A Political Economy of African Universities

I advance two objectives in this article. One, I draw on my autoethnography as well as the industrial disputes, strikes, and other interventions by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in Nigeria to reflect on the experience and role of home-based African academics-intellectuals-scholars and national academic unions in engaging the neoliberal policies and pro-imperialist transformations imposed on the continent and its public institutions and sectors, especially higher education and the public universities by the Bretton Woods Institutions and their International Financial Institutions—the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Two, I show that although the 1960s–1990s were decades of deep-seated authoritarian rule in Africa, this period also marked the apogee and golden era in the historical articulation of resistance politics by African academics-intellectuals-scholars and university students against neo-imperialism and state repression. I build on my 37 years of active involvement in university life, researching and teaching on Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the Middle East (1988–2025), to construct a political economy of Africa’s public universities and an ethnography of ASUU’s engagements, limitations and resort to complicity, co-optation, and despair in its relations to the state.