Politics & Power Quote by Ibrahim Babangida

Babangida frames the book launch as a civic ceremony, and that choice isn`t innocent. By casting each new book as a literal "step forward" in the nation`s march, he turns publishing into statecraft: ideas become infrastructure, and authors become quiet civil servants of memory. It`s a flattering elevation of literature, but it also smuggles in a politics of legitimacy. If history advances through sanctioned texts, then who gets to write them - and who gets invited to the launch - matters as much as the words on the page.

The line about "bearing witness" is doing heavy rhetorical work. Witnessing sounds passive, even humble, yet it implies authority: you were there, you saw it, your presence ratifies the event. In political cultures where public rituals substitute for public accountability, this is a familiar move. The launch becomes a stage where consensus is performed, and the audience is recruited as co-signers of the narrative.

Calling a book "another testimony of history" suggests history is a courtroom, not a messy argument. Testimony can be selective, strategic, self-protective. Coming from a statesman - and in Babangida`s case, a figure associated with contested chapters of Nigerian political life - the praise for "new bodies of ideas" can read as both aspirational and defensive: an appeal to record-making as a way of fixing legacy. The subtext is clear: whoever controls the archive controls tomorrow`s common sense.