Professor Joseph C. A. Agbakoba will be remembered as one of those rare African thinkers who refused to confuse noise with thought. At a time when development debates in Africa were dominated by slogans, statistics, and borrowed policy formulas, Agbakoba insisted on asking a deeper and more unsettling question: what does it truly mean for Africa to develop? His enduring book, Development and Modernity in Africa, stands today as a quiet but powerful intellectual monument to that question.
Agbakoba’s central insight was that Africa’s development crisis could not be reduced to economics alone. Roads, budgets, institutions, and technology mattered, but they were never enough.
Development, he argued, was first a human and cultural project. A society could grow materially and yet remain profoundly underdeveloped if its institutions lacked moral legitimacy, its citizens felt alienated from governance, and its cultural values were treated as obstacles rather than resources. In this sense, Africa’s persistent failures were not accidental; they were rooted in a deeper disconnection between imported models of progress and lived social realities.
What made Agbakoba’s work especially compelling was his balanced engagement with modernity. He neither rejected modernity as a foreign imposition nor embraced it as a universal solution.
Modernity, he observed, was historically shaped by European experiences and assumptions. When imposed on African societies through colonialism and retained uncritically after independence, it often produced states that looked modern on paper but lacked ethical depth in practice—laws without legitimacy, bureaucracies without trust, and development policies without social meaning.
At the same time, Agbakoba warned against romanticizing African tradition. Culture, he insisted, was not sacred simply because it was indigenous. Traditions had to be examined, critiqued, and reformed where they undermined human dignity. What he defended was not nostalgia, but rational cultural self-confidence: the ability of African moral traditions—communal responsibility, consensus, and relational personhood—to enrich and humanize modern institutions.
Underlying Agbakoba’s thought was a firm commitment to intercultural dialogue. Africa’s future, he believed, lay neither in imitation nor isolation, but in reflective engagement with the world. Philosophy, for him, was not an academic luxury; it was a civilizational necessity.
As Nigeria and Africa continue to grapple with governance failures, development paradoxes, and cultural uncertainty, Joseph C. A. Agbakoba’s voice remains urgently relevant. His legacy reminds us that nations do not rise by policy alone. They rise when they dare to think seriously about who they are, what they value, and the kind of human community they seek to become.
Achike Umunna, a lawyer and author, writes from Lagos.
