I am so saddened to learn of the passing of Oye Oyediran, who was much beloved and greatly respected and admired by political scientists and other academics and practitioners who knew him and worked with him, in Nigeria or abroad. Oye was an outstanding political scientist who was fascinated with the challenges of public administration, governance, and democratic development in a country that was constantly challenged by its search for honest and accountable government. He was not only a scholar but a public intellectual and advocate, who was called on by Nigerian governments to advise on constitutional reform and democratic development. Oye was not unwilling to advise those in power, but always he demanded of himself and others the highest ethical standards. He refused to be seduced by the powerful, and in private, he expressed bitter disappointment with his fellow scholars who yielded to these temptations and compromised their souls in the process (while gaining wealth). He was passionate and uncompromising in his devotion to truth, transparency, and integrity. The rampant corruption that infected not only politics but everyday relations of commerce and administration offended and even disgusted him.
I shared his moral outrage and intellectual conviction that Nigeria had to overcome the curse of endemic corruption. But I did not always have the stamina he did to withstand the difficulties of everyday life in Nigeria without occasionally giving in to the petty ways that people sought to take advantage of a situation. I remember vividly a morning when he picked me up at my hotel on Victoria Island in Lagos to take me to a conference or meeting we had. It was my habit when visiting Nigeria to pick up half a dozen or more newspapers in the morning to get different perspectives on what was happening. I hadn't had the time to look for newspapers yet that morning and so when we got to an intersection where a young man was selling an assortment of different newspapers I asked Oye to stop the car and I rolled down the passenger window. Then I asked the young man to give me one copy of each of the different newspapers he had. I think there were seven or eight. I asked the paperboy how much it was, and he overcharged me by something like 50 percent. I wanted the newspapers so I just took out my wallet and started to pay him, but Oye--who had been counting the newspapers and closely scrutinizing the young man--grabbed my arm and stopped me, while he gave the young man a tongue-lashing in Yoruba. I said to Oye in essence, it was okay, the kid was no doubt poor, and I really wanted the newspapers, but Oye turned to me indignantly and remarked, "That's not the point. When you give in like this it only encourages them." That was the only time he got even the slightest bit cross with me. He just couldn't stand anyone getting away with a corrupt act. He got the satisfaction of giving the young man a lesson. I never got my newspapers that day, but I got instead a more precious and far more memorable gift from Oye.
Oye and I became good friends when he spent a year at the Hoover Institution in the late 1980s as a visiting scholar. He impressed everyone he came to know at Stanford with his depth of knowledge about Nigeria, and his unfailing courtesy, openness, good humour and humanity. He was just a wonderful person. This was a period when the Nigerian military dictator, Ibrahim Babangida, was signaling his intention--which proved to be devious and insincere--to transfer power back to civilian, elected rule. Oye and I developed a plan to launch a comprehensive analytic study of the transition, joining forces with the great British historian and analyst of Nigerian affairs, Tony Kirk-Greene. The result was two superb academic conferences, one at the Hoover Institution in August 1990 and another at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos in January 1991. These represented two of the largest and most distinguished transcontinental gatherings of experts on Nigerian politics and development that took place at any time during this period (or perhaps since). But the project--covering everything from the institutions of the military-led transition (including the famous "Political Bureau" that Oye himself wrote about) to the reconstitution of parties and elections, to governance, structural adjustment, and civil society--kept being delayed by the political realities on the ground in Nigeria, namely, the military's cynical manipulation and distortion of the process. We had hoped to end the book (Transition Without End: Nigerian Politics and Civil Society under Babangida) with the return of Nigeria to democracy, but alas, when we finally brought it to publication in 1997, it was with the most brutal tyrant in Nigeria history, Sani Abacha, consolidating his personal dictatorship. Oye hoped the book would educate Nigerians about an important and painful period in their political history--and the imperative of avoiding any return to military rule in the future. I hope future generations of Nigerians will continue to study it.
Most of all, I hope Oye's family and friends will not only treasure his memory but also take pride in what he accomplished and stood for. He was, from beginning to end, a man of deep faith and principle, a man who would not compromise his principles, and a man who loved his country, for all its faults, and believed it could do better. May his memory be blessed.
