Remembering an Optimist

Tomorrow in Abuja a memorial will hold for the late Björn Beckman, (BB), the celebrated Swedish (sorry, African-Swedish!) radical political economist. He was laid to eternal rest on the December 6 last year exactly a month he passed away on November 6, 2019 in Stockholm, Sweden, his home country. He died at 81 years. Beckman was a member of the Political Science teaching staff at the Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru Zaria in the eighties.

I read Economics, having completed preliminary students at the School of Basic studies (SBS) in 1977/1978. The then Faculty of

Arts and Social Science ( FASS) was a centre of radical political economy oriented scholarship.

All students of social sciences and arts were positively impacted upon by the critical thoughts of star Marxist scholars like BB, the late Dr Bala Usman, Professor A D Yahaya, Professor Yusuf Bangura, Dr Metuge, Professor Mike Kwaneshe, Professor Patrick Wilmot and Professor Akin Fadahunsi among others. Certainly tomorrow’s memorial would raise the nostalgia of the robust battle of ideological ideas in the 80s, the anti-climax being the 1983 Karl Marx Centenary Conférence. The late Professor Claude Ake of University of Port Harcourt was a great African scholar of Marxist persuasion. He died on November 7th, in the tragic ADC airline disaster in 1997. Ake just like BB nurtured our fertile intellectual minds in the late 70s as undergraduates of social science with indelible intellectual legacy on African development studies. The amazing intellectual outputs of BB with his numerous collaborative comrades, elevated and popularised political economy as tool for understanding Africa development process just as Ake did.

Africa is in profound despair caused by the entrenched pessimism (or is it cynicism?) that the continent cannot take-off not to talk of catching up.

Nigeria and (indeed Africa) has almost been declared literarily a failed state/continent.