[Culled from the Lyrics and Performance at the 2011 Stauffer Symposium by Rodney Hopson, Duquesne University. Originally Scott-Heron G. (1970). The revolution will not be televised, In Small Talk at 125th and Lenox.]

You will not be able to avoid the usefulness and ubiquity of evaluation,

You will not be able to mislabel, misappropriate, misconceive, misapply or misuse evaluation, limiting it to settings of programs, policies, projects and personnel

You will not be able to refer to the usual distinctions between research and evaluation, draw simple conclusions at the end of a program evaluation, or avoid instances of bias and conflicts of interests, as if our only concern in the discipline rests on value judgements or our only claim to fame is to inform decision – making

Because the revolution will not be evaluated

The revolution will not be brought to you by the civil society organizations and aligned through the sustainable development goals and veiled allegiances of low hanging fruits,

The revolution will not continue to pay honour and homage to the roots of the field in recognition of the Carl Reindorf and Jacob Egharevba and other forefathers without attention to the foremothers or even specifically those evaluators who either studied with them but nobody cared or knew their names.

The revolution will not be evaluated.

The revolution will not be brought to you by the African Evaluation Association or Nigerian Association of Evaluators and will not star Wole Soyinka, Omoyele Sowore, or Chidi Odinkalu.

The revolution will not give you free education, free healthcare, free water facilities

The revolution will not get you published, promoted, or funded;

The revolution will not use evidence-based, performance-measured, scientifically legitimate arguments, assumptions, and logics,

Because the revolution will not be evaluated

There will be no pretty little pictures of logical frameworks, theories of action, theories of change, or whatever you want to call or confuse these graphic conceptual models – used and abused without careful and critical thinking about their use at various stages and development in serious, systematic evaluations;

Funders and clients will not require that we focus only on goals and objectives – in fact, we will do our damndest to stay away from them and those who run these programs since their story is not likely the one that has most merit.

The revolution will not be evaluated.

There will be no references to the 1929 Aba Women’s Market Rebellion, the Biafra secessionist movement, the National Assembly, the enlightenment era in Lagos;

There will be no democracy or equality without evaluation and no evaluation without attention to democracy or equality;

There will be more high stakes evaluations who continue to show how traditionally poor, underserved, and minoritized communities do not benefit from donor funds;

There will be more locally engineered evaluations showing students do not learn effectively, all because, historically, they are reading the science of another environment!

There will be no “gender – related” evaluations that will provoke change in our society, all because, it doesn’t add Ten Kobo to the less privileged, and that this revolution will not be evaluated!

There will be no evaluation of the Abachas, debt ceilings, and wasteful military industrial and prison complex spending and shenanigans in religion or national security and war on Boko Haram.

NERDC, NUC, JAMB and WAEC will no longer be relevant;

Standards, principles, criteria, and checklists will no longer be restrictive unless they lead to creative, meaningful evaluation practice which generates new knowledges, epistemologies, and methodologies.

The revolution will not be evaluated.

There will be no academic programs in the social or natural sciences, law, humanities, without evaluation – interdisciplinarily or interdisciplinarily;

There will be no static or finite presentations, textbooks, or articles about evaluation models, and approaches written by the usual suspects.

There will be no relevant academic papers if they do not refer to the work of Ngugi wa Thiong’o, D.O Fagunwa, Chinua Achebe, Alain Mabanckou, Aminatta Forna, Mariama Ba

The revolution will not be evaluated.

The revolution will not be defined only by the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, or the Agenda 2063, or other goals that will be agreed to, after 2030 and 2063

You will not have to worry about whether what we do is scientific, whether it informs accountability or whether it is useful, feasible, proper or accurate;

We will not need to wait till after a program has ended, before conducting rigorous evaluations;

The revolution will not go better with desired outputs or outcomes;

The revolution will not be on Facebook, Twitter, and accessible on your iPhones and iPads;

The revolution will be live.

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