In Remembrance of Professor Claude Ake (1939 – 1996) of Blessed Memory.

A Pan Africanist and a World Citizen!

THE TRAGIC NEWS has been received of the untimely death of Professor Claude Ake, the top-rate Nigerian political economist, killed along with 131 other passengers and nine crew members in the Boeing 727 airplane crash near Lagos on November 7 1996. Ake had just presided over a national workshop on conflict resolution in Africa, held at the Centre for Advanced Social Science (CASS) in the oil city of Port Harcourt, and was on his way to keep a working dinner appointment with the Swedish Ambassador in Lagos on the fateful Thursday when he met his tragic death.

Professor Ake was born on February 18 1939 in Omoku, Ogba/Egbema/Ndoni local Government Area (ONELGA), Rivers State, Nigeria. Initially a graduate of University of Ibadan, where he took his BSc Hons degree in 1962, he obtained a PhD from Columbia University, New York, US in 1967.

In 1992, he was awarded his country’s highest academic prize, the Nigerian National Merit Award

He received numerous internationlal fellowships and awards at various times, including those from the Rochefeller, Ford, MacArthur and Brookings Foundations. In 1992, he was awarded his ciuntry’s highest academic prize, the Nigerian National Merit Award.

The professor had a distinguished academic career, teaching at many universities at home and abroad, including Carlton, Columbia, Dar es Salaam and Nairobi Universities. He was appointed Professor of Political Economy at University Port Harcourt in 1977, and held many top research positions. He was a former Head of the Department of Political Sciences and Deanof the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University Port harcourt; a FoundtionMember and past President of the Nigerian Political Science Association; Reseach Director at the African Association for Political Science (AAPS); Consultant for the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA); fomer President of the Executive Committee of the Council for Develipment of Social Research in Africa (Codesria) based in Dakar, and Founder and Executive Director of the Centre for Advanced Social Science (Cass), a post which he held until his death.

An internationally renowed scholar, Ake was the author of numerous scholarly works, amongwhich are: A Theory of Political integration (Dorsey, 1967 Revolutionary Pressures in Africa (Zed, 1978, The Theory of Political Development: Social Science as Imperialism (Ibadan University Press, 1979); A Political Economy of Nigeria (Longman, 1985); and most recently, Democracy and Development in Africa (Brookings, 1996).

Ake was an engaged scholar who combined the best in scholarship with a commitment to helping the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed. A man of profound insight, Ake’s most distinguishing trait lay in his simplicity, his ideas and the way in which he tendedd to express them. He ws a suremely confinent person, yet much noted for unassuming and unobrusive nature.

A man firm believer in the ennoling role of politics as both in activity and discipline, he was also at paons to show why and how politics, like colonialism, continued to contribte to the under-development of the Frican continrnt. He was both a social critic and optimist.

With such an orientation, it was only to be expected that Professor Ake would be an implacable opponent of military rule, particularly in his own country. He considered military rule and intelectual function to be differently structured and oriented, the former beinggactuated by repect for hierarchy, order and disciline: the latter, by almost antithetical ideas, including those of egalitarianism, inquisitiveness and sceptical outlook. He was every inch a democrat at heart, but not necessarily in the exclusivist Western-liberal definition of the term.

Ake was one of Nigeria’s leading critics of shell and the oil industry and, therefore, a supporter of the late KenSaro-Wiwa and his Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (Mosop) in their crusade against the economic and environmental damage and desttruction wreaked by shell and the oil industryin the riverine areas. By some curious trick of fate, his tragic death took place close to the anniversary of the execution of the environmental activist and leader of the Ogoni minority rights group.

By Claude’s tragic and untimely death, this writer has lost a clos friend, senior professor colleahue and compatriot; the Nigerian political science profession has lost easily its best and brightest member, and African intellectual community, one of its most stimulating and engaged scholars.

He will surely be missed for a long time to come by all those who knew him.

He ws a suremely confident person, yet much noted for unassuming and unobtrusive nature. May his soul rest in perfect peace.

J. ‘Bayo Adekanye, PhD

The author is Professor and Programme Leader of the Ethnic and Nationalist Conflicts Programme at the Internatioal Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in Oslo