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The title of the column today speaks glowingly and glitteringly, but reluctantly, for the Glitterer. Read – Listen to parts of my outer and inner beings.
Questioner: What do I make of you? What do we make of you?
Self: What do you want myself to make of myself? Do you see myself or do not see myself?
Questioner: We see you, but do not see yourself. We see yourself, but do not see you. We know you, but do not know you. Why?
Self: How? Why do you say so? What question is this? You are saying you are seeing me, but are not seeing me. You say you know me, but do not know me. Explain your remark. Explain your question. Explain the why that ends your remark.
Questioner: We read you. We hear you loud and clear every now and then in your writings. But we cannot pin you down. We see you as a narrative – a sort of hybrid narrative of a narrator of self, and who narrates several public narratives of things and subjects pertaining to our clime and outside our clime. Most times you speak and write symbolically, and at other times plainly. But your plainness can be obscure as well.
Self: You are no longer asking a question. You are now lecturing me on my threads and my compositions – in fact, you are cleverly mutating into a strange conversationalist turning the self of myself into a hybrid glitterer. Let me say that I am a reluctantly reluctant talker who wishes to continue this conversation by calling myself a well that is not empty, an underground and open ground well at the same time in a city that is myself. You may find my symbols here and elsewhere hermetic as this conversation progresses to the end. As conversationalists let me, let us endeavour to get locked into a highly specialized bubble – protected and detached from our country’s reality – without drama.
Questioner: Fair enough. Now, let me wear the toga of your fellow conversationalist, your co-conversationalist, your partner conversationalist. Let me be your questioner and a conversationalist – who is at the same time building – or attempting to build – a bridge with you. Can you interpret our country in (or of) 2027 now? How is our transition to 2027 looking like? Is Nigerian political culture of now going to change in 2027 or after?
Self: The debt our country owes to our popular culture of changelessness will determine 2027 – or may determine 2027. But let my well of privacy, my well of private thoughts, conceptions, prophecies remain as air-tight as it can be. No matter how open I have been in times past, and notwithstanding what I foresaw and openly screamed about and streamed in the patriotic desire to join other well-endowed ones to transform our country into an up-ladder, up-status place in the community, in the committee of leading nations of the world.
Questioner: Whatever your vested interest is, is also what my vested interest is. Now, let our common voice be the de facto prophetic voice of this generation. Your acclaim and popularity will soar and soar and soar beyond the distance of sight. Speak from the deepest depth of the well in your orchard ground.
Self: Which style should my glittering mind and mood employ to convey my strategic choice of revelation? Dramatic drama of dramatic drama of dramas? Or do I chant the chant of chants consistently and consistently to avert the magic of manipulation they want to conjure as they do and do in their moments of addiction? The glitterer’s self does not mean to sound obviously literary or philosophical or spiritual. But it is incredible not to discern the turn of thought that is myself’s turn of mind in the direction of this thought.
Questioner: Let the questioner who has since ceased to be a questioner be silent here. Silence is a different means of winning any argument in a conversation.
Self: Correct. The inner and the outer understand this richly. The outer and inner are collaborators from the deep seas and oceans of thought and sky of knowledge.
Questioner: There is the voice here that is told in that of a Being of Light.
Self: Are you suggesting that my images, some of my images, are akin to those that belong to Beings of Light? Let me state clearly that the images and symbols and sentences come naturally. The metaphors also. They embellish the gift from the heavens that reveal, that are revealing, the articulate manipulations to come. They will enter our contemporary folktales. From the coastal to the un-coastal. The power of power will shatter what it will shatter. And minorities will be caged in narrow, tiny holes, tiny tight holes, airtight but not water-resistant, not waves-resistant. Flashy violence to wound, that will wound, the wind everywhere – from everywhere… to everywhere…. They will feed vultures with entrails to hold on to power, and firmly cling on to it from everywhere to everywhere…. Yet the glue will be de-glued. Persons of peace are also skilled at war. Let’s make no mistake of assuming that they are not.
Questioner: What metaphors! What what what from fantasyland….!
Self: Pray for Nigeria. Pray for your country. Pray for my country. Pray for our country that will cease to be their country. You have been listening to the music of myself singing to myself that sings to all outside myself.
Will Kenya Finally Deliver Equality For Women?
Opinion
For 42 years, Kenya has committed to ensuring women’s equality in marriage and family life. In 1984, the country ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), and Article 2(6) of the Constitution makes the treaty part of Kenyan law. Yet in reality, this promise remains unrealised. Women in Kenya can still lose their homes when their husbands die, struggle to claim property they helped build, and face barriers to leaving marriages marked by violence.
Kenya’s record on women’s rights is currently under scrutiny as the CEDAW Committee reviews the country’s implementation of the Convention during the Committee’s 93rd session at the United Nations in Geneva.
The Global Campaign for Equality in Family Law, Equality Now and Kenyan partners, including Come Together Widows and Orphans Organization (CTWOO), have submitted a shadow report providing a civil society account of what happens on the ground in Kenya in relation to Article 16 of the CEDAW Convention.
What CEDAW Article 16 means for women in Kenya
Article 16 of CEDAW protects equality inside the family. This includes equal rights when spouses marry, during marriage and when it ends, with equal say over parenting, property and decisions about children. It protects the right to belong in a family, to be safe in it and to prosper in it, from marriage through widowhood. The Committee’s guidance on violence against women extends that protection to safety at home.
That commitment is tested at every stage of family life. When a couple registers a marriage, when unpaid care counts towards family wealth, when a woman seeks a divorce, when a widow tries to keep her home and when a woman needs protection from violence. These are not separate failures but different ways in which equality can exist on paper and be denied in practice.
Kenya has made real progress. Article 27 of the Constitution guarantees equality, and Article 45(3) applies that guarantee to spouses at every stage of marriage. The Marriage Act of 2014 brought many marriage laws into one statute, and the Matrimonial Property Act of 2013 recognised non-financial contribution to family wealth, reforms that the Federation of Women Lawyers in Kenya and other women’s organisations helped advance through strategic litigation, legislative proposals and community education.
Marriage registration and women’s property rights in Kenya
Equality in family life starts with being able to prove a marriage exists. The Marriage Act requires registration, yet it costs Kenya shillings 3,900, and both spouses must appear before the registrar. Only 19.3 per cent of married women aged 15 to 49 had registered their marriage in the 2022 Kenya Demographic and Health Survey, while the shadow report finds no fee waiver for poor households and no county registration drives to help make it easier for couples to register their marriages locally.
For a family living on the World Bank’s international poverty line of US$3 a day,
the fee equals ten days of income. Many families pass land down the husband’s line, so a wife who cannot prove her marriage can struggle to claim the family home and land after a divorce or a death, and courts have been inconsistent about the consequences of non-registration. Free registration for poor households and mobile registration teams in every county would remove the barrier.
Kenya recognises unpaid contribution in property division, but no formula says how to value it, and in 2023 the Supreme Court held that Article 45(3) does not give spouses an automatic half share. Women must still establish their contribution to matrimonial property over the years, including non-monetary contributions such as childcare and housework. A presumption of equal sharing, supported by judicial guidelines on valuing unpaid work, would help turn the constitutional promise of equal rights into equal outcomes.
Divorce, access to justice and women’s safety
The question is not only whether Kenya has laws protecting women’s rights, but whether women can use them. Fees, distance from courts and lengthy proceedings stand between many women and justice, and Kenya’s divorce law is largely fault-based, so a petitioner must prove a ground such as adultery, cruelty or desertion.
In 2022, the Court of Appeal ruled that the three-year wait to seek a divorce in a civil marriage is unconstitutional when a divorce is justified sooner, yet Parliament has not amended the Marriage Act. Chiefs, elders and clergy can also pressure women to reconcile, even where violence is present, but mediation cannot replace a court for a woman who fears for her safety.
Widows’ rights in Kenya: more than a succession issue
Kenyan law treats widowhood mainly as a succession issue, yet being widowed also determines who keeps property, dignity and safety. CTWOO’s August 2025 widowhood survey found that approximately one third of respondents faced eviction from their home or land after a spouse died and around a third were excluded from inheritance decisions. CTWOO recorded 139 cases involving widows in May 2026 alone .
The Law of Succession Act ends a widow’s life interest in her husband’s estate if she remarries, a rule that does not apply to widowers. The High Court declared it unconstitutional in the Ripples International case in September 2022, but the provision remains in the text of the statute.
The Widowed Persons Protection Bill, 2026, tabled in Parliament in May and drafted with input from CTWOO and Equality Now, would bring protections now scattered across succession, family and criminal law into one framework.
Muslim women and equal protection under Kenya’s Constitution
Here, the Constitution’s guarantee of equality meets a constitutional limitation. Article 24(4) allows that guarantee to be qualified “to the extent strictly necessary” for Muslim law in the Kadhis’ courts, covering marriage, divorce and inheritance, and the Law of Succession Act does not apply
to the estates of deceased Muslims.
In practice, Muslim daughters can receive half their brothers’ inheritance share, while Muslim wives have fewer routes to divorce than their husbands. Kenya’s Supreme Court has found that any departure from equality under Article 24(4) must be strictly necessary and proportionate.
Equality Now and its partners therefore call for Article 24(4) to be repealed so that the constitutional equality guarantee applies equally to all women.
Gender-based violence, reproductive rights and the risk of rollback
The Africa Data Hub has documented the killings of at least 1,069 women in Kenya between 2016 and 2025. Section 43(5) of the Sexual Offences Act excludes lawfully married people from the section that defines unlawful sexual acts, creating a marital rape exemption. Usikimye’s accountability audit also notes that Kenyan law does not define femicide.
Harmful practices persist, including child marriage, where data remain scarce, and female genital mutilation (FGM). A review of 68 prosecutions under the Prohibition of Female Genital Mutilation Act by the American Bar Association Center for Human Rights found that 76 of the 137 identifiable accused people were survivors themselves, including 11 girls under 18, and only eight were cutters.
The Act also has a gap. In 2021, the High Court found in Kamau v Attorney General, a case in which Equality Now was an interested party, that the Act leaves out Type IV practices such as pricking and piercing, and directed the Attorney General to propose amendments.
Article 16 also covers decisions about the number and spacing of children. Article 26(4) of the Constitution allows abortion in defined circumstances, yet the Penal Code criminalises it. In April 2026, the Court of Appeal held that abortion is not a fundamental right and acknowledged the absence of a clear regulatory framework. Kenya’s reservation to the abortion provision of the Maputo Protocol, Africa’s treaty on women’s rights, also contradicts the Constitution.
The shadow report finds that, since the Committee’s last review in 2017, most of CEDAW’s recommendations remain unimplemented, while the Linda Jamii constitutional amendment proposal
and the National Policy on Family Promotion and Protection have raised concerns aboutrolling back protections for women, as Equality Now has documented.
The pushback has also included the Family Protection Bill of 2023, which seeks to criminalise same-sex conduct, and calls for Kenya to adopt the regressive Draft African Charter on Family, Sovereignty and Values.
Yet Article 45 recognises the family as the natural and fundamental unit of society while giving spouses equal rights. Protecting the family and protecting the equality of each member are therefore part of the same constitutional duty.
Commitments Kenya should make after the CEDAW review
Align the law. Kenya should amend provisions that conflict with the Constitution, CEDAW and the Maputo Protocol. The Widowed Persons Protection Bill 2026 should be enacted, and a stand-alone law on femicide introduced. The Protection Against Domestic Violence Act needs to be fully operationalised, and the Sexual Offences Act must be amended to remove the exemption for marital rape.
Article 24(4) in Kenya’s Constitution that exempts Muslim women from constitutional protection also needs to be reformed. The government should also lift reservations on Article 14(2)(c) of the Maputo Protocol, which protects women’s access to medical abortion in specified circumstances, and align the country’s laws and policies with the Constitution’s protections for women’s reproductive health and rights.
Implement existing decisions. Court rulings on widows’ inheritance, divorce and FGM, and the recommendations of the government’s Technical Working Group on gender-based violence should change the statute book and practice, so that women are not forced to litigate the same rights repeatedly.
Make rights accessible and protect the gains. Fee waivers, marriage registration drives, legal aid and community education would lower the financial, geographic and procedural barriers, because discrimination rooted in culture and religion outlasts a new law. Kenya should also keep its constitutional and treaty guarantees intact against rollback.
.Equality in marriage and family life benefits every family in Kenya
Equality in marriage is not only a women’s issue; sons, fathers, grandparents and children all bear the cost when a family loses its home, its land or its safety.
Kenya has the Constitution, the court rulings and a Bill before Parliament to build on. Today’s review offers a chance to turn 42 years of legal promises into equality that families can feel at home.
. Nyokabi is Associate Manager, Economic Justice and Family Law, at Equality Now, a global human rights organisation dedicated to ending discrimination against all women and girls. She is based in Nairobi, Kenya.
Opinion
Benchmarking The Tinubu Administration And Its Leadership Possibilities
Leading the Nigerian state, by any standard of leadership, is the most tasking of any leadership endeavor one can consider. Leading such a postcolonial state must be situated within the historical and political context of the trajectory of the state—it is postcolonial, it is plural with the enormous weight of over two hundred million people fragmented into nations and ethnicities; it has been misgoverned for over six decades, its governance template has remained external, and its current human development standing is abysmal. How should such a leader bearing the weight of over two hundred million Nigerians and their collective disaffection be assessed and then judged?
That question is a fundamental one because a leader can be mis-assessed and hence unfairly judged based on parameters and criteria that could make no sense of the context of governance and the specific challenges of the leadership. In other words, one must be careful in judging a leader based on frameworks that are not carefully crafted to connect leadership achievements to the contexts where those achievements could make the most impacts. I am specifically saying that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s leadership achievements must be properly situated and benchmarked against the highest parameter that the African continent can produce.
There is no other leadership benchmark for measuring leadership quality on the continent than the Mo Ibrahim Prize for Achievement in African Leadership. In looking forward to the general elections in 2027, this leadership prize constitutes the framework that enables a far more rigorous and issue-based discussion than the staccato burst of uninformative and inchoate reactions from oppositional political parties. The question then is: what does the Mo Ibrahim leadership prize enable us to benchmark against the current governance efforts and future development possibilities of the Tinubu administration? What can Nigeria and her governance matrixes learn from the African good leadership practices to raise the governance standards, post-2027?
Established in 2006, the award for Achievement in African Leadership celebrates an outstanding and democratically elected African executive leadership (head of state or government) that has demonstrated an unparalleled merit in facilitating the protection of human rights, strengthen democracy and democratic institutions, and enable sustainable development. The award is not an annual one. Rather, it is constituted whenever the committee is made aware of any candidates with the possibility for being conferred with it. And over the twenty years since it was established, the African Leadership award has gone to recipients: Joachim Chissano, Mozambique (2007), Nelson Mandela, South Africa (2007), Festus Mogae, Botswana (2008), Pedro Pires, Cape Verde (2011), Desmond Tutu, South Africa (2012), Hifikepunye Pohamba, Namibia (2014), Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Liberia (2017), and Mahamadou Issoufou, Niger (2020).
Unfortunately for the continent, the prize was not awarded since 2020 as no qualifying candidates had been found to possess the qualities the award demands.
Unfortunately, also, no Nigerian executive leader has made the cut too. Those who have won, including Mandela and Tutu who got the prize on special recognition, have contributed outstanding development to their various states, and impacted democratic governance. Former president Issoufou drove down poverty in fragile Niger from 48% to 40% through solid macroeconomic growth. Mandela and Chissano strengthened the democratic transition process by letting go of power after their various terms, despite their popularity. Johnson Sirleaf, despite the deep challenge of governing a war-torn country, was able to lay the foundation for a lasting national unity in ways that also enabled social inclusion and economic opportunities especially for women. Former President Pohamba supervised a series of formidable and resilient democratic institutions that made democratic governance possible and all too easy. This also coupled with a vigorous anti-corruption framework that assists the task of good governance.
Benchmarking the Tinubu administration against these past laureates, as well as the African leadership ideals of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, might first appear as an exercise in futility at several points. First, the prize is not awarded until three years after the prospective candidate has left office. And President Tinubu is barely out of office. Second, the Tinubu administration does not appear anywhere near the achievements that the past laureates of the award recorded. And third, it appears too foolhardy to even put President Tinubu in contention for the African Leadership award when Nigeria’s governance and development matters stand too dismal. But then it is only a superficial consideration of the issues that would raise these points. A deeper scrutiny yields a different understanding.
Highlighting the African Leadership award as a benchmark for spotlighting the achievements or otherwise of the Tinubu administration is first a very good way to redirect the campaign focus that has hitherto been directed at witch-hunting the reputational credentials of the president when there are more significant matters of state that could swing the upcoming general elections in 2027 in favor of millions of Nigerians. But more than this, the African Leadership prize provides a framework by which a government could orient itself on what real leadership means especially within a specific governance context that is not defined by external parameters.
The focus of the Mo Ibrahim Achievement in African Leadership award is a leadership that is grounded firmly in human development that impacts the millions of people that live in any African states. This speaks concretely to government policies that lift people out of poverty, that undermine the cankerworms of political and bureaucratic corruption in ways that undermine infrastructural development, that pour government’s considered funding into healthcare and education, that deepen the respect for democratic accountability and transparency, and so on. Within this context of governance standard, we must be sufficiently fair as not to simply deny the efforts that the almost-four-years of the Tinubu administration has yielded.
In crafting the Renewed Hope Agenda, and aligning it with the objective of making Nigeria a $1trn economy by 2030, the Tinubu administration signaled a powerful governance and development focus that has produced some massive macroeconomic achievements. In other words, the administration, since its inception, has strategically pursued structural reforms of all sorts that are meant to rehabilitate Nigeria’s lost decades in governance and development planning.
A few of these are worth itemizing. Take security simply because it constitutes the bedrock of any national development. Given the alarming rate at which insecurity, through banditry, kidnapping and insurgency, has continue to undermine Nigeria’s investment profile, the Tinubu administration has raised a multi-level reform approach that infuses a N500 billion emergency security fund that is meant to tackle banditry and insurgency through military intervention and intelligence gathering. This is bolstered by the significant constitutional move to decentralize the structure of the police force while also expanding the strength of the security forces. Next is the all-purpose tax laws reform that serves as a complement to reforms for economic growth. The Nigeria Tax Act, Nigeria Tax Administration Act, Nigeria Revenue Service Act, and the Joint Revenue Board Act are all meant to fundamentally overhaul Nigeria’s tax architecture in an even more significant step to clear the cobwebs attached to the ease of doing business while also enhancing the tax administration regime for government to earn more money for development purposes. While the inflation rate jumped to an all-time high due to the removal of petrol subsidy and the floating of the foreign exchange in 2023, further consistent policy actions have since seen inflation drop to 15.39% in 2026, with food inflation falling from 20.31% in July 2026 to 19.57%.
But then, more is required. Economic reforms must be steered consciously and steadily towards people-centered governance frameworks that will not achieve macroeconomic stability on the one hand, while millions keep suffering economic deprivations on the other. In other words, macroeconomic stabilization of the Nigerian economy must be transformed into micro-economic human development policies that have the capacities to change the citizens’ welfare and well-being. The growth of the Gross Domestic Product cannot win the Mo Ibrahim Achievement in African Leadership prize; it must be Gross Domestic Happiness that tracks the real happiness and well-being of the citizens. This demands that the Tinubu administration must consolidate its macro-economic achievements by doubling down on governance and development reforms that bring well-being closer to millions of Nigerians. When the Bhutan government introduced the concept of Gross National Happiness or Gross Domestic Happiness, it benchmarked four pillars—socio-economic development, good governance, cultural preservation and environmental conservation—across nine domains that range from living standards, education and health to the usage of time, ecological diversity and community vitality.
In Nigeria’s case, five thematic areas are crucial for the governance reforms. First, the administration needs to establish and efficiently track a local Human Development Index. This will enable the government to introduce, monitor and evaluate social impact parameters, including the reduction in the rate of out-of-school children, amelioration of multidimensional poverty, critical lessening of maternal mortality rates, and more. Budgetary allocations, especially through the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee (FAAC), would be measured and evaluated along these indices. Second, the government must focus on structural agrarian reform. This takes attention away from the monocultural economic fixation on crude oil, and the raw commodity export model. Agricultural reform facilitates local value addition that embolden domestic production and eventual industrialization. For instance, the Tinubu administration must focus on the “Nigeria-First” procurement policy that in turn enables small businesses and local manufacturers.
Three, the administration must necessarily attend to the albatross of the humongous cost of governance spending as a matter of achieving institutional integrity. This requires, for instance, a policy that manages wastage and reduce institutional redundancies.
Rationalizing political and administrative spending is the best possible way to achieve public accountability while ensuring that public resources impact public good. The fourth thematic focus of the Tinubu administration is the urgent reskilling of the human capital through massive investments in healthcare services and especially the education system. This involves not just improving the institutional accesses to education, represented by the Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) initiative, but also funding vocational and technical education. This enables the government to sync vocational education with entrepreneurial and industrial needs of the country.
The last strategic thematic area is represented by government’s establishment and deepening of social security nets. Hitherto, the palliative solution to, say, the removal of fuel subsidy has not only been draining the coffers of government, it has also facilitated further political and bureaucratic corruption. A more permanent structural intervention requires the establishment of a national social register and database that enable biometric verification of vulnerable recipients. This is complemented by the strengthening of the Nigerian Consumer Credit Corporation that assists in redeeming the purchasing power of middle-class Nigerians.
If President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must enter the Hall of Fame of Outstanding African Leadership, he has to put in the work and extend the framework of his macroeconomic stabilization to strengthening micro-economic indices that directly affect millions of Nigerians. Another four years in office would be an opportunity not just to be a Mo Ibrahim leadership laureate, but to essentially lay a solid foundation of a legacy of good governance that transform the lives of millions of Nigerians.
. Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration, and the Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja.
Opinion
Globalization And Social Clubs
It is a privilege to have been invited to give the lecture to mark the 50th anniversary of the Ibadan Social Group. Its contributions are legendary. Many of its members are famous and highly distinguished in their various occupations. My lecture focused on the theme of social bonding in a technological age that is creating social distance.
There’s a great irony in the era in which we live. We are more united than ever. A communication from Lagos arrives in London in seconds. A video call traverses oceans without a second thought. Social media has given everyone a stage, an audience, a presence, the sense of being heard by many people. Yet ask any honest person how they feel within all this connection, and the word they are most likely to reach for is not “satisfied.” It is “lonely.” This is the basic contradiction of globalization, and it is the beginning point for understanding why the social club, that institution many consider a relic of another period, is not disappearing. It is needed more and more.
The conventional wisdom is that globalization is the enemy of social clubs. The idea is that the internet makes it unnecessary to meet physically. Cultural homogenization has dulled the unique local identities clubs used to rally behind. The erosion of solid, place-based communities has destroyed the basic foundation on which clubs were established. This perspective sees the social club as an endangered species plodding about while the asteroid of modernity approaches. This perspective is incorrect. And to understand why it’s incorrect, you must know what a social club really is, not what it looks like from the outside, but what it does.
A social club is not only a place for individuals with similar interests to get together for fun. This is the surface description. At bottom, a social club is a human technology for generating trust, a sense of belonging, and a sense of mutual duty amongst individuals otherwise having no reason to give a damn about one another. It is the type of institution that a society builds when it senses the need to bind itself together against forces threatening to tear it apart. By that criterion, there has never been a time in history when social clubs were more essential than today precisely because there has never been a time when the pulling factors were greater.
Globalization accomplishes great things. No sane person would dispute any of it. But globalization also accomplishes something its fans are hesitant to concede. It falls apart. It replaces transactional ties with communal partnerships. It incentivizes movement so fiercely that rootedness starts to seem like a liability. It pulls people out of hereditary networks of belonging and into open marketplaces of social connection in which you are only as good as what you can provide at any given time. The outcome is a world that is more networked and less linked, at the same time.
People feel this, even if they can’t speak it. The anxiety that hums beneath the surface of contemporary life, the feeling that no institution can be entirely trusted, that success is always provisional, that community is something you post about rather than something you live inside – this is the particular damage that globalization, left to its own logic, does to human beings who are not wired to live as isolated economic units. The platforms that were meant to link us have mostly offered the illusion of connection without the substance. You may have ten thousand followers and no one to ring. Everyone can see you, yet you are invisible to your own neighborhood. Here again the social club comes into play, not as some nostalgic project, but as a structural answer to a structural issue.
Looking at the history of club culture in Southwest Nigeria, especially Ibadan, you are not looking at a quaint custom that managed to live into the contemporary period by happenstance. Here is an institution which has shown its worth over and over again, precisely because it has been constantly put to the test. The Yoruba have a long history of community association, of individuals structuring themselves into webs of mutual duty and collective identity that do not rely on the state to operate. This tradition was not born of colonialism, but colonialism put it through its paces like no other. The colonial encounter brought with it new status categories, new economic pressures and new dangers to indigenous social organizations. In response, official organizations grew across Ibadan and the greater Southwest: social clubs, professional groupings, age-grade societies, town unions, not as political opposition groups in the strict sense, but as a demand that human beings would continue to connect on human grounds, not just on colonial or economic criteria. That history gave rise to the social clubs of Ibadan. They were made by women and men who knew, whether they would say it or not, that belonging is not a luxury. It is necessary. And they had created institutions to address that need in circumstances adverse to it.
Colonialism disturbed the inherited social order, imposed new hierarchies, and produced a society in which the ancient markers of rank and community were subject to ongoing modification. In that context, the social club offered a place where a new sort of power was practiced, not based on colonial appointment or economic success, but on character, continuity, and the shown desire to show up for other people over time. That is the tradition worth looking into, not because it is ancient but because the issue it was answering is very much alive.
Those institutions were again challenged by post-colonial challenges. The unequal distribution of wealth after independence, the wild gyrations of Nigeria’s oil economy, the disintegration of public institutions, the collapse of civic life – all this exerted pressure on the social relationships that clubs were created to defend. Some clubs became weaker. Others headed toward exclusivity and lost the power to build a meaningful community. Some went into dormancy. But those who did adapt did so by retracing the first principles: trust, belonging, mutual duty. They lived by remembering what they stood for.
Then globalization, in its present hyper-connected form, comes along. The demand is different again, but the difficulty is essentially identical. The temptation for social clubs under this strain is to attempt to be what globalization demands: efficient, branded, digital-first, curated for performance. There have been groups that have gone down this road and discovered, not unexpectedly, that in attempting to seem like the society that was threatening them, they lost what made them worth defending. A club that is just an Instagram page and a WhatsApp group hasn’t evolved for the digital era. It has melted into it.
A more relevant topic is whether social clubs can withstand globalization. That is what a social club must become if it is to stay a real alternative to globalized forms of social life rather than a mere copy of them. That is not an abstraction for an institution like the Ibadan Social Group. It’s the ‘how do we get there’ behind a 50-year vision. A path from now to 2076 may seem extravagant, but the goal makes sense, provided you accept the fundamental premise: that local institutions with deep roots are not barriers to growth; they are anchors against the drift. The world does not need more institutions chasing the trendy. It requires institutions that know who they are and are ready to be that consistently, across generations, across economic cycles, across the churn of trends.
So how does it work in practice? It involves a conscious investment in the quality of human interaction that the club facilitates. Not events for events’ sake, nor membership drives for membership’s sake, but a deliberate effort to create circumstances under which real connections among members might develop and grow. That seems apparent. It’s uncommon, unexpectedly. Most declining organizations adapt by becoming more outward-facing, more promotional, more concerned about image. The better answer is to become more inward-attentive. To ask what goes on between individuals in the institution; what goes on there is the type of stuff that cannot be reproduced on a screen.
It also requires having a conscious interaction with the young people. Not tokenism, not just opening the doors and hoping new professionals would find their way in and carry the culture forward. Transmission of a generation is an act of intention. It asks elder members to do the hard thing, which is not simply to transfer the structure of the institution, but to impart its purpose. But why is this club around? What has it been for? What does it give you back? What does it want of you? If the younger generation can answer these questions with confidence, it is going to decide the destiny of the institution. They can’t fix them; no amount of rebranding will help.
And then there is the issue of what an institution entrenched in a particular place and culture provides to a globe that is more skeptical of the local. Globalization favors the portable, the scalable, the universally readable. An institution such as the Ibadan Social Group is naturally immune to such rationale. It’s built in. It has a history that belongs to a region, to a people.” That is no bug. In a world where everything is everywhere, the fact that certain things are someplace, that they belong to a particular group, have the memory of that community, is a type of cultural resistance in itself worth taking seriously.
The error is in supposing that the local rootedness renders the institution irrelevant to larger discourse. It’s the contrary. This is where the most serious thinking on social renewal, about how human societies restore cohesiveness in the face of atomization, is taking place. There is something to be said from nowhere else, from an institution that can speak out of a particular
things that matter most. It wagers that the trust that develops over time between individuals who know one another and have made meaningful commitments to one another cannot be replaced by any combination of apps and algorithms. It wagers that the pain individuals experience when they lose a feeling of belonging is real, that it signals a true need, and that institutions created to address that need have a future precisely because the need is not going away.
These are not little claims. But the proof is everywhere for them. In the survival of associative life wherever there is a real community. In the manner that people, given any genuine option, still want to do the most important things in their life, rejoice and grieve, make tough choices, heal damaged relationships, in the company of others who know them well and have known them for some time. The well-documented damage loneliness does to mental and physical health is damage that no amount of connectedness has been able to lessen, and by some metrics has risen as connectivity has grown. The research is clear on this: human beings require persistent, face-to-face, responsible interactions. This is not what social media offers. When it is working correctly, the social club does.
There has never been a time when the social club was pronounced dead. It lived through industrialization. It withstood the advent of mass media. It’s living via the internet. Not because it is obstinate, but because the need that it satisfies is obstinate. People will continue to find ways to meet with those they trust, to establish circumscribed spaces of duty and belonging, to insist on being acknowledged as more than individuals in a market. The social club is one of the most exquisite shapes which instinct has assumed.
The challenge for the next fifty years is whether institutions that hold this history will take up that duty with the seriousness it deserves. Suppose they would come to see that their relevance is not an argument to be made for in brochures, but something to be earned, all the time, in the quality of what they make possible amongst their members. Will they be honest about their previous failures, the exclusivities they tolerated, the trend toward ceremonial at the price of content, and utilize that honesty to establish something more durable?
A globalized world is unsettling in ways we are just starting to understand properly. People in large numbers are seeking what is genuine, local, and enduring. The social club is all three at best. That’s not a minor thing. That is the whole argument, in fact.
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