On Thursday, September 22, two U.S. experts on African affairs will present the seventh Atiku Center Lecture at the American University of Nigeria in Yola. The Americans, Dr. Carl LeVan and Mr. Matthew T. Page, are authorities whose views on Nigeria are highly sought.
The duo will speak on “Improving U.S. Anticorruption Policy in Nigeria,” the subject of a recent brief authored by Mr. Page, who is a former International Affairs Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations. He is the coauthor of another seminal book, Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know, due to be released next year from Oxford University Press.
Mr. Page has deployed his in-depth knowledge of African and Nigerian affairs to the benefit of the intelligence community, senior policymakers, and the U.S. Marine Corps.
Inaugurated in 2014, the Atiku Center for Leadership, Entrepreneurship and Development coordinates and drives the AUN mission as a development university. The Center, named after the University’s founder and former Nigerian Vice President, His Excellency Atiku Abubakar, is tasked with identifying and coordinating AUN’s development projects. Through the lecture series, it generates fresh ideas and perspectives and thus sets the agenda on development issues.
An Assistant Professor in the School of International Service at American University, Washington DC, Dr. LeVan has taught courses on African politics, comparative political institutions, and political theory at the undergraduate, Master’s, and doctorate levels.
In 2015, he published Dictators and Democracy in African Development: the Political Economy of Good Governance in Nigeria. In 2000, LeVan was the first director of the National Democratic Institute’s legislative training program in Abuja. Later he was a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer at the University of Ibadan, teaching a course on comparative federalism.
As the debate rages on the way forward for Nigeria, the American University of Nigeria, via the Atiku Center, is taking the lead in finding practical development solutions in the Northeast region and Nigeria.