Social sciences as dependency: state apathy and the crisis of knowledge production in Nigerian universities

Abstract

The dominance of Eurocentric perspectives on African studies has been examined in literature. The irrelevance of this corpus of knowledge to the development of an endogenous body of knowledge for studying society in Africa has been analysed by various scholars. Despite the obvious lack of utilitarian value of contemporary social sciences to addressing the problems that Africa is faced with today, they continue to dominate the intellectual horizon both at the level of theory and praxis. The study of social sciences in Africa has continued to manifest all the features of dependency in terms of theory, methods and application to everyday life. The anti-intellectual posture of political elites in postcolonial Nigeria has negatively impacted on funding of education. This neglect has created opportunity for the West to design technical and educational aids for the country. What role does foreign aid play in undermining endogenous development of social science in Nigeria? What is the relevance of the contradictions that this posits for the debate on the importance of endogenous knowledge production? This article fills the lacuna on the link between the epistemic dominance of western social science in African studies and the search for autonomous and development-oriented social science in Nigeria.

Keywords:

• African studies
• social science
• knowledge production
• dependence
• foreign aid