Foremost Nigerian professor at Oxford, Abdulraufu Mustapha, is dead

An eminent scholar and author, Abdulraufu Mustapha, Professor of African Politics at the Department of Government, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, has passed on according to family sources.

Mr. Mustapha, 63, succumbed to stomach cancer after months of courageous battle at about 3 p.m. London time on Tuesday August 8, 2017. He is survived by his wife, Kate and three children.

He was author of many well-regarded works including, Turning Points in African Democracy; and Sects and Social Disorder, Muslim Identities and Conflict in Northern Nigeria.

Mr. Mustapha who hails from Ilorin, Kwara State, studied at the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria, for his Bachelors and Masters degree in Political Science, and proceeded to the University of Oxford in London where he earned his doctorate degree and stayed back to lecture till his death. He was a member of the Premium Times Editorial Board.

Mr. Mustapha’s research focusses on the politics of rural societies in Africa, ethnicity and identity politics and the politics of democratisation in Africa. He has held teaching positions at Bayero University, Kano, and Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria.

He is a member of the editorial advisory groups for the Review of African Political Economy, Africa, and the Board of Trustees of the Development Research and Projects Centre (dRPC), Kano, Nigeria.

Mr. Mustapha is the lead researcher on the Islam Research Project, IRP-Abuja, funded by the Dutch Foreign Ministry. The project is a policy-oriented study of interfaith relations in northern Nigeria. The IRP project is executed by ODID through the Nigeria Research Network, NRN, a loosely-structured research group with members within ODID and affiliated academics from Europe, North America, and Nigeria.

In the recent past, the professor also worked on the report on ethnic minorities for the Working Group on Ethnic Minorities, UN Commission on Human Rights, and the project on ‘Ethnic Structure and Public Sector Governance’ for the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (UNRISD) in Geneva. He was the Senior Researcher (West Africa) at the Centre for Research on Inequality, Human Security and Ethnicity (CRISE) at ODID.