Tunji Olaopa
The Guardian Nigeria
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Past articles by Tunji:
Post-2023: Leadership function and lessons for Nigeria
In this piece, I want to further explore deeper issues relating to the lessons that political history of the world around us offer in focusing on the leadership challenges that Nigeria needs to urgently engage with, as we approach the change of leadership baton in 2023. → Read More
Change agent reformer-leader Nigeria needs in 2023 (2)
The achievement of a Nigerian national consciousness of unity requires an urgent imperative of national value deconstruction and reorientation. One just needs a bird’s eye view of Nigeria’s current political dispensation to know how deeply seated the normlessness of the Nigeria value space is. Almost all the political contestants, at all levels, are embroiled in […] → Read More
Toyin Falola at 70: The reminiscing about a scholar and legend, By Tunji Olaopa
TF, as Professor Toyin Falola, is known all over the world, has gracefully been inducted into the exalted and hoary circle of the septuagenarians. And strangely, his self-effacing self would not acknowledge nor celebrate this momentous occasion with at least a seminal offering as we are wont to. Sometimes in November, 2022, I raised the […] → Read More
Dele Olowu at 70: The unusual scholar with the collar
The public administration community of practice in Nigeria is a closely knit one, albeit with a fast-diminishing membership. And so, when one of us is retiring, it is an affair that fills me with dread. → Read More
Falola: Between celebration and canonization of intellectuals
As is to be expected in any gathering of intellectuals, the recent special event to celebrate the scholarship of Prof. Adeshina Afolayan, a teacher in the philosophy department at the University of Ibadan, was → Read More
The Nigerian condition: Perspectives from a philosopher
Moving towards 2023, and beyond has become a task that, I believe, must generate all sorts of analyses and preparations. While the politicians and political parties are preparing in their usual manners to take over power... → Read More
Post-2023: Setting agenda for rethinking Nigeria’s dysfunctional federalism
There is no doubt on the minds of discerning Nigerians, including the political class, that what is needed to empower the protracted Nigerian national project is the urgent need to reset Nigeria’s federalism through a crucial restructuring. → Read More
Mabogunje: Thoughts and legacies on fixing Nigeria
The breath of the contributions of the late Professor Akinlawon Ladipo Mabogunje to development policy and governance reform is so breathtaking that one cannot ever think of exhausting its deep nuances. → Read More
Religious identity, Muslim-Muslim ticket and 2023 elections
I grew up within a cultural context that grounded Ali Mazrui’s triple heritage thesis: that Africa has arrived at a stage where three → Read More
Tobi Amusan’s tears
By now, almost everyone across Nigeria has heard of Tobi Amusan, the Nigerian superlative athlete who just won a gold medal at the World Athletics Championship Women’s 100m hurdles in Oregon, the United States. → Read More
Professionals in Govt: Issues in Navigating the Policy Space in Nigeria
By Tunji Olaopa All across the world, the policy space has always been a critical and contested one. It is critical to the extent that it is within this space that government consolidate the social… → Read More
New thinking in public service and administration
The Fourth Industrial Revolution has already become definitive of the twenty-first century, and the Nigerian civil service system cannot afford to keep struggling to key into the fundamentals of a new age that has transformed human sensibilities and ethos in many radical ways, from the way we work to the ways we organize our lives and existence. → Read More
2023, ideology and issue-based politics: Where did we miss it?
The significant year 2023 is still some eight months away, but the Nigerian political space is already feeling the weight and heat of electoral matters, especially with several candidates—presidential... → Read More
Balogun: The Olubadan that I knew
Ibadan is a space of deep cultural manifestations and multiple histories. It is a place of wars and trades, as well as political intrigues → Read More
Tenure policy restoration in the federal service: Matters arising
The news has now circulated sufficiently that the Federal Government has reversed itself on the crucial issue of tenure policy → Read More
Phillips, unfinished business of reform in Nigeria
In the annals of public administration scholarship in Nigeria, and most especially with regard to the specifics of the dynamics of institutional reforms in getting the Nigerian state into shape... → Read More
On money rituals, logic and life
On Thursday, December 2, 2021—and in her Punch column and article titled “The logic of what Nigerians call ‘money rituals’,” Abimbola Adelakun in her usual incisive manner attempts to pierce through the conceptual and existential... → Read More
COVID-19, managing in crisis times and public administration
The year 2020 would be remembered in the annals of world history as the year that the coronavirus visited the world and transformed every dimension of human endeavors, from eating and greeting habits to administrative frameworks... → Read More
Yahaya and public administration scholarship in Nigeria
There is a way death compounds our sense of finality by adding also a sense of lack. When someone important dies, a big hole begins to gape in the fabric of human existence. → Read More
Mabogunje at 90: A measure of grace indeed
It is better to celebrate life than death. Life, for me, does not consist in the length of existence but in the depth of the life’s worth measured in other-regarding capacities. → Read More