Jibrin Ibrahim and the shaping of Nigeria’s discursive space, By Tunji Olaopa

There is something really intriguing and fascinating about having a wonderful friend of yours grow into the septuagenarian circle. And this is even more crucial when that colleague has a history of stubborn ideological inclination that has kept him in shape as a scholar of note within Nigeria’s combustible intellectual firmament. From our mutual commitment to the political science scholarship and different approaches to the understanding of the Nigerian nation-building project, Professor Jibrin Ibrahim — Jibo to all of us — and I have become intellectual partners in progress. Both of us keep investing our intellectual and scholarly resources in the ongoing commitment to the understanding of the task of making the Nigerian state, on the one hand, more meaningful from the perspective of scholarship, and on the other hand, more citizen-friendly in terms of its capacity to leverage advocacy and discourse to achieve good governance.

Jibo is one…