public good and the creation of a decent society in late 19th and early 20th Century Lagos. But the specific elite that I will like to use in reflecting on the legacy of the Enlightenment in Lagos are the elite of the newspaper press in late 19th and early 20th centuries Lagos. I want to focus on their re-articulation and reaffirmations of the
legacies of the Enlightenment in their battle against retrogressive colonial rule imposed by Frederick Lugard, when Lagos, and eventually the rest of Nigeria, was unfortunate enough to have him as the first Governor-General of amalgamated Nigeria. I want to use this to recast the Biblical question: If the foundation is faulty, what can the elites do?

That Lugard hated Lagos and the enlightened elite – I am being deliberately tautological – of the city is no longer news. Why he hated your predecessors is what has been unnecessarily debated by those who still have a problem with the positive career of modernity in Nigeria’s history. When he arrived Lagos to resume duties in 1912, that is, two years
before formal amalgamation, Lugard described the Lagos elites in a letter to his wife, Flora, in these terms: “I am somewhat baffled as to how to get in touch with the educated native….

4 Wanderings in West Africa: From Liverpool to Fernando Po. London: Tinsley Brothers, 1863.


To start with, I am not in sympathy with him. His loud and arrogant conceit are distasteful to
me, the lack of natural dignity and courtesy antagonise me.”5 Can anyone who was open to
the Enlightenment project in such a city as Lagos say this of the likes of Richard Beale Blaize
of the Lagos Times, J. Blackall Benjamin of Lagos Observer, Owen Emerick Macaulay of the
Eagle and Lagos Critic, John Payne Jackson, his son, Thomas Horatio Jackson, both of the
Lagos Weekly Record, George Alfred Williams of the Lagos Standard, James Bright Davies
of the Nigerian Times, Ernest Ikoli of the African Messenger, and Herbert Macaulay, of the
Lagos Daily News?

The educated elite in early 20th century Lagos so dismissed by Lugard were the same people whom his predecessor, that is, the Governor of the Colony of Lagos and the hinterland Protectorate, Sir William MacGregor (1899-1904), had described in these terms: “The great majority of the civil servants are natives of the country, some of whom have been educated in the Colony, others in England and elsewhere.” Also, as mentioned earlier, Lugard’s successor, Hugh Clifford, described these same people as responsible for ensuring “the most active life and thought of the country,” and ensuring that government was exposed to the “closest scrutiny and criticism.” Contrary to the “enlightened” position of his predecessor, MacGregor, upon resumption of duties in Lagos, Lugard told his wife that “My policy…was
the very opposite of MacGregor’s…”

6 Why this contrasting view of the Lagos elite by Lugard and MacGregor as well as Clifford?

I want to provide a snapshot of this, so as to draw some lessons on the career of the Enlightenment, the historic struggle for modernity and the role of the Lagos elites in reflecting on the question of progress in Nigeria. I am also doing this to remind you of your heritage and to challenge you again not to abandon that heritage even as a critical few in very powerful positions are struggling to return Nigeria to the Lugardian era of contempt for the
intellect and opposition to the warm embrace of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

What I want to describe briefly before reflecting on the past, is part of a two and half decades of my research, the many dimensions of which will be too long to describe here. But it is sufficient here is to point out how the difference between a retrogressive ruler such as Lugard and a progressive one at the foundation of Nigeria, such as MacGregor, can provide some illumination on the history of the present.

5 Letter to FL on 10 October, 1912, Perham, Lugard: The Years of Authority, 1898-1945, p. 389.


Lugard did not want for Africans, in this case, Nigerians, the kind of modern evolution that is embodied in the philosophical postulates of the Enlightenment. He wanted Nigerians to be trapped in tradition, or the traditions he invented and sought to use as a means of subjection. He didn’t recognise the subjectivity of Africans; in fact, Lugard never imagined them as subjects but as objects of history. For him, human agency in this part of the world, was only for the perpetual project of subjection and not subjectivity. This was why he so hated the elites who were most vociferous not only in embracing modernity and
championing freedom, but in exercising their agency by choosing freely among old and new
customs, institutions and practices, as Taiwo has suggested.

 Rather Lugard wanted Africans trapped in their past, and where that past didn’t exist in the manner that was serviceably to his imperial imagination, he invented some traditions and cloaked them in the garment of the past. Lugard held back those who wanted to move forward and pull others along to
modernity; he pushed back the bearers of the Enlightenment ideals and imposed stultifying
ordinances that slowed human progress and weakened the foundations necessary for building
a progressive, modern polity in the heart of Africa.
Nothing signified Lugard’s retrogressive attitude as much as the Indirect Rule system.

As Taiwo has argued, Lugard “actively opposed and stridently denigrated African views and
preferences”. Added Taiwo, “Indirect rule was a euphemism for an orchestrated effort to
stop Africans from choosing modern forms of life and, by so doing, give the lie to the
preconceived … idea that Africans were too primitive to appreciate those modern forms.”
Thus, in leaving intact, or inventing traditions of “native rule”, where no such rule existed, he
helped to consolidate or ossify, “modes of governance that were not necessarily congenial to
the development of institutions that are considered some of the most important gains of modernity.”

The global career of the Enlightenment which began in Europe in the 18th century took a uniquely African flavour in the West Coast of Africa in late 19th and early 20th century.

This was especially so among the intellectuals and elites in Lagos, Abeokuta, Freetown, Accra, Moronvia, to mention the most significant centres of local elites reflections on the question of modern progress and the future of Africa. As it has been said of their precursors in Western Europe, the intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment in Lagos, “regarded themselves as a courageous elite who would lead the [African] world into progress from a long period of doubtful tradition.”

This was the background to the context in which Lugard arrived in Lagos in 1912 as Governor General of soon-to-be amalgamated Nigeria.

The Present History of the PastOn September 6, 1914, the Governor-General of colonial Nigeria, Sir Frederick Lugard, abrogated the 1893 treaty which guaranteed the independence of Egbaland, the only such independent entity within the boundaries of any colonial state in British West Africa.

Egbaland, located in what became the Southern Protectorate in 1900, had been guaranteed its
autonomy in the treaty signed with the British Crown. This remained so under the Egba United Government (EUG) until Lugard revoked the autonomy after he became the Governor-General of amalgamated Nigeria in 1914. Lugard, who I.F. Nicholson11 has succinctly described as a man who had a “talent for clothing naked oppression in the
garments of liberty and progress”, later imposed the Indirect Rule system on Egbaland.

Earlier, Lugard had extended this system of rule to the rest of Nigeria after the initial experimentation in the Northern Protectorates.

Prior to the abrogation of the independence of Egbaland, local African intellectuals operating the leading newspapers in the West coast of Africa, particularly in what had become the colony of Lagos, were much gratified by the autonomy of Egbaland and were full of praise for the Egba government which combined the traditional institution of the Alake with a modern administration led by the educated elites of Egbaland. But it placed some limitations on the powers of the king, which Lugard didn’t like.

 The late respected historian, Professor Saburi Biobaku, describes the precursor of the Egba United Government, that is,the Egba United Board of Management,12 which was established in 1898, as “a unique experiment in enlightened self-rule.”
13 The E.U.G. was recognised by the British Government and it was the only legally-existing city-state in Nigeria that survived colonisation of Nigeria in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Biobaku adds that, “The history of the Egba ensured for them the alternative of self-rule, which could endure only by the co-operation of the
traditional chiefs and the rising middle class of Egba ‘Saro’ and successful indigenous
 entrepreneurs.

10 The Editors of Encyclopeadia Britannica, “Philosophe: French Intellectual”.
11 1969: 146.
12 See Agneta Pallinder-Law, “Aborted Modernization in West Africa? The Case of Abeokuta.” Journal of 
African History, xv, I, 1974: 65-82.
13 Biobaku, p 98.

The E.U.G. was the first genuine attempt at a federal constitution, but the elements were more diverse in 1898 than they had been when the fragmentary federations emerged in the Egba Forest…. All efforts to evolve a stable government failed until 1898 when the first truly federal constitution emerged.”

The EUG was built over the years on the model of the Lagos colonial government and
supported by the Governor of Lagos, Sir Hector MacCallum. When Lugard visited Abeokuta
in December 1912, the Egba Government already had a Secretariat, it directly recruited British officials, it had a “printing press, official gazettes, water-works, roads, and much of the essential forms of modern government.” As a historian concluded, “These arrangements, so much more business-like than any Nigerian local government was to see again for many years, were a grave offence to Lugard’s eyes.”

Mr President, distinguished guests, when the devastations wrought by bad and wrongful leadership in Nigeria lead some to question whether we can self-govern or whether people like you can run a modern, efficient state, it is important to remind them that your predecessors already answered this question conclusively, even in the early modern era, as the EUG experience ably demonstrates. It was Lugard who destroyed, at infancy, this experiment in modern self-government, which was encouraged by his predecessors in Lagos.

The loss of this “independent native state” in Abeokuta became a critical issue which attracted the attention of the Lagos elite and their newspapers and sparked a controversy, and
eventually, violent riots in Abeokuta. Even seven years after the abrogation of the independence of Egbaland, the Lagos Weekly Record in a historic editorial series, still described the abrogation as “Foul Tragedy.”

Indeed, most of the educated people in the West Coast of Africa regarded the independence of Egbaland, in light of the widening net of colonization which most parts
Africa were experiencing, as “a certain special symbol.”17 The Lagos Standard, in 1898
confessed that “A wishful smile plays across our face at the mention of the fact that the Egba
kingdom stands alone today, the only independent native state in this part of West Africa,” while the Lagos Weekly Record noted 15 years later, that is, in 1913, that “Abeokuta [the capital of the Egba city-state] is sailing as a self-dependent barque on the ocean of politics,”

14 Ibid, p. 99.
15 Nicholson, p. 199.
16 “The Abeokuta Muddle and the Evolution of Native States,” (Editorial), May 7-14, 1921. The editorial was 
part of a series of editorials that ran for a few months, entitled, “Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin or A Critical 
Review of Sir Hugh Clifford’s Address to the Nigerian Council.”
17 Fred Omu, Press and Politics in Nigeria: 1980-1937. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1978: 216
18 Lagos Standard, Feb. 23, 1898.

adding that “we in Lagos take a special pride in the autonomy and progress of the Government of Abeokuta as demonstrating to the world at large the resources for self￾government… possessed and practiced by the Native and sincerely pray that nothing may ever happen to weaken that autonomy or hinder that progress.”

But Lugard was sworn to hinder that progress. As Nicholson has noted, the progress that Lugard witnessed in Abeokuta among the natives was an offence to him. How could this people be self-governing in such an efficient matter as to give a lie to the racist tropes that “recommended” the colonial enterprise in the first instance? Lugard’s mission was neither to raise the standards of the other parts of the protectorate to that of the best in the geography, nor to facilitate the process of the embrace of modernity by encouraging the move towards self-government.

 Rather than encourage the least developed, the least modern part of the amalgamated territory to embrace the Highest Common Factors (HCF) of modernity, he worked hard to ensure that the most developed and the most enlightened parts of the territory dissolved into the Lowest Common Multiple (LCM) – to use mathematical analogies which help us to identify the difference between a multiple and a factor.

 To drive home the analogy, in the project of amalgamation, of the colonial integration of two territories, we could say that rather than move the rest of Nigeria into the future, that is, towards the advancement already evident in Abeokuta and Lagos in late 19th and early 20th centuries which was led by the modern elites,Lugard wanted to return Lagos, with its vibrant public sphere and independent press, and Egbaland, with its independent government and vibrant modern native leadership, to the past. He sought to stultify their progress, and reduce them to the level of the least developed parts of the British realm. To borrow mathematical terms, I would say he sought
to, and largely succeeded, in reducing the highest factors (the HCF) to the lowest multiple
(the LCM).

The Lagos elite saw through Lugard’s chicanery. The Lagos Standard therefore described the Egba riots against direct taxation imposed by Lugard as “the substratum of deep distrust” resulting from the abrogation of the independence of Egbaland and “the disruption in the pattern of social, political and administrative life consequent upon the introduction of the Lugardian Indirect Rule, forced labour and its effect on the farm economy and the
introduction of direct taxation.”

 The Indirect Rule system which Lugard helped to
formulate, and later articulated in his book, The Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa

19 Lagos Weekly Record, March 22, 1913, emphasis added.
20 Omu, 1978: 218.

(1922), articulated a system of “native rule” in African colonies because he believed that
Africans were too far below the hierarchy of races to “benefit directly from the laws, justice,
or education fit for Europeans, so incorporating these principles into colonial practice would
thus be unsuccessful and lead to insolence.”

The Lagos Standard and other radical newspapers understood Lugard’s duplicity and what they regarded as his anti-Enlightenment stance. They recognize his aversion for Africans, particularly the modern elites, especially those based in Lagos, who had embraced the Enlightenment and were eager to deploy the institutions and discourses of modernity to expand the liberty of their people, ensure the evolution of their existing institutions and develop new institutions and new practices which had emerged since the contact with
European missionaries and merchants in the West Coast of Africa.

Lugard did everything hecould to discourage the ascendancy of these educated elites and “modernists” especially those who refused to become what the West African Pilot would later describe as “imperialist pets”by submitting themselves totally to the dictates of their colonial overlords. This class of modernists who embraced the ideals of autonomy, freedom and reason, among others, was mostly represented in and by the newspaper press.

 This is how Lugard described them in a letter to his wife on 9 December, 1916: “These people here are seditious and rotten to the core… the people of Lagos are the lowest, the most seditious and disloyal, the most prompted by pure self-seeking money motives of any people I have met.”

This was his reaction to the rejection by the people of Lagos led by the elites, of “his autocratic tendencies… his desire to reduce the people to submissive slavery… [his] destruction of the judicial system… the reduction of the embryonic Parliament [which he inherited from the Government of the Colony of Lagos and the Southern Protectorates] to the status of a municipal board… and then the direct taxation, the abolition of Egba independence, the quarrel over the imposition of the Oba of Lagos…[and] a proposed
censorship of the press.” Each of these, concluded I.F. Nicholson in his important book, The Administration of Nigeria: 1900-1960, “was a proof to the educated elites of Lugard’s despotic tendencies.”23 Even the colonial office doubted the veracity of the reports that
Lugard sent to London and his competence.24 When Lugard first asked the Secretary of States
for the Colonies, Lewis Vernon Harcourt (after whom Port Harcourt was named), to

21 Babbitt and Campbell, Racism and Philosophy, 1999: 7, in Taiwo, 2000.
22 In Perham, p. 594.
23 P. 208.
24 Nicholson, p. 208-209.


introduce direct taxation in the South and for a draft law to control the Lagos press, Harcourt
dismissed the first request as “a ludicrous suggestion in such a crisis as this”, and the second
request, as “a positively grotesque idea.
”
Against this background, the Lagos elites, particularly those operating the progressive
newspapers, were glad when Lugard retired in 1918 as the Governor-General of colonial
Nigeria. Though it was his successors who had what has been described as “the herculean
task of cleaning out an Augean stable of administrative chaos, after eight years of one-man
rule without any proper central machinery of government,”26 it was the Lagos elite who had
the last word on what they described as “an inglorious administration.”

 The Lagos Weekly Record described the Lugard era for the Egba people as “the dark curtain that enshrouds the historical annals of Egbaland” about which the people “must bow their sorrowing heads
whilst the injustice of the questionable abrogation of their national independence still fills their troubled breasts with bitter rancour.”

Mr President, your predecessors regarded Lugard, at best, as a poor representation of
the advancement exemplified by the British concept and practices of modernity, including
good governance, freedom, justice and equity. On June 19, 1918, the Standard editorialized
that, “There is not the slightest doubt that the administration of Sir Frederick Lugard is very
unpopular among natives of this part of Nigeria…. Ordinances upon Ordinances have been
passed… native freedom under British law restricted….” It was not surprising that the Lagos
press reported “great excitement” by the people when Lugard left Nigeria. “The community
was thrown into ecstasies of delight and the newspapers mirrored the public mood,” writes
Fred Omu.

It is significant that when most of the newspapers operated by the leading elites and
intellectuals in Lagos reviewed the Lugard years, they did not find specific fault with
(European) modernity per se. Rather, they concluded that Lugard was the anti-modernist, a
relic from the imperial past who was opposed to the advancement of other races. Barely a few
days after Lugard departed Nigeria, the Lagos Weekly Record29 editorialized that his rule
“constitutes not only a standing disgrace to the cherished traditions of British colonial policy
in West Africa but also a positive libel upon the accepted principles of British culture”. “Sir
Frederick is a huge failure,” added the Record. “[He is] a hopeless anachronism… the victim

25 Ibid, p. 213.
26 Nicholson, p. 218.
27 LWR, May 7-14, 1921, p. 5.
28 1978: 219.
29 February 1, 1919.

of exaggerated personality…. Opinionated, unswerving from a purpose if even it be irrational
when it was once formed, and brooking no interference with his imperious will….”

The paper continued:“Sir Frederick flagrantly disregarded the sage advice of those who were in
sympathetic touch with the natives and paid the greatest courtesy to those satellites who…
flattered his reactionary schemes and wild ambitions with the result that he found himself
enmeshed in a series of blunders and violent misrule which constitutes the indelible stains of
his inglorious administration….”

The Record expressed the hope that Lugard would be “the last of military governors to disgrace the annals of British Colonial history in West Africa” and that with his departure, the “Nigerian System” (based on Indirect Rule) which he had imposed, “will be consigned to the limbo of oblivion where embedded in the historical strata of British imperial colonization it will exist as the [fossilised] remains of an administrative experimental failure.”

Mr President, if some of the phrases in the early 20th century editorials written by the Lagos elite in describing Lugard’s rule sound familiar to you in the present; perhaps the past still haunts us; in fact, may be the past is confronting you again in the present: you, the successors of those who wrote these brilliant lines of rebuke. The past comes to you today demanding to know what you plan to do about its legacies which are troubling the present
and threatening to destroy the collective future of the distorted and deformed political geography that Lugard imposed in this part of the continent. Let me remind you of the relevant phrases from the editorials describing Lugard and his regime and ask whether they have any resonance for you in the present: “hopeless anachronism”, “victim of exaggerated personality,” “unswerving from a purpose if even it be irrational when it was once formed,”
“brooking no interference with his imperious will,” “disregarded the sage advice,” “paid the
greatest courtesy to those satellites who… flattered his reactionary schemes,” “enmeshed in a
series of blunders and … misrule.”

Distinguished guests, like individuals, political geographies can be lucky or unlucky.
Though what they make of the luck or ill-luck can be a critical commentary on the ruling
elites, it is important to recognise the role of accident or chance in the foundation of nations.
The role of “ifs” is something that we who are students of society love to consider as we
examine history and the affairs of nations.

30 Record, March 20, March 27, & August 7, 1920.

I will not go into the details of so many elements that did not recommend the despotic
Lugard for selection as the “amalgamator” of Nigeria. It is sufficient to state here that if the
forward-looking and progressive and less self-interested former Governor of Lagos Colony,
MacGregor, had been healthy enough and had been given the task of amalgamation, perhaps
we would be living in a different, most likely happier, country today. Perhaps the weak, anti￾modernist foundation that Lugard built would rather have been a strong, progressive and
modernist foundation which would have been the greater pride of the black race. But I will
return to what we have made or can be made of this terrible legacy.

Among many examples, if you compare the record of MacGregor31 to that of Lugard
in relation to colonial violence, you will see the weight of history that you carry in the
present. While Lugard has on his record a series of massacres in response to the Tiv revolt,
Satiru revolt, and in Hedeija32 as the Governor of the Northern Protectorate and the massacre
in response the Ijemo riots as the Governor General of amalgamated Nigeria, Macgregor
boasted that “I have not shed a drop of blood in Africa” though, “I have given a new trend to
government there… Lagos is the only colony we possess there that has had no war since I
went out, I alone can travel without a great military escort to the most remote corner of the
territory.”

When I say that a MacGregor rather than a Lugard as amalgamator would most likely
have produced vastly different results and a different country, I am not making a mere
allusion to what would have been or romanticising a wish. Rather, I am pointing to the
possibilities of an alternative past based on foundational human agency. I do this to suggest
the possibility of an alternative future organised around critical forms of agency. And this is
one of the core reasons why I have taken you on this historical excursion. As some historians
have pointed out, Lugard’s “decisions as amalgamator were aimed at the destruction of his
predecessors’ achievements in establishing a rational and modern system of
administration.”

While MacGregor, a successful administrator who had been an health
officer and had won distinction for his work on tropical diseases, was “ready to consult the
governed on all occasions, to stress their desire for liberty and independence, and to show I do not mean to present MacGregor as a “liberator.” It is in comparison to Lugard in the project of Empire
that he appears preferable. For instance, in 1900, MacGregor abolished the subsidy that the colonial government gave to the Lagos Weekly Record because of John Payne Jackson’s “vigorous opposition to the government.”

See Omu, p. 34.
32 See, Nicholson, footnote 2, p. 149.
33 Nicholson, p. 304.
such ingenuity in finding new ways of making contact”,34 Lugard, the soldier, listened only to
his own counsel. The work of modernity by preceding administrators such as MacCullum and
MacGregor “were obliterated, partly by Lugard’s own actions in the period 1912-1918.”

More important is Lugard’s the near-obliteration of the work of modernity by the “native”
elites in Lagos, some of them your progenitors – as the example of J.K. Randle shows – but
all of them, definitely your predecessors.

Distinguished guests, the mistake of 1914 was not the amalgamation, as Sir Ahmadu Bello famously stated; the mistake was the selection of a retrogressive imperial agent to lead the enterprise of amalgamation at its foundation. Lugard was neither interested in building a strong, modernist country with transformational structures, nor in putting the most enlightened and the most competent people, both “natives” and even colonial officers, in charge. Thus, in terms of both structure and agency, Lugard ensured at the founding of
Nigeria that the country had limited chances of meeting the manifest common destiny of its
incredibly talented population led by the most visionary faction of the national elite.

 He looked to the past and not to the future; he ostracised the elite who were wedded to progress
and the radical transformation of the country into modernity; rather, he embraced retrogression and a tunnel vision.

Even Lugard’s boss in London, the Assistant Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, R. L. Atrobus, once expressed regret that either MacGregor or Moor, the latter was the Governor of Southern Protectorate based in Calabar, was not given the job of “opening up” Northern Nigeria.

 Atrobus wrote that, “Sir F. Lugard has many good qualities…. But he is not a prudent or far-seeing administrator, his schemes are not well thought out….”

 And as Nicholson stated, “In any bold enterprise of this kind which the British Government undertook in Nigeria, in 1900, mistakes in the selection of men to carry out the task were certain to occur. Lugard was the most serious of these mistakes; not only was the first mistake (when he was appointed the Governor of the Northern Protectorate) not fully or
openly corrected, it was committed again, in 1912”
– when he was selected to undertake the
work of amalgamation. I am sure that in contemporary times, you can all relate to fatality of
repeated mistakes.

34 Ibid, p. 50.
35 Nicholson, p. 305.
36 Nicholson, p. 156.
37 Minutes on C.O. 446/40, dated 16 Sept. 1904, quoted in Perham, p. 190.
38 Nicholson, p. 305.


This is the ruinous legacy of Lugard that you as the elite have inherited. So, I ask again, if the foundation is faulty, what can the elite do?
First, let me reiterate that what is critical about the short history I have retold, particularly the responses by the Lagos elite to Lugard’s atavistic policy and project, is that it constitutes a reminder of your heritage; including the fact that the elite position that you have succeeded to is one whose dominant and most trenchant faction has always embraced the Enlightenment and mobilised its key logics, institutions and possibilities in ensuring
unceasing progress.

My excursion into this history is also to remind you that the Lagos elite – which includes Lagosians in the broadest sense of the term that emerged from the early 19th century have always felt that it is their manifest destiny to advance and defend the cause of the Enlightenment in Nigeria, and indeed in Africa. It is not for nothing that the Metropolitan
Club’s Rule 2 (a) states that “the Club is a social club of gentlemen who are at present and are likely (in the future) to continue to be major contributors to the progress of Nigeria."

The kind of progress you have in mind is not the type that Lugard envisaged for Nigeria. The kind
of progress that your founders had in mind was one that harnessed the best of the past and
projected them towards a constantly evolving present and a progressive future. Again, that,
distinguished members of the Metropolitan Club, is your inheritance. And that is what you
must continue to champion even as you pass on the torch to other generations.

The succeeding generations will remember you too as we remember those who stood
up to the retrogressive colonial administrator today. But how will you be remembered?

As those who merely enjoyed their wine in their exclusive clubs when the neo-Lugard returned
to power or as those who mobilised their strategic advantages to advance the career of the
Enlightenment in Africa?

I hope I am able to challenge you about the present darkness and its implications for the future of Nigeria. How can an elite who are heirs to the enlightened, visionary and competent men who ran and intellectually defended an independent and efficient city-state in the context of colonialism in the late 19th and early 20th century surrender its patrimony to internal colonialism? How can a history and polity which have produced such accomplished people as all of you here be appropriated – or more appropriately, be misappropriated – by the kinds of embarrassing rulership that Nigeria has had since independence? Why is it that, to focus on the most recent past, since 1999, and despite the gallant struggle that eventuated in democratic rule, not one of those who actually fought for democratic rule or invested their imagination, efforts and resources in a vision of a developed, efficient, effective modern state
has emerged as the president of Nigeria? Why have you surrendered this embarrassment of riches that is Nigeria to the most embarrassing among the factions of the national elite?

I leave you with the answers. However, I will now conclude by turning to what can be made of this dual heritage in the age of the neo-Lugard. I say dual heritage, not to mimic Lugard’s much-vaunted “dual mandate”, but to point to, on the one hand, the debilitating heritage of a weak foundation with
structural errors that you have inherited as elites, and on the other, your proud heritage of resistance to autocracy and bad governance and embrace of the legacies of the Enlightenment which I have described in the title of my lecture as progress. Thus, because of Lugard’s “dual mandate”, you have a “dual heritage”; one facing the past, the other facing the future.

 The challenge is which one will you embrace in the long term?

Neo-Lugardian Era and the Future of Nigeria
There is no doubt that Nigeria faces serious and urgent structural challenges which constitute threats to humane civilisation.

“It has been jokingly suggested by some members”, writes Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora in your 50th Anniversary brochure, “that Nigeria would be better managed if it was handed over to the Club.

[The Metropolitan Club] members certainly have the necessary experience and the expertise. What they may lack is the political savvy. But in general, most members of the Club are apolitical and shy away from the rumble and tumble of politics.”39
Everyone cannot be a politician. In fact, most people should not be politicians. But when the survival of the polity is at stake, is it in the enlightened self-interest of critical sections of the elite to remain disconnected from the political process?

Mr President, distinguished guests, while billions of dollars from oil revenue are lost to theft, corruption, waste, inefficiency, ineffectiveness, and sheer lack of vision, millions of your compatriots live in conditions of Hobbesian degradation. As I speak, Leah Sharibu is being held captive by some terrorists and serially assaulted in conditions of bestiality. Her crime is her refusal to renounce her faith. But her original crime was that she woke up one morning and went to school as a girl! Leah was abducted by the Islamic State of West
African Province (ISWAP), a breakaway faction of Boko Haram, along with over 100 of her
classmates from the Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi, Yobe state,

39 “The Story of the Metropolitan Club,” by Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, p. 29.

on 19th February 2018. In October 2018, ISWAP announced that Leah will be kept as “a
slave for life.” This is just one example of the heavy human costs of the structural fatalities
that was inscribed into the building of Nigeria and the intellectual and moral aridity of its
ruling elites, past and present.

Mr President, distinguished members of the Metropolitan Club, as I speak, your compatriots are drowning in the Mediterranean in an attempt to escape from the Lugardian contraption; they are being immolated, assaulted and/or chased out of South Africa by their fellow black Africans for whom Nigeria expended huge resources to ensure their freedom from apartheid; Nigerians are being harassed and humiliated at different entry ports around the world because they carry the burden of the green passport.

How can any people who value human freedom and human dignity allow this to continue as if it were normal; as if it were the fate of those who were born in Nigeria to suffer in this way? Why do those who have been given the privilege of high office proceed as if nothing is amiss? And why do you acquiesce as if you have no capacity to do something about the ongoing devastations to
human freedom and human dignity?

Let me confess that I make what some might regard as a dubious assumption that it is possible to create a liveable, workable, just and equitable democratic state from the mess that we inherited from Frederick Lugard. I understand the frustrations of those who think otherwise; those, who, like the late foremost novelist, Chinua Achebe, have concluded that the house that Lugard built on weak foundations has fallen already and that there is nothing left to salvage. But I come from a tradition of praxis; with infinite trust in the capacity of
human beings to rebuild.

This is why I will end this lecture by returning to that contentious national debate
about Nigeria’s future, as the most crucial way to proceed in our national conversation led by
people like you. While the idea of restructuring has been maligned in some quarters as the
battle-cry of those who do not believe in “one Nigeria” – or of those who want to take power
from those who it rightly or wrongly belonged to – as I stated at recent workshop in Abuja,
there is a consensus among the discerning elite in Nigeria that this is not the country that we
all have the capacity to build.

 We can do better than this as a people. We can produce a much more capable leadership. We have the capacity to build a greater country. But to build such a country – forget about a nation for now – we do not even have to reinvent the wheel. The
path forward has been outlined in multiple forums. That vision of modern, efficient, effective,
transformational and progress-infused state and society was already articulated by your


predecessors in the late 19th and early 20th century and rearticulated by others in mid-20th
century Nigeria.

But the again, while one may not agree, one can understand the frustrations of those
who insist that this house cannot long endure and that those who seek to save it from collapse
labour in vain. Indeed, if this house endures as it is, it will only do so as a predatory, injurious
entity sustained by the pillaging by a few to ensure the ruin of the rest. After a century of the
amalgamation, it is clear that if Nigerians want to live in a humane society and an egalitarian
state, the most crucial and the most urgent question that we need to address is if, why and
how Nigeria can survive. I recognise that this debate – including the attendant mild or
fervent separatist agitations – have taken on particular inflections since the late 1950s,
including recently, with the ascendancy of an unrepentantly exclusivist order marked by its
contempt for national consequences.

There have also been strident voices against this agitations for a remaking of Nigeria.
Whether this search for a humane, truly democratic, just, equitable and progressive polity
took on the language or practice of Nigeria as ‘a mere geographical expression,’ ‘the mistake
of 1914’, the failed secession, ‘the national question’, ‘the excision of [some]states’ from
Nigeria, ‘confederation’, ‘true federalism’, ‘secularism,’ ‘sovereign national conference’,
‘constitutional conference’ or ‘restructuring’, there is no doubt that most enlightened
Nigerians agree that this is not the kind of country that we have the capacity to build and
sustain. Anyone who think Nigerians cannot do better than this is ignorant about Nigeria’s
immense human resources in relation to which the country’s natural resources should even
count for far less.

A lot has been said about leadership – particularly about the quality of leadership in
Nigeria. But as we have witnessed since 1960 at the federal level, Nigeria’s fundamental
problem is not leadership. No competent and visionary leader can, or indeed, has,
successfully emerg(ed) at the federal centre, from a deformed structure such as this. This
necessarily raises a question about structure and agency. What takes primacy historically in
Nigeria and at this juncture in our national history?

Since the hope invested in successive
leaders to transform Nigeria into a desirable polity at the centre has repeatedly failed, as the
early elites I have alluded to showed us, it is most crucial that a forward-looking, truly
enlightened elite use their strategic agency to mobilise the mass of the people to build
structures, that is, institutions that will make it possible for human agency to flourish in
Nigeria. If we have to use human agency to build structures that will then enable human


flourishing in Nigeria, the primary role must fall to such people as are in this audience. And
the first of such tasks must be to have a national dialogue about the original structure that is
called Nigeria.

Whereas, to use a term much beloved by lawyers, the problem with Nigeria is not a
semantic problem, I will suggest that if there is so much rancour over what to call this search
for a new order, one with which most Nigerians will be proud; if there is division over the
word ‘restructuring’, a term regarded as a ploy to steal what some regard as their patrimony
in Nigeria, then maybe we can all agree on calling this search for a new order, a search for a
“New Nigeria.” Yes, instead of restructuring, let’s call it “new Nigeria.” There are two
advantages to this, I think.

One, most Nigerians – including even those who want to get out of Nigeria or abolish the country as it is – like to think of Nigeria as potentially the greatest black polity in the world, and themselves as the most talented, the most imaginative and the
most resourceful of any of such demonymised group of black people in the world.

If these frustrated Nigerians, from the neo-Biafran groups, to the groups in the Nigeria Delta and
Western Nigeria wishing to leave Nigeria, get a concrete and deliverable promise of a new
Nigeria, one about which they can be proud and in which they can fulfil their immense potentials, they will most likely embrace it and work hard towards making it a reality.

It is in the enlightened self-interest of the different elite formations in Nigeria not to let this country implode. The elites may think that it is the ordinary people who have the most to lose if Nigeria implodes, but how can people who live on less than $2 a day have more to lose than that those whose daily trash bags contain more value than $2?

Last year, the World Poverty Clock data showed that Nigeria now has more people living in extreme poverty than any other country in the world.40 Distinguished guests, think about that for a moment. Your country has more people living in poverty than countries which have imploded, are at war or can only be called a country in the absence of another term such as Somalia, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and South Sudan. Extreme poverty is increasing by nearly six people every minute in Nigeria.

I must emphasise, though, that the most salient point about this data is not so much
that you have more to lose than those already in extreme poverty if Nigeria implodes or
explodes. Indeed, the implications of widespread economic and social paralysis evident in
extreme poverty and related the question of population explosion in Nigeria should give any

40 https://worldpoverty.io/blog/index.php?r=12
41 Ibid.

serious elite a cause for panic, particularly where nothing is being done do address these
intertwined challenges. It is being projected that by 2030, that is, in ten years, Nigeria will
have a population of 263 million. By this same year, the estimated percentage of Nigeria’s
population living in extreme poverty would have increased to 120 million people. There are
two other implications of this population growth. 150 million of the population will be below
the age of 25. And if the current economic trend continues, between last year and 2030, real
GDP growth at 2.15% per annum will not match up with population growth. Thus, the annual
GDP per capital will be less than zero.42 You can therefore say that a very high percentage of
Nigerian youth will face a “zero future”.

Historically, young people have never accepted zero conditions. What they will do with their energy may not be acceptable to society, but they
will do something. I am not predicting apocalypse, but if we do not arrest, or better still, reverse this trend, apocalypse has already predicted itself for Nigeria.

Distinguished guests, this is not the future we deserve as a people. Or let me rephrase
that, we can do something about the grievous, even gruesome future that awaits Nigeria based
on current trends. And you the elites have a crucial role to play in this.

Though as a corporate group, the Metropolitan Club is unique and particular, but you are also part of a national elite that is moving towards national suicide with a worrying keenness. It is regrettable that even some of the most progressive factions in the national elite formations are failing to link imagination with conviction, and often mistake perspective for perception.

In light of this, as one of the most enlightened group of the Nigerian elite formation,
again I say to you that you have a pivotal role to play. We don’t need the multitude to rethink
the direction of history. The multitude is needed in the final stage of the execution of a new
political order. The strategic thinking and strategic planning is the work of a few. Throughout
human history, it is the few, often the elite of any socio-political formation, who identify or
understand or are thrust unto the context of what Max Weber describes as “elective affinity.”
In the Nigerian context, that elective affinity is between disorder and the need for a new
order. It is the faction of the Nigerian elite that appreciates this affinity which will become
the vanguard of a new history and change the course of Nigeria’s history of perdition.

I stated earlier that there are two advantages to renaming the political struggle for remaking Nigeria a struggle for a new Nigeria. The second advantage is that the part of the country where there is the strongest opposition to restructuring is also the part which named

42 Ibid.

its post-independence newspaper, the New Nigerian. So, in the spirit of ensuring a national
consensus to work towards what the Americans call “a more perfect union”, let us adopt the
hope and aspiration of that part of the federation to create a New Nigeria, but this time, for all
Nigerians.

CONCLUSION

If Frederick Lugard were to return to Nigeria today, he will still recognise the country in its essential parts. The weak structure that he built ironically endures in that, more than a century after he laid the devastating foundation, millions more Nigerians are still trapped in human misery, while the illogic which he inscribed into the working of what was pejoratively described as the “Nigerian system,” as a persistent negation of the core logic of the Enlightenment, remains dominant. However, what we have done with and about that weak
foundation is our own fault, not his. In fact, it is principally the fault of the elites. This is why
your role in remaking Nigeria is crucial.

Distinguished guests, Nigeria faces immense challenges. As members of the elite, you
have a choice either to be paralysed by the immensity of these challenges or to be catalysed
into concerted and progressive action.
Mr President, I crave your indulgence to dedicate this lecture to a man who
exemplified some of the finest virtues of what it means to be enlightened and to be a member
of the elite, the late Sir Olaniwun Ajayi, KJW. As I stated in my tribute to him, “It was a
testament to that unquenchable trust in the possibilities of public good, the creation of a good
society and an evangelical sense of rectitude that a few hours before his passing, the old man
was still at work building alliances to save Nigeria.”

I know that this great club, both in the past and in the present, is composed of great
men who exemplify these same virtues. Therefore, I salute you.
And I thank you for your kind attention.