Sa’eed Husaini is a political sociologist with a DPhil in International Development from the University of Oxford (UK) and a postdoctoral researcher at the African Research Universities Alliance (ARUA) Center for excellence for Urbanization and Habitable Cities, at the University of Lagos (Nigeria). His work examines the political economy of democratization in Africa, focusing on how migration, conflict, and political and economic ideas shape political party organization Nigeria. Sa’eed is also a Non-resident Research Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Development (CDD) in Abuja, Nigeria.
MIASA Project: Progressivism and Mobility in Nigeria's Fourth Republic
The project “Progressivism and Mobility in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic” extends the intuition that the legacy of the early twentieth-century global intellectual movement of progressivism, though having undergone various modifications, continues to shape political ideals and phenomena in African societies (Breckenridge 2014). It interrogates this thesis by exploring the evolution and contemporary character of a self-avowedly “progressive” political tradition in Nigeria. Active since the anti-colonial period, and prominently embodied in the political thought of Nigeria’s independence era opposition leader, Obafemi Awolowo (Taiwo 1986), this traditional arguably came to its full fruition in contemporary Nigeria with the dramatic emergence in 2013 of the first nationally victorious opposition party in Nigerian history, the All Progressives Congress (APC). Specifically, it takes the theme of mobility — and how its permission and restriction are currently understood by self-avowed “progressives” in the city of Lagos — as a lense through which to understand the contemporary norms, discourses, and effects of progressivism in Nigeria.
