Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria Critical Interpretations (Wale Adebanwi, Ebenezer Obadare (Eds.) )
Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria Critical Interpretations (Wale Adebanwi, Ebenezer Obadare (Eds.) )
Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria Critical Interpretations (Wale Adebanwi, Ebenezer Obadare (Eds.) )
in Nigeria
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De moc r ac y a n d
P r e be n da l ism i n Nige r i a
Critical Interpretations
Edited by
Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare
Foreword by
Larry Diamond
DEMOCRACY AND PREBENDALISM IN NIGERIA
Copyright © Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare, 2013.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-28076-3
Foreword
Larry Diamond vii
Acknowledgments xv
The oldest and most enduring story of human political life is this: the
strong exploit and abuse the weak. Those who wield political power use
it to extract wealth from the powerless. “Power corrupts, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely,” as Lord Acton wrote. Historically, force was
typically the means by which the wielders of power acquired it and held
it. And force remains the ultimate guarantor of power, for, as Max Weber
wrote, the irreducible feature of any state is that it exercises a legitimate
monopoly on the use of force.
Political development can be viewed as a quest to solve three basic
problems in the organization and exercise of power. First, how can vio-
lence be subdued and contained so that power is acquired and exercised
by (largely) peaceful means? Second, how can the abuse of power—the
exploitation of the powerless by the powerful—be restrained? And,
third, how can the powerless be empowered, so that all members of the
collectivity benefit to some fair—if not exactly equal—degree from the
exercise of power, and hence the holders of power are held accountable
by the people?
The first challenge is one of state building—generating and institu-
tionalizing the authority and capacity of the official structures of power,
based on certain shared rules. In the modern era, as peoples of distinct
languages and identities were brought together in a common political
order, this also became intertwined with the imperative of nation build-
ing. The second challenge involves building a rule of law, which further
constrains the autonomy of political officeholders and subjects them
to certain rules, neutrally and equally applied. The third challenge is
democratization—giving the people ultimate sovereignty, and the insti-
tutional means, through regular, free, fair, and competitive elections, to
hold their rulers accountable.
One of the seminal contributions of Richard Joseph’s brilliant work
a quarter century ago, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria
(1987), was to place the destructive dynamics of Nigeria’s politics in a
deeper historical and theoretical perspective that engaged these basic
questions of political order. The problem with Nigeria was not simply
endemic corruption, but the profoundly systematic, prebendal character
viii For e w or d
of it. It was in fact expected that state office would be acquired and used
for the material benefit of the officeholders “and their constituents and
kin groups,” rather than the society at large. In an authoritarian, monar-
chical system like prerevolutionary France, this meant that positions of
state authority (prebends) could be purchased from the ruler as licenses
to loot. In the republican and superficially democratic context of Nigeria
in the Second Republic, it meant that the electoral struggle was not for
the power to enact one or another policy program but rather to acquire
rents (unearned income) through the exercise of power at the national,
state, or local level.
As Richard L. Sklar noted in his seminal work, Nigerian Political
Parties (1963), competitive politics in such a context became the driver
of class formation, as rival political elites struggled through elections
to enter the emerging dominant class with the transition from colonial
rule to independence. Unfortunately, when everything is at stake in an
election, when all routes to wealth formation and class attainment pass
through political power and the state, it is impossible to conduct compet-
itive elections by democratic rules of the game. Thus, politics in Nigeria’s
First Republic (1960–1966) was riddled with violence, fraud, and “trib-
alism.” Lacking much in the way of a real political program, rival parties
and politicians fell back upon ethnic identity as the most reliable way of
mobilizing electoral support. “Tribalism” became, in Sklar’s memorable
words, “a mask for class privilege.” But if the polarization of politics
around ethnic identity was socially constructed and cynically mobilized,
it had very real and destructive consequences. Not only was it the imme-
diate precipitant of the collapse of the First Republic, but it also spiraled
downward into a ghastly civil war (1967–1970), in which well over a
million people (and by some estimates, up to 3 million) died.
The devastation of that war generated lessons and institutions that
remain with Nigeria today, and that have, at least, prevented a repeat of
that Nigerian holocaust. The Nigerian military reorganized the country
as a multistate federal system, cutting across the lines of the three major
ethnic groups and empowering smaller ethnic minorities as well. Much
of Nigeria’s considerable constitutional energy and imagination since
then has been devoted to elaborating and reforming this federal system.
And one of the secrets to the tenacity (if not stability) of prebendalism in
Nigeria, as this volume makes clear, is that it has become, with the relent-
less proliferation of states and local government authorities, a thoroughly
multiethnic affair. At the federal level, and in many of the states riven by
ethnic and subethnic cleavage, identity groups contest for dominance.
But elites from every group are able to ride the train of prebendalism to
some degree of status and wealth, and typically to levels unimaginable
outside the political realm.
For e w or d ix
The rise of a more complex, balanced, and resilient federal system was
one of two great transformations Nigeria experienced between the col-
lapse of the First Republic and the inauguration of the Second Republic
in October 1979. The other was Nigeria’s emergence as a major oil
exporter, at roughly 2 million barrels a day. With the two great oil price
shocks of 1973 and 1979, staggering new revenues poured into Nigeria’s
federal treasury. These massive oil rents fed the prebendal system the
way dry brush fuels a forest fire—except that in this case, the fuel will
continue to burn for decades to come.
When Richard Joseph arrived in Nigeria in early 1976 to begin the
research that would lead to Democracy and Prebendal Politics, these two
great transformations—political institutions and political economy—
were gathering steam. The Nigerian public was seized with debate and
imaginative thinking about the constitution for a Second Nigerian
Republic. And hope was abundant as oil riches poured in, education and
infrastructure expanded, and wealth began to pump through the system.
There was talk, quite realistically, of Nigeria becoming a middle-income
country within a generation.
The Second Republic, whose demise Joseph anatomizes in his book,
had the misfortune of forming right at the moment of the second dra-
matic spike in global oil prices. By then the dynamics of prebendalism
had been gathering substantial momentum through the failed First
Republic and successive military regimes. Awash in oil, uncertain of how
long they would be in power, and eager to make up for nearly 14 years of
lost time, Nigeria’s civilian politicians indulged in an orgy of looting that
reached its peak just as the second boom in global oil prices was begin-
ning to go bust. During this heady and calamitous period, prebendalism
became consolidated and pervasively entrenched as the way of politics
and governance in Nigeria. Barely four years later, with the economy a
shambles, the public outraged, and the opposition seething from brazen
electoral theft in 1983, the military swept aside Nigeria’s discredited sec-
ond civilian experiment.
The 1983 military coup provoked effusions of relief and even joy from
the Nigerian public, and cautious optimism from many observers, who
were heartened by the coup-makers’ blunt denunciations of corruption
and misrule and their vows to reform politics and governance, purge the
corrupt politicians, and return the country to democracy. But these ini-
tial reactions proved profoundly naive. For in the context of entrenched
prebendalism, the transfer of power from civilian politicians to the mili-
tary merely meant a contraction—and militarization—of the number
of offices providing a prebendal platform for looting. Under three suc-
cessive military regimes, prebendalism became, as Richard Joseph notes
in his Epilogue, predation; the transition to a planned Third Republic
x For e w or d
was cynically manipulated and aborted; and the nation experienced new
depths of tyranny and plunder.
With the relatively rapid transition to a Fourth Republic in 1998–
1999, following the sudden (and by some accounts, unnatural) death of
the tyrant, General Sani Abacha, Nigeria has come full circle. Civilian,
constitutional rule has now survived for more than 13 years—well over
twice as long as any previous attempt. Moreover, under the first president
of the Fourth Republic, Olusegun Obasanjo, the military ruler who had
returned power to the civilians on time in 1979, the military was reduced
in scale and reorganized to diminish the prospects of another military
coup. Yet prebendalism persists with a vengeance, and what prevails
politically is a hybrid system. Elections are too riddled with fraud and
corruption to qualify as a democracy, yet there is sufficient competition
for power, alternation of personalities if not parties, and freedom and
pluralism in civil society to allow for some degree of representativeness,
and at least some possibilities for reform.
The problem is that prebendalism can represent a tenacious and
self-reinforcing equilibrium when there are enough resources to sustain
it through extraction by one means or another. Tax farming can be one
way, but mineral wealth seems uniquely suited to sustaining prebendalism
in the contemporary era. In the modern era of political equality and mass
political consciousness, it is difficult to sustain feudal or semifeudal forms
of extraction of wealth from a population of vassals. Foreign aid can func-
tion (and unfortunately it has) as a good enough source of external rents
to fuel a prebendal system, but in the post–Cold War era the donors have
periodically shown some willingness to suspend aid to the most hopelessly
corrupt and predatory rulers, so aid dependence has its uncertainties. But
when rents derive from oil (or other forms of lucrative mineral wealth),
the money is there for the taking, because it is nobody’s money, really.
Psychologically, that is the way a society too easily views external rents—
as manna from heaven poured down on the country, to be grabbed by
the lucky and well connected. As many scholars have noted, when state
resources derive mainly from taxation of the people, people have a stron-
ger and more natural incentive to demand accountability.
As Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare explain in their introduc-
tion, prebendalism represents a dead-end trap developmentally. When it
reaches its full, natural, plundering logic, prebendalism robs a country
of the promise of economic development. For the logic of governance
in a prebendal system is not to generate public goods for development—
transportation, education, electricity, public health and sanitation, effi-
cient administration of justice, and so on—but rather private goods for
the officeholder and his family, and “club” goods for a limited group
of his clients and supporters. In this way, a potentially rich country like
Nigeria can squander many tens of billions of dollars of manna from
For e w or d xi
leaving everyone in society better off. Then, states that have shifted off
the prebendal logic can radiate positive demonstration effects, inspiring
and empowering reformist leaders and coalitions in other states and in
the country at large.
In the fight against prebendalism, transparency is crucial. Even though
prebendalism represents a kind of societal conspiracy, widely expected
and conceded to, the massive theft of public resources is not legitimate
and can only thrive in the shadows. Transparency in all matters related
to the receipt and management of oil revenues, and the budgeting and
expenditure of public funds, is, therefore, essential to shrinking back the
prebendal system and reducing corruption. In this regard, as Richard
Joseph also notes, there is an exciting new array of tools and possibilities
in the realm of liberation technology, the various digital platforms, and
social media that can greatly amplify and accelerate flows of information.
These tools can empower large numbers of citizens to become micro
agents of accountability, monitoring what government does and fails to
do, auditing the performance of promised development projects and the
compliance with good governance and human rights norms, and report-
ing back to independent monitoring organizations in government and
civil society. Getting effective, capable, and neutral agents of account-
ability inside the state—particularly in administering elections and
monitoring and punishing corruption—is also crucial to the struggle for
good governance.
In the absence of revolution, reform will be a long, messy, and incre-
mental struggle. But the past few years in Nigeria have shown that prog-
ress is possible. Extending and deepening democracy—which means in
part achieving real democracy—is an indispensable condition for such
progress. In a context of civil and political freedom and robust, fair
electoral competition, constituencies for reform can mobilize, expose
outrages, build popular support, and gather institutional allies. New
models of governance can gain traction and show cumulative results.
Constitutional norms can extend roots. But another military coup would
only set Nigeria back to the square one of a praetorian institutional
vacuum.
If, 25 years after the publication of Richard Joseph’s stunning and
sobering book, one is looking for a silver lining across the bleak land-
scape of Nigerian governance, it may be simply that, for the first time in
Nigerian history, the formal structures of civilian, electoral politics have
survived so long. That is, at least, a beginning.
LARRY DIAMOND
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Ac k now l e dgm e n t s
D e moc r ac y a n d P r e be n da l ism:
E m ph a ses, P rovoc at ions, a n d
E l ong at ions
Ebenezer Obadare and Wale Adebanwi
Democratic politics and prebendal politics are two sides of the same coin
in Nigeria: each can be turned over to reveal the other.
Richard Joseph, 1987, 10
A Crude Democracy
In the very first week of January 2012, with the New Year’s air still
redolent of the odor of the previous year, major towns and cities across
Nigeria exploded in spontaneous civic rage. The immediate provocation
was President Goodluck Jonathan’s announcement of the federal govern-
ment’s resolve to remove the “remaining” subsidy on petroleum prod-
ucts distributed in the country. With that seemingly irreversible decision,
the pump price of petrol was to rise from ө 65 to ө 41 per liter, an increase
of more than 100 percent. Earlier, as 2011 drew to a tense close (parts of
the north and the federal capital, Abuja, had been rocked by deadly bomb
blasts for which the radical Islamic group, Boko Haram-Western educa-
tion is sacrilegious, had taken responsibility), major Nigerian newspapers
2 E be n e z e r O b a da r e a n d Wa l e A de b a n w i
Nigerians are worn down by inherent corruption. The harsh reality is that
despite being in the big league of oil producers with reserves of 36 billion
barrels, the country’s rank, according to the IMF, is 133rd in the world
when it comes to per capita income—the lowest performance of a coun-
try with this level of natural resources. That per capita income ranking
is just above its poor status in Transparency International’s corruption
index where Nigeria took the 143rd position in 2011 alongside Belarus,
Togo, Russia and Mauritania . . . This is a tale of two Nigerias—one that
has garnered $67 billion of foreign direct investment, growing at 7–8% a
year, and being singled out by Goldman Sachs as being one of the “Next-
11” economies . . . According to the World Bank, 80% of the oil wealth has
really only benefited 1% of the population. It is worth noting, there are
other, big complications. This is a country that remains divided between
north and south along religious lines. (Defterios 2012)
Evident in the strike and protests were questions involving both con-
sensus and disagreement about the uses and abuses of political power
and collective (economic) resources. These, fundamentally speaking, are
the very tissue of politics in Nigeria. What are the sources of these crises
and paradoxes, and how can we understand the ways they construct and
constrict democratic politics in Nigeria?
Critics Encircle
Yet, the book was not without its critics. Shaheen Mozaffar’s source of
frustration with Democracy and Prebendal Politics was what he saw as its
“reliance on an intellectual perspective of limited analytic utility, and its
failure to draw on the complementary and analytically more useful
insights of current scholarships to develop a more nuanced explanatory
framework” (1989, 504). Mozaffar also suggested that though Joseph
perceptively identifies “the central paradox of Nigerian politics” (502),
he analytically never comes to grips with how the “social structural pat-
terns and attendant processes” captured by his framework “impel the
8 E be n e z e r O b a da r e a n d Wa l e A de b a n w i
[c]uriously . . . the empirical chapters relate only very broadly to the the-
oretical discussion and provide little direct support for the propositions
advanced. That these empirical sections seem to stand by themselves
reflects the fact that the research was conducted some time before the
author arrived at the need for a theory. One suspects that the book would
have been more coherent if the author had asked new questions of his
evidence, derived from his own theoretical advancements. As it is, we are
presented with a book consisting of many valuable components, especially
those dealing with the transition to civil rule in 1979, but which is disag-
gregated as a whole. (Nugent 1989, 224)
Although Shehu Othman agreed with Joseph that state officials preben-
dalize their offices for their own benefit, he endorsed Jeffries’ qualifica-
tion that they do not always do so to benefit their reference or support
group. According to Othman, the claim “unwittingly smacks of confer-
ring a kind of democratic legitimacy on prebendal practices. Besides, it
ignores the fact that what trickle-down effect there is affects not so much
the state officials’ communities as particular political or business clients”
(1989, 211).
Not unlike Jeffries and Othman, Larry Diamond was upset that “at
times, the ‘group benefit’ dimension of Joseph’s prebendalism is hard to
distinguish from the more general (and less destructive) phenomenon of
ethnic politicians using the state to benefit their constituents especially”
(285). He observed, correctly, that “this happens in any culturally het-
erogeneous democracy, including the United States” (ibid.) but that
Rethinking Prebendalism:
Questions and More Questions
Our decision to convene a conference of Nigerian(ist) scholars to engage
various aspects of Richard Joseph’s work was mainly informed by the con-
tinued influence of this particular work. As the twenty-fifth anniversary
of the first publication of the book loomed, we felt a need to explore the
continuities and discontinuities of politics and the prebendal principle in
Nigeria. Appropriately, we sought contributions that take the theoretical
D e mo c r ac y a n d P r e be n da l i sm 11
The political economy of these contentious issues that set the tone and
tenor of the struggle for, and debates over, independence and eventually
led to the collapse of the First Republic, the Civil War, and the collapse
of the Second and Third Republics, is also not only threatening to lead to
the possible collapse of the Fourth Republic, but also imperils Nigeria’s
corporate existence.
Toward the end of the Second Republic, some elements in the south
of Nigeria began to make calls for the restructuring of Nigeria as a con-
federation to address the fundamental dysfunction of the system, which
was produced and reinforced by prebendal politics. After the termina-
tion of the Second Republic, and especially given the bitter experience
under military rule between 1984 and 1999, calls for the convocation
of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) to address the fundamental
problems of the Nigerian state intensified. Widespread assumption that
the termination of military rule and the inception of the Fourth Republic
would end the calls or perhaps the need for such a national parley has
proved unfounded. Instead, in various ethno-religious riots such as those
sparked by the introduction of Sharia laws in Zamfara State in late 1999;
the uprising in the Niger Delta; intra- and interethnic bloodletting trig-
gered by the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) in and around Lagos; and
most recently the threat to civil order constituted by Boko Haram, we
have reminders that Nigeria faces the danger of catastrophic collapse
unless some fundamental restructuring is done. As Joseph ominously
warns in the conclusion of his chapter in this volume, in the near future,
“there may be no Nigeria to be salvaged.”
Beyond the context-specific utility of Joseph’s theoretical explora-
tion of prebendalism, one of the most significant arguments that can
be advanced in the context of the robustness of his work is its utility
for cross-disciplinary research. Cognizant of this, we encouraged con-
tributors to the volume to follow disciplinary and/or multidisciplinary
approaches in interrogating the specifics of prebendalism in its vari-
ous manifestations and (dis)guises, both historically and in contempo-
rary Nigeria. For instance, how might ethnographic immersion in the
everydayness of prebendalism illuminate our understanding of what has
come to be seen as “the National cake” in Nigeria—one that everyone
with the necessary leverage attempts to “eat”; and how might the appli-
cation of mathematics or statistical methods, favored in econometrics,
“shock” the lethargy out of the victims of prebendalism in Nigeria and
also propel social policy toward fundamental remedial actions? Also,
what kinds of fresh thinking can we impose on the familiar, the regular,
and the regulated within the Nigerian space, such that we can begin
to see old things in new light? For instance, is Nigerian federalism in
its fiscal practices—say, the so-called sharing formula—not a mode
of prebendalizing the logic and theory of federalism? If the political
D e mo c r ac y a n d P r e be n da l i sm 13
Critical Interpretations
One important issue that Joseph’s analysis underscores is that despite the
discontinuities presaged by the termination, and later, reinstitution of
democratic rule by military regimes in Nigeria’s history, the fundamen-
tal logic of Nigeria’s political life—prebendalism—remains the same.
Thus, though the country continues to experience “geologic structural
shifts”—such as the creation of more and more states and local govern-
ments, the changes in the revenue formula, the creation of federal agencies
and specific policies for disadvantaged groups and areas of the country,
for example, “federal character,” “quota system,” “nomadic education,”
“zoning formula,” Niger Delta Development Commission, the creation
of anticorruption agencies, and so on—there is hardly any modifica-
tion in the underlying logic of power and public life. Consequently, the
discontinuities signaled by these geologic structural shifts are at best
14 E be n e z e r O b a da r e a n d Wa l e A de b a n w i
persistent conf lict, and since its modus operandi is to politicize eth-
nic, regional and linguistic [and religious] differences, it serves to
make the Nigerian polity a simmering cauldron of unresolvable ten-
sions over which a lid must regularly be clamped, and just as regularly
removed. Sisyphus would recognize a similar predicament to his own
in Nigeria’s political and social life” (1987, 10).
This volume offers ideas and propositions on possible routes of escape
from this systemic trap.
References
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in Narration.” In Nigeria at Fifty: The Nation in Narration, ed. E. Obadare
and W. Adebanwi. London: Routledge.
———. 2011b. “When Corruption Fights Back: Democracy and Elite Interest in
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No. 2: 185–213.
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Apter, A. 2005. The Pan-African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in
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Ayogu, M. D. 1999. “Before Prebendalism: A Positive Analysis of Core
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Bayart, J.-F. 2009. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. Second Edition.
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Berman, B. J. 1998. “Ethnicity, Patronage and the African State: The Politics of
Uncivil Nationalism.” African Affairs, Vol. 97: 305–341.
Booth, D. and F. Golooba-Mutebi. 2012. “Developmental Patrimonialism? The
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Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
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Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Daloz, J-P. 2005. “Nigeria: Trust Your Patron, Not the Institutions.” Comparative
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Defterios, John. 2012. “Nigeria’s Oil Economics Fuel Deadly Protests.” CNN, January
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20 E be n e z e r O b a da r e a n d Wa l e A de b a n w i
G ov e r na nc e a n d t h e Pol i t ic a l
E c onom y of P r e be n da l ism
1
Introduction
The discussion of politics in Africa has been strongly shaped by the work
of Richard Joseph, whose 1987 study of Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–
1983) has highlighted the importance of prebendal or neopatrimonial
networks based on ethnic and regional solidarity throughout Nigeria.
Neopatrimonial politics draw on the survival and adaptation into the
modern state of networks based on reciprocity and mutual obligations,
often consisting of relationships forged in the precolonial and colonial
period, which in turn encourage the use of public office primarily for the
benefit of clients and supporters. This process has been widely under-
stood as part of a process of appropriation and assimilation by African
elites and their followers in the modern state structures presumably cre-
ated at independence. Assuming the functioning of the modern state to
be based entirely upon rational-legal forms of authority, this process of
assimilation has been interpreted as a potential “re-traditionalisation” of
the continent (Chabal and Daloz 1999, 45–92) and even a “hollowing
out” of the state (Obadare 2007).
But while few African states have been able to establish or maintain
the monopoly of force and authority required for the maintenance of
legally transparent and rational bureaucracy, this does not mean that
they are universally weak or even failing (cf. Clapham 1993). While
the state’s modern institutions may not consistently function accord-
ing to legal principles, they nevertheless serve as spaces for collaboration
between “social positions inherited from the past” (Bayart 1993, 169),
and as places of mediation between other networks existing at least par-
tially outside of the state (Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009). Thus,
26 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
all Yoruba states within the former western region, except Lagos. It is not
clear to what degree electoral results in favor of the centrally based party
were manipulated, but electoral malpractice played a role in ascertaining
this victory.2 However, the fact that, unlike in the past, the population
did not respond violently to counterintuitive electoral results suggests
a much more widespread acceptance of central politics than previously.
Nonetheless, after 2007, another opposition party, from a base in Lagos,
began to reclaim local territory, and after the 2011 elections, the central
party lost power in all states in the former western region.
In this chapter, we assess the implications and transformations of
Yoruba politics especially since the return to civilian rule in 1999 through
an examination of the political careers of three Yoruba politicians—
Lamidi Adedibu (1927–2008), Gbenga Daniel (b.1956), and Bola Tinubu
(b.1952)—and their local networks. Located within the wider context of
the Nigerian political debate, we explore the way in which these politicians
have drawn on, or created, locally embedded roots in order to create con-
sent for (or acceptance of) their rule. While both local and national political
networks are neopatrimonial in the sense that they include contemporary
dimensions of power as well as “mutual, socially constructed obligations”
(Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009, 127), they are shaped by the fact
that they operate in a locally and historically specific environment in which
forms of reciprocity associated with progress, development, and the wider
political legacy of the Yoruba nationalist leader Obafemi Awolowo remain
important to ensure the support of local clients. This constellation created
opportunities for the short-term eruption of centrally funded politicians,
but it also meant that the medium- and long-term costs of maintaining
legitimacy and power were substantial. In the light of this, and possibly
also as a reflection of strategic interests from the center, it became possible
for locally rooted networks to reassert control of the local state.
In conclusion, we suggest that while contemporary Yoruba opposition
politics are complicit with—and part of—national political struggles to
a larger degree than suggested by Joseph post-1983, the extension of
patronage ties linked to central or national politics into southwest Nigeria
is subject to a number of tensions that reflect a locally specific history and
form of political organization. As patronage networks are rarely based on
coercion alone (though they may attempt to coerce outsiders), the groups
and individuals drawn into the political process at the grassroots can opt
out of them if their expectations, which are also linked to wider ideals,
are not met. For this reason, the simple provision of financial support for
clients is not sufficient for the maintenance of power in the long term,
at least where funds are finite. Despite the overwhelming ability of the
system to coerce and co-opt local constituencies, and despite the fact
that local politics remain subject to strategic appropriation by the center,
the local roots of politics continue to contain the possibility of popular
28 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
the Nigerian state. Nonetheless, the fact that important Yoruba leaders
were drawn toward national patronage networks both in the 1960s and in
the 1980s illustrates the difficulties of maintaining opposition politics and
unity in the face of a resourceful and powerful central state. At the same
time, the widespread grassroots violence that ensued after fraudulently
proclaimed “victories” for factions associated with the central government
in southwestern Nigeria in 1965 and 1983 suggests that the social base for
a general departure from Yoruba opposition politics was still only in its for-
mative stage. Although leaders from both sides supported and planned the
violence, the dominance on the ground of pro-Awolowo forces suggests
that even if sections of the local leadership were tempted to join the net-
works associated with the central government, popular opinion remained
largely opposed to this proposition.
In the decades since Awolowo’s demise, several Yoruba politicians
have attempted to reconfigure local debates on progress in order to
establish themselves as political successors to Awolowo both in terms
of political leadership and grassroots popularity. In the early 1990s, the
Yoruba multimillionaire Moshood Abiola emerged as one of the region’s
most prominent politicians.4 But Abiola’s career also illustrated the fluid
nature of the Yoruba elite’s internal divisions, because he owed his for-
tune to his close association with members of the central political estab-
lishment.5 However, after reconciliation with Awolowo’s inner circle,
Abiola was endorsed by this group in the run-up to the 1993 presidential
election, designed to form the end of the transition to Nigeria’s Third
Republic.6 Able to draw on substantial support both in northern and
southern Nigeria, Abiola was widely acknowledged as the winner of the
1993 elections. When the military annulled the presidential election,
many Yoruba speakers formed the opinion that the central government
was anti-Yoruba. As the subsequent military government was associ-
ated with declining life chances and growing corruption, a revival of
Awolowo’s politics seemed to many Yoruba speakers a possible force of
national restoration.
After the annulment of the 1993 general elections and the subse-
quent return to military rule under General Sani Abacha, the treatment
of Abiola as a “(con)temporary Awo” in spite of the history of ideological
difference between the two leaders was a crucial marker of the extent
to which Awolowo’s political legacy could be revised and reassigned.
Following Abiola’s imprisonment and death in 1998, this process culmi-
nated in the full investiture of “the mantle of Awo” upon Abiola and his
elevation as a contemporary icon of the Yoruba progressive movement,
seemingly on a par with Awolowo (Adebanwi 2008, 126).
Widely shared fears about Yoruba marginalization also led to a trans-
formation of grassroots politics. Mobilizing previously local forms of
organization at the ethno-national level, several organizations emerged
Th e Ro o t s of Ne opat r i mon i a l i s m 31
during the latter half of the 1990s, which were explicitly aimed at assert-
ing Yoruba culture and interests. Among them was the Oodua7 People’s
Congress (OPC), originally established as a sociocultural organization
for the discussion of Yoruba culture, history, and current affairs. After
the arrest of its founder, Frederick Fasehun, in December 1996, his
deputy Gani Adams took over the control of the organization. Under
Adams’ leadership, the OPC’s activities expanded into more assertive
political work such as the settlement of local disputes and vigilantism
(Nolte 2007). Attracted by the OPC’s program of crime control, politi-
cal activism, and Yoruba reempowerment, disenfranchised young men
constituted the majority of the OPC’s active members. However, OPC
politics were supported by wide sections of the population.8 The OPC’s
expanding control of grassroots politics acted as a clear reminder of the
entrenched nature of Yoruba grievances vis-à-vis the central government.
But at the same time, the OPC’s claim to political ownership of Awolowo’s
vision, the combative attitude of its leadership, and its sheer scale enabled
a younger generation of Yoruba political activists engaged in its activities
to break from their elders in a way that challenged the assumption—
historically entrenched through the transformation of Awolowo and his
followers into national heroes—of the implicit legitimacy of seniority
(Olarinmoye 2007, 22). After Abacha’s unexpected demise in 1998, this
context provided the setting for the Yoruba engagement with Nigeria’s
transition to its Fourth Republic in 1999.
justification for his crossing over to the NPN.20 After a UPN win
throughout Yorubaland in 1979, Adedibu, who had drawn on federal
resources to increase his popularity, provided the support of local groups
for the rigging of the 1983 general elections. Much of this popularity
lay in his easy manner, and his emphasis on his lack of tertiary education
endeared him to local road transport workers, unemployed and under-
employed youths, and other clusters of disenfranchised people in Ibadan.
But Adedibu was also generous and redistributed most of the income
derived from his links to the center in a way that mirrored the generosity
of local warriors and leaders of old. Members of youth and other popular
groups regularly congregated at his Molete residence, where they were
fed Ibadan’s staple food of àmàlà (yam-four) porridge with gbègìrì (bean
and fish) stew. As a result of this, Adedibu’s particular form of influence
was often referred to as “àmàlà politics.”
Based on local networks operating on the basis of reciprocity, the
ostensible NPN victory in Oyo State also brought the state its first gover-
nor from Ibadan, thus appealing strongly to localist sentiments. But even
in Ibadan, the NPN’s open challenge to Awolowo was not well received,
and widespread violence in protest against the rigged election result con-
tributed to the end of the Second Republic. All the same, Adedibu’s suc-
cess in rooting his political manoeuvrings in a popular base confirmed
his ability to act as a conduit for federal funds and a local “godfather”
to suitable candidates under the military governments of Babangida and
Abacha. But despite his ability to achieve victory for his chosen candi-
dates, the overall popularity of the Abacha campaign was “more of an
acceptance of the inevitable than a wholehearted declaration of commu-
nal support” (Hoffmann 2011, 246). Interestingly, it was in this context
that Adedibu’s autobiography, which explained his politics as a result of
Awolowo’s oversight of him, was published. Taking Awolowo seriously
despite—and even through—the reference to his arrogance, Adedibu
may not have been able to create significant (unpaid-for) support for cen-
tral politics in Ibadan, but he attributed both significance and credibility
to his own support of central politics.
Following Abacha’s death in 1998, Adedibu attempted to reinvent
himself as a conservative opposition politician in the 1999 elections.21
Despite limited success, he attracted the interest of Obasanjo, who
sought to expand the PDP’s reach to southwest Nigeria, and Adedibu
soon acted as a conduit for federal funds in support of the PDP. This
drew aspiring politicians into his political network, thus establishing his
residence as a nucleus for the “production of political power” in Ibadan
(Obadare 2007, 10). As in the past, a key component of Adedibu’s cli-
ent base was the local network of area boys and young male transport
workers, or touts, organized in politically active associations or transport
unions. Patronage links with the National Union of Transport Workers
36 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
reach of the Nigerian state and its ruling party, which has been able,
through the expenditure of central funds, to penetrate or control local
political networks after 1999 to the degree that electoral victories could be
ensured that were not immediately contested in a violent manner. While
helped by wider factors, including Obasanjo’s acknowledgment of Yoruba
interests and the organizational and ideological weakness of the AD at
the time, the 2003 and 2007 PDP victories could be read as indicating
not only a hollowing out of the legal-rational logic that is widely taken to
formally justify the state, but also as a hollowing out of established politi-
cal networks based on reciprocity, which, while often violent and based
on notions of control and accountability outside of the state, have in the
past either ensured that candidates associated with opposition politics in
the Awolowo vein won elections, or that candidates imposed by the center
were violently rejected.
Able to create enough consent at the grassroots for the ruling party
to accept its official victories in different states, it appears as if those in
control of the state have personalized it for their own designs (Obadare
2007, 124). But at the same time, both Adedibu’s and Daniel’s politi-
cal styles suggest that while grassroots consent could be manipulated
through the distribution of federal funds through local “instru-
ments” (127), they still need to take account of local historical experi-
ence, exemplified in sentimental or mythical references to Obafemi
Awolowo. Thus, both PDP politicians sought to demonstrate personal
integrity, linked in both cases to the foundational role in the poli-
tics of southwest Nigeria of Obafemi Awolowo. Adedibu’s story about
his personal rejection by Awolowo not only legitimized his opposi-
tion to him but also, implicitly, acknowledged Awolowo’s importance.
In Daniel’s case, his close relations with the Awolowo family offered
an explicit recognition of Awolowo as well as a validation of his poli-
tics, by proxy as well as through endorsement. The appropriation of
Awolowo by politicians who have discarded the details of his political
vision suggests that his political memory is strongly associated with
the specific local political experience and remains iconic even among
his ideological opponents.
Ironically, Bola Tinubu, who most obviously fulfills many of the roles
associated with Awolowo, has been much less explicit in claiming the erst-
while Yoruba leader for himself than Daniel, suggesting that Awolowo’s
political memory may be a more complex consideration for those who
have remained within the Awolowo political tradition than those with-
out. The slow but steady faltering of popular support for Gbenga Daniel
after 2003 suggests that a claim to personal integrity through Awolowo
does not only reflect the enduring importance of a rhetoric of progress
and development to potential voters or supporters, but also constitutes
a basis for empirical comparison, at least as long as ideas of progress are
Th e Ro o t s of Ne opat r i mon i a l i s m 43
that the ACN’s higher popularity at least partly reflects his greater—real
or imagined—accountability to those whose contributions it collects (cf.
Guyer 1992).
All the same, this apparent accountability coexists with the patrimo-
nial and personal nature of reciprocity offered by Tinubu’s ACN, and
thus cannot be understood as the result of a structurally different form of
political organization. But by recognizing and confirming public expec-
tations of Yoruba political leaders, the ostensibly greater accountability
of the ACN is very likely to offer a counterweight, in the eyes of impor-
tant sections of the electorate, to the greater access to financial resources
enjoyed by its opponents.
Thus, while the ACN victory arguably reflects strong ideological
support for Fashola’s redistributive politics, it is nonetheless anchored
in a local political economy of patronage ties whose viability outside of
Lagos State is an important long-term question. While it seems pos-
sible that the ACN governments in some states can raise more funds for
their own political platforms, it seems likely that in the medium term
most current ACN states will remain dependent both on the income
from Lagos State and on the federal contribution to their budgets,
both of which are ultimately beyond the control of the local groups
on whose support they rely. In this constellation, it remains to be seen
whether the ACN will be able to command the material and nonmate-
rial resources that will enable them to address local expectations. While
it may be possible to improve existing resource flows, the broadening
of the ACN’s financial base might most easily be achieved through its
political expansion into states with a broader base of income. If such
strategies fail, the party may, in time, be faced with similar discontent
as the PDP after 2007.
Moreover, given the importance of centrally based Nigerian poli-
ticians, and especially Olusegun Obasanjo for politics in southwest
Nigeria, it must be considered that the success of the ACN in 2011
also fitted into wider political strategies.40 Rumors of an agreement
between Obasanjo and Tinubu make sense if one considers that the
continued PDP control of five of the six southwestern states would not
only have been costly and contested, but that it might also have legiti-
mized and strengthened a national politics of opposition, which were,
at this time, centered on northern Nigerian grievances and aspirations.
After the early demise of Obasanjo’s successor Yar’Adua in 2010, and
the selection of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan—like Obasanjo
a southern Nigerian, though from the contested delta region—as
presidential candidate in 2011, many northern Nigerians suspected
that Obasanjo had acted strategically to disempower the north. In
response to this understanding, popular support for the Congress
for Progressive Change (CPC), the 2011 vehicle for the presidential
46 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
Notes
1. There are Yoruba communities outside the former Western Region, and
both Kwara and, to some degree, Kogi State can be counted among them.
However, this chapter does not focus on them.
Th e Ro o t s of Ne opat r i mon i a l i s m 47
2. Human Rights Watch (2004, 11–39) discusses the political use of vigi-
lante violence and thuggery before and during the 2003 elections in several
Nigerian states. While HRW notes that levels of violence were much lower
in western Nigeria than in the rest of the country, local studies confirm the
high likelihood of central government coercion (Nolte 2004, 78–83).
3. Awolowo never gained the trust of Ahmadu Bello and Nnamdi Azikiwe,
especially of his fellow nationalist leaders from northern and eastern Nigeria
respectively.
4. As a leading member of the Muslim Ansar-ud-Deen association, Abiola was
closely associated with the spread of Western as well as Arabic education
among Yoruba Muslims, and thus confirmed both the multiple roots of
Yoruba nationalism and its commitment to education and enlightenment
(Reichmuth 1996, 396).
5. During the Second Republic, Abiola had been among several high-profile
Yoruba members of the ruling NPN, and he publicly opposed Awolowo’s
presidential ambition.
6. One of the main reasons Abiola could gain the support of Awolowo’s close
associates, including the lawyer and former senator Abraham Adesanya from
Ogun State as well as the former governors Lateef Jakande, Michael Ajasin,
and Bola Ige from Lagos, Ondo, and Oyo States respectively, was simply
that due to the military manipulation of the process of candidate selection,
Abiola emerged as the most plausible Yoruba presidential candidate.
7. According to Yoruba myth, Oduduwa or Oodua is the mythical founder of
human civilization.
8. This included women (cf. Nolte 2008), members of the educated elite, tra-
ditional rulers, and civil servants (Akinyele 2001, 631).
9. Following his inauguration, Obasanjo retired many military leaders who had
served in senior positions in the Babangida (1985–1993) and Abacha (1993–
1998) military regimes, demonstrating his commitment to preventing a return
of the military. His administration’s setting up of a Human Rights Violations
Investigation Commission (Oputa Panel) and the redistribution of federal rev-
enue also gained him respect in southwest Nigeria.
10. The AD leadership had nominated Olu Falae instead of Bola Ige, a longtime
associate and political lieutenant of Awolowo and key intellectual contribu-
tor to Yoruba political rhetoric. Ige then increasingly challenged the group’s
leader, Abraham Adesanya.
11. The leader of this group, Bola Ige, accepted his ministerial posting in a
PDP-led cabinet while simultaneously serving as the deputy leader of
Afenifere and chairman of the Board of Trustees of the AD.
12. The bureaucratic tendency within the AD and Afenifere was further empha-
sized by Adesanya’s refusal to give up seniority as a guiding principle for
political influence. As the Afenifere leadership decided party primaries
according to age and experience, they disfavored politicians of the younger
generation, and in particular those who had been too young to be involved
in party politics during the Second Republic (1979–1983). As a result, a
large number of younger AD members joined the PDP in order to be able to
contest the 2003 elections.
48 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
13. Adelaja accepted the post of minister of Solid Materials from the Obasanjo
administration.
14. Awolowo’s daughter Olatokunbo Awolowo-Dosunmu accepted a posting by
the president as ambassador for the Federal Republic of Nigeria in The Hague,
and his widow Hannah Awolowo openly welcomed PDP representatives to
events celebrating her husband’s life and achievements. The complicity of the
Awolowo family, especially of Hannah Awolowo, in the appropriation of the
iconic Yorubaist’s name by the central government also reflected her personal
feelings of being sidelined “within Awoist politics and her perceived neglect
by the AD” (Nolte 2009, 251).
15. For a detailed postmortem of this astonishingly ill-advised political strategy,
see Oshun (2005).
16. Although federally aligned state governments also suffered similar neglect,
it was more or less the norm in the AD states of the southwest (cf. Fourchard
2010, 9).
17. The unsuccessful political career of southwest-based businessman, Chief
Arisekola Alao, the Aare Musulumi of Yorubaland, is demonstrative of this
type because despite his profitable connections to past military regimes, he
was unable to transform his national links into local legitimacy or popular
support in his home base of Ibadan (Hoffmann 2011, 134).
18. This phrase was made popular by Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky
(1988) in their analysis of the imperative of profitability in the news media
business and the editorial biases produced by this objective. The general
notion of commercial viability is an inherent feature of many of the political
alliances entered into by a broad section of Nigerian politicians.
19. For a detailed narrative of Adedibu’s life and politics, see Obadare (2007)
and Omobowale and Olutayo (2007).
20. It also explains the strong suspicions that he was involved in organizing the
destruction of a statute of Awolowo over three decades later. A public statue
of Awolowo was erected by the former AD governor of Oyo State on May
27, 2003, two days before the swearing-in ceremony of the first PDP gover-
nor of the state and political godson of Adedibu. It was destroyed only days
later (see Adebanwi 2008, 352–357).
21. Adedibu joined the APP, a party then favored by Abacha loyalists, but all
his political clients were defeated in the 1999 elections. The political climate
in the southwest during this time was particularly hostile toward politicians
and local leaders like Adedibu who had actively demonstrated what was per-
ceived as a lack of moral and political integrity or ethno-national loyalty.
22. Tokyo was eventually also co-opted by Adedibu.
23. Adedibu also cultivated close links with the Hausa community in the Sabo
area, and his local political machine granted him an increasing control
of the redistributive network of government patronage in Oyo (Obadare
2007, 17).
24. A majority of the members, aware of their political vulnerability, publicly
supported Adedibu against Ladoja. In January 2006, 18 out of 32 mem-
bers of the House voted to remove Ladoja from office on allegation of
financial misconduct. The deputy governor, Christopher Alao-Akala, an
Adedibu loyalist was unanimously selected to replace Ladoja. However, the
Th e Ro o t s of Ne opat r i mon i a l i s m 49
Supreme Court overturned their decision about a year later because it was
not supported by the required two-thirds majority of the legislature.
25. For a detailed description, see Human Rights Watch (2007, 58).
26. Tinubu voted against Ige, a supporter of Daniel’s, in the AD primaries for
the 1999 elections (Adebanwi 2008, 152). During his first term as Lagos
State governor, Tinubu initiated and led major cooperative efforts among
southern governors such as the Southern Governors Forum.
27. This claim has been challenged by some commentators. To the authors’
knowledge the claim has not been contested by known members of the
Committee of Friends.
28. This included the family of the former Ogun State governor Bisi Onabanjo,
several of whose members supported Daniel in the 2003 elections.
29. Daniel donated generously toward the completing of the Dideolu Specialist
Hospital, a personal hometown development project of Hannah Awolowo
that was formerly opened by former PDP vice president Atiku Abubakar.
30. In the early days of the factionalization of the AD, Daniel’s defection to the
PDP received the blessings of the Yoruba Council of Elders (YCE), a group
formed by Bola Ige.
31. Daniel executed a wide-reaching campaign in nearly all of the 236 wards in
Ogun State.
32. Daniel went so far as to advise Osoba to leave politics for the youth (ThisDay,
August 5, 2002). Daniel and other PDP senatorial candidates in Ogun like
Ibikunle Amosun (Ogun Central) reversed their so-called age disadvantage
in the AD by claiming to represent a vision and dynamism that appealed
particularly to the younger generation of Yoruba voters and was a strik-
ing contrast to the older politicians put forward by the AD. In fact, Daniel
even challenged Osoba to a televised public debate in the hope of creating
a Nixon versus Kennedy contrast that would further underscore their age
difference and showcase his intelligence and personal charisma (ThisDay,
January 27, 2003).
33. The name of Daniel’s foundation, and its monthly newspaper called Gateway
Mirror, corresponded with the motto of Ogun State, “The Gateway State.”
Once in power, Daniel changed the name of state-owned facilities like the
Ogun State TV station to Gateway TV.
34. A number of allegations against Daniel by his erstwhile rival Oladipo Dina
and, after his death, his supporters are listed at http://www.pointblanknews.
com/os2806.html (Accessed November 2, 2011).
35. The Obasanjo-led faction prevailed because INEC accepted the names of
candidates who had emerged in their round of party primaries.
36. For a range of opinions on the activities of the tax company Alpha Beta,
allegedly owned by Tinubu, see posts and blog on http://saharareporters.
com/news-page/governor-fashola-spars-saharareporters-london-%E2%80%
93-denies-tinubu%E2%80%99s-financial-windfall (Accessed November 3,
2011).
37. This includes a faction led by his former counterpart in Osun State, Bisi
Akande.
38. Tinubu often attended the electoral tribunals. His presence and monitoring
of the lengthy litigation processes helped maintain the media’s engagement
50 L e e n a Hof f m a n n a n d I ns a Nolt e
and coverage of the proceedings, which in turn may have encouraged the
presiding judges to consider the ACN claims more thoroughly.
39. Challenging the PDP in a manner similar to the ACN, the Labour Party
was confirmed as having won the 2007 elections in Ondo State in 2009.
However, it seems likely that the 2013 elections in Ondo State will be charac-
terized by competition between Labour and the ACN over the resource-rich
state.
40. This is a worthwhile consideration because electoral results are compiled
and confirmed electronically at the INEC office in Abuja, and could thus
be subject to forms of manipulation in ways beyond the control of local
groups.
41. In 2003 and 2007, Buhari had stood for the ANPP.
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Th e Ro o t s of Ne opat r i mon i a l i s m 51
P r e be n da l ism a n d t h e P eopl e:
Th e P r ic e of P e t rol at t h e P u m p
Jane I. Guyer and LaRay Denzer
violent action from time to time. He focused on the longer term issues
and expressive forms, targeting practices that emanate from the moral
life of the political community. In addition to the focus on price, the
varied vulnerability of different members of the political and economic
community to price changes, and their implications for shares in the pain
and gain of economic life, he shows how the “crowd” identified respon-
sibility for their condition. Given that oil, like grain in the eighteenth
century, is a national product and a mundane daily need, we can see the
Nigerian people’s claims on petrol as comparable claims on livelihood
and on life itself.
In Nigerian history, the “just price” is not a term that has been
invoked (at least, not in the English language of policy, but there
may be terms for “fair price” in Yoruba, Arabic/Muslim/Hausa and
other indigenous language communities that debate national issues
in their own terms). There has been, however, an explicit concept of
the “appropriate price” with respect to petrol at the pump. There has
been a “recommended price” for fuel since the 1980s, which was occa-
sionally enforced at the pump by military presence, such as during
the shortage witnessed by Guyer in 1997 (Guyer 2004, Chapter 6).
In December 1998, General Abdulsalami Abubakar allowed market-
ers to fix what he termed as an “appropriate” price, effectively raising
the price from ө11 to ө25 per liter, for which the shares of the fed-
eral government—tax, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation
(NNPC), and the PTF—the marketers and the dealers were predicted
precisely in advance. The question of what is judged and implemented
by various parties as “appropriate,” and with what political implica-
tions, lies at the center of our concerns in this chapter. Drawing on
the concept of moral economy, we look at successive instances of the
people’s complaints about supply and price, under changing economic
and political circumstances, to attend to the moral-political terms in
which these claims are couched.
This chapter is based on an archive of newspaper articles on the
economy under structural adjustment and military rule.1 An exten-
sive draft of the chapter was written for a seminar presentation at
Northwestern University in 1999 under the title “The Oil Economy of
the Nigerian People.” Given the enormity of the topic, we had tabled
it, and when we offered a revision and rethinking of it for this volume,
we could not have known that the topic was still growing in size and
importance, as yet another protest got under way as we finalized the
text and further discussions of “subsidy removal” took place in Abuja
(Amazie et al. 2011)
A note is in order on the limits of our approach. By focusing her
important study of civil society in Nigeria under military rule on the
explicitly prodemocracy movement (1989–1999; 1986 in some parts of
56 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
the text), Rita K. Edozie (2002) illuminates the participants in the strug-
gle but not always the exact themes that fueled popular support. During
the period we study, there were demonstrations about food prices as well
as petrol prices, and about many other issues, as she explores. Indeed,
the broader consumer revolt that seems to be spreading in the present
world is a very old theme in history and a recurrent one in recent Nigeria.
The theme of oil prices and protests is complex enough in its own right,
and crucial enough to Nigerian political life, to justify us containing
our theme and limiting it to that subject. So, after a short digression on
what we mean by “popular” processes, we need to examine the oil/pet-
rol price conundrum and give a timeline for the price changes to which
the people have reacted.
consumer debt technologies and cheap Chinese imports gave the impres-
sion of a rising standard of living alongside these customary stabilities.
Taken together, the idea of customary shares in the price and gener-
ally expanding consumer welfare may have confirmed a strong sense of
affordability. As a result, and without anyone knowing the exact ratios,
there is already a certain accepted moral and political economy around
the ratio of world market price to pump price, the exchange rate for the
currency, and the place of petrol in the consumer market “basket” for
the Consumer Price Index (CPI) and the ordinary population’s sense of
well-being and hope for the future.
The ratio of the world market price to the price at the pump in Nigeria
is very different from these cases. Here we come face to face with the
exchange rate problem for making comparisons and estimating the effect
on livelihoods that are lived in naira. A recent CNN report on world
prices at the pump shows the Nigerian price as among the lowest in the
world, at 38 cents a gallon, only about 10 percent of the world market
price. But this would be at a naira exchange rate that has plunged from
parity with the dollar in 1985 to around 150 to the dollar by the end of
the first decade of the twenty-first century.
To simply indicate the history and conundrum of f luctuating oil
prices alongside f luctuating exchange rates (see table in the following
section), in 1985, when the naira was at parity, oil was at $39.6 to the
barrel; hence, a barrel of oil was ө39.6 naira, making a liter 0.3K. No
wonder the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) claimed that the
currency was overvalued, and the commentaries later in the decade
argued that “the whole talk about oil subsidy is rubbish” (Claude Ake,
quoted in Akinrinade 1988, 19). By 1999, the world oil price had
fallen (brief ly) to $12.6 to the barrel, so at an exchange rate of ө22
(ө 90 on the parallel market), a liter of crude at the world price was
ө1.8 at the official rate and ө7.3 at the parallel rate. At the Nigerian
pump, petrol was ө20. Since the abolition of official/parallel exchange
rate differential in 2005, the rate has ranged from ө120–170 to the
dollar. Other prices have also f luctuated over this period, but in ways
that are hard to disentangle from the exchange rate. When the African
Guardian (January 8, 1990) reviewed the 1980s, during which the
rate on the parallel market went from parity to ө10 to the dollar, they
wrote that a Volkswagen Beetle that cost ө2,600 in 1980 cost ө57,000
in 1987, which is 20 times the nominal price and about double the real
price (31). This kind of churning and progressive deterioration makes
a very difficult situation to explain to a population that is trying to
tackle other domestic price changes, needs, shortages, and political
turbulence.
In our earlier paper we showed how the quantitative benchmarking
of the petrol price shifted from one comparison to another during the
P r e be n da l i s m a n d t h e P e op l e 59
first subsidy debate, in the 1980s and into the early 1990s. We quote
selectively from that paper here:
Comparison with the pump price, translated into dollars, in other oil pro-
ducing countries, shows that Nigerian prices are low.
Comparison with regional prices shows that the price of petrol was
higher in the franc-zone neighboring countries, only Cameroon then
being an oil producer itself.
Comparison with Nigerian incomes shows that in Nigeria the ratio of
petrol prices to incomes is very high. An article in TSM (May 24, 1992,
8–10) quoted demonstrators saying that it cost ө 4 a day for transport to
and from school. “Who are our parents? Cleaners, servants, messengers.
How much do they pay them? ө250. How we go survive?”
Comparison with the costs of production and therefore realistic mar-
gins, as in the advertisement of the American Petroleum Institute men-
tioned earlier (Guyer 2009), was always a nightmare to calculate in Nigeria,
given all the partnerships and currencies involved.
In fact, accidents from poor quality materials and their shoddy main-
tenance, tapping into lines, and politically motivated “sabotage” begin
much earlier than this, but our concentration on the price precludes
detailed documentation.
In brief summary, just a scan of these figures suggests the long-term
nature of price-churning and deterioration, with particularly convoluted
P r e be n da l i s m a n d t h e P e op l e 61
Table 2.1 Basics: Timeline of Petrol Price Hikes (in Naira/Liter) and
International Crude Prices (in Dollars/Barrel)
1985 20 kobo 40
1987 20 kobo to 39.5 kobo 20
1988 42 kobo 17
1989 60 kobo 20
1991, March 70 kobo 30
1993 N3.25 20
1994, October N11 17
1998, December N25 15
1999 January N20 12
2003 N40 30
Sources: Adedoyin 1999; http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm; and http://www.wtrg.com/
oil_graphs/oilprice1947.gif (both Accessed July 14, 2011)*“World price” is necessarily
approximate for the year. The high price in 1985 was falling from a peak of $70 in 1982; in
2003 it was rising toward $135 in 2008, then fell briefly to $40 in 2009.
conditions in the mid-to-late 1990s: stable and low world oil prices, enor-
mous spread between the official and parallel market exchange rates for the
naira, rapidly rising domestic petrol prices at the pump, substantial sale over
the borders into the franc zone, the rise in imports, and chronic shortages.
Just reading the “logic between the lines” for that period, for the politi-
cal economy of an oil-producing country one can infer acute polarization:
the preservation—even enhancement—of the resources and value-conver-
sions controlled at the center at the expense of all others (see Suberu in
this volume). The elements, however, endure in varied configurations that
62 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
1986–1988 Removal of the oil subsidy; price rises; NLC campaign; and popular
demonstrations
1991–1994 Fuel price debate; fluctuations in regional prices (Niger, Chad);
violent demonstrations; intermittent shortages throughout
1995 IMF calls for more price rise; exchange rate alignment, at first
resisted by government
1996 Shortage; protests by occupations: drivers, airlines, brewery, oil
dealers versus “hawkers”; protests over differences between the
states; long lines; “black market”
1997 Continuing scarcity; differing views on quality and quantity of oil
imports
1998 Government to review prices upward; strong criticism
1999 Reiteration of “fuel crisis”; “deregulation”; high rise in price;
Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) oppose, among many others
2000 NLC strike against fuel price hike (by now NNPC saying that 75
percent of fuel is imported); complaints about “smuggling” and
refineries; new fixed price; strike called off
2003 NLC strike about the rise in price; higher “black market” prices;
negotiations
economy where the CFA franc remained steady while the naira fluctu-
ated and was exchanged at two widely divergent rates (the official and
the parallel rates). The popular themes here become generalized anger
and confusion, as illustrated by the numerous cartoons of people with
question marks and exclamation marks over their heads, in place of
“speech bubbles.” In 1998, the issues revolved around new freedoms:
of expression among the people and of “deregulation” in government
and administration. During the crisis of 2003, subsidy and shortage fig-
ured together, as attention was diverted to the “market,” to those who
operated in the privatized, or government-regulated markets, including
lower level officials in specific sites of sale and distribution all over the
country.
To prefigure, in relation to Joseph’s focus on “fundamental processes”
of political life: two themes are carried forward and refocused over the
decades. First, there is sustained expression of exasperation with the
recurrence—each time in new combinations—of “subsidy,” “shortage,”
“inflation,” deregulation,” refinery problems, and so on. Throughout,
there continues the refrain of “same-old, same-old” with military rule
explicitly mentioned as the point of reference. Second, the focus on offi-
cials, in relation to Joseph’s specific argument about prebendalism as
one of those fundamental processes, seems to move down the hierarchy,
resulting by 2003 in a new deflection and precision of responsibility and
blame. After discussing the four cases, we return to Thompson’s “moral
economy of the crowd” theory.
had only just accepted the notion of subsidy at all” (Guyer with Denzer
2009, 108). Chichi Ashwe (51) offered to redefine the whole situation:
“Starting from first principles . . . when the ‘shouting match’ started,”
going through a series of calculations of the price of crude, the cost of
refining, the exchange rate and the “cost at the pumps” to arrive at the
conclusion (see below) that getting rid of the “subsidy” is highly “dubi-
ous,” and in any case oil is a Nigerian endowment whose price is set by
a world cartel. Writing in Newswatch, Akinrinade (1987) highlighted
the dilemma in an article headlined “Fuel Subsidy: To Be or Not To
Be” and subheaded “Government Perches on the Horns of a Dilemma
As It Weighs the Economics and Politics of Petroleum Subsidy.” Strong
voices questioned the subsidy concept altogether. They claimed that
since Nigeria was a producing country, the price to consumers should
reflect the costs of production and refining, and not the world price
at all. Political scientist Claude Ake claimed that the petrol used in
Nigeria was never on the international market, “so you cannot translate
into dollars. The whole talk about oil subsidy is rubbish” (Akinrinade
1988, 19).
The last discussions of the 1980s focused on identifying whether
the price hikes really amounted to government subsidy or were rather
a result of “the escalating cost of production” under the management
of the NNPC (Akinrinade 1988, 17). The insertion of the term “costs
of production” into the questioning opens up the large topic of the
state of Nigeria’s four refineries and the apparent rising necessity for
imports of refined fuel (therefore, certainly denominated in world mar-
ket prices). All this takes off in the 1990s.
dominated the local press and received wide international coverage (see
Nobel 1992). The finger was pointed in increasingly diverse directions as
people struggled with all factors at once: prices, exchange rates, delayed
budget policy (in 1996), liquidity mop-up, and the democratic deficit
more broadly.
In 1994 shortages led to steep price rises. The Nigerian Union of
Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) announced an indefi-
nite strike and petrol production capacity plunged. The press reported
the strike as if it was merging with the post-1993 political crisis, when
the government cancelled the election results. Under extended military
rule, President Sani Abacha sacked and replaced the leadership of the
oil workers’ unions. By 1994 the explanation of “technical hitches”
in the refineries often emerged as the reason for shortage (Akhaine
1994) and the media reported that “ordinary people opt for danger-
ous method to tap into fuel deposits” (Achema 1994), resulting in a
series of catastrophic accidents between 1998 and 2003 that we tabu-
lated above. In early 1996 the fuel scarcity coincided with the delay in
the budget, which was not announced until February 15. That month
there were long queues to fill petrol tanks, with people sometimes
waiting all night at petrol stations (National Concord, February 23,
1996, 1). Commuters often waited two hours for transport to work.
On February 16, the NNPC reassured the Lagos population that pet-
rol was being off-loaded at the docks, that prices would not rise, and
that the shortage was largely a result of consumers’ “panic-buying” for
a long holiday weekend (Adigun, Oyelegbin, Oladimeji et al. 1996).
With imports growing, regional disparities in supply begin to receive
more attention, for example, in Borno (Guardian, February 16, 1996.
11) and in Oyo, Osun, and delta states (Guardian, April 18, 1996. 3).
Occasionally disparities were blamed on distance from, or neglect by,
the Lagos distribution agencies or sometimes on smugglers. Eventually
newspapers reported the rise of street-hawking of petrol by teenagers
(e.g., in Sokoto [Guardian, July 24, 1996. 3]). Government began to
identify individual malfeasance. The operators of eight Lagos petrol
stations were accused of “hoarding 38,600 litres among themselves,” a
crime that entailed a penalty of death or 21 years imprisonment under
the Petroleum Production and Distribution (Anti-Sabotage) Act of
1975 (Guardian, February 22, 1996. 4). Soon afterward NUPENG
condemned such measures (Agbodo and Olukunle 1996). Speculation
about the effects on the stock exchange arose (Guardian, April 23,
1996. 15), and some important businesses posted losses due to the
shortage (e.g., Jos International Breweries; see Oni 1996). In June,
the fuel tanker drivers went on strike, alleging harassment by officials
(Adigun, Ajulo, Oyelegbin et al. 1996).
66 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
Deregulation in 1998
The prospect of a transition to civilian rule after the death of President
Abacha on June 8, 1998, brought expectations of an improved life,
including an improvement in the recurrent problem of fuel scarcity.
This moment happened to coincide with a plunge in the world oil price
to its lowest level in about 15 years. Already by 1997, the government
had been worrying about the national budget, which depended cru-
cially on oil revenues (Ogaziechi 1997). For years, the world oil price
had f luctuated around $20/barrel, then fell to a low of $12 in 1997–
1998, but eventually surged upward again to a high of $140/barrel
in 2008—an unprecedented rise. It is worth noting here, that the oil
price is highly inf luenced by political and financial conditions as we
can see from Wikipedia’s year-by-year chronology of oil prices that
helps us to see all the various inf luences (e.g., for 1999). New financial
provisions in the US oil futures market—the “Enron loophole” signed
into law in December 2000—add their impact to demand factors due
to financial crises in the world, the political situation in major pro-
ducing countries, OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting
Countries) policy, and many other factors that are not strictly “mar-
ket” factors.
In this volatile and unpredictable situation, the solution to the
long-lasting scarcity in Nigeria that was put forward by the transi-
tional government was to foster the market through “deregulation.”
This included a series of measures: oil firms became free to import
under a new price mechanism announced on December 21, 1998
(Adigun 1998); the NNPC and PTF prices were judged “sufficient”;
the government-recommended retail price was put at ө25, although,
unlike the case under military rule, marketers could sell lower than
this (i.e., deviate); the margins for various middlemen and transporters
was fixed as a gross amount that they could share as they wished. The
NNPC lost its monopoly on “supply, importation and distribution of
petroleum products nationwide,” as the crucial “deregulation” was to
free the operatives from control by the NNPC, as a way of addressing
the scarcity.
The immediate effect was disorientation. According to a team of
Guardian reporters led by Adigun (December 22, 1998), “the petroleum
industry was thrown into confusion yesterday amid conflicting signals.”
Many newspaper articles followed aspects of the reactions of the various
interested groups and organization. Popular anger concerning a price
rise from ө11 to ө25 per liter crescendoed into a “furore” (Edemodu,
Akintoye, and Okpugie 1998). Labor unions and the student unions
of Lagos State University (LASU) and Obafemi Awolowo University
(OAU) gave General Abubakar an ultimatum: massive demonstrations
68 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
if the fuel price was not reduced within 12 days (Elumoye et al. 1998).
Gani Fawehinmi took the federal government to court. Teachers groups,
religious organizations (e.g., the Catholic Church), and many other
organizations (e.g., the Nigerian Bar Association) condemned the price
hike. Articles started to dissect the components of the price to try to
figure out what justified a hike of over 100 percent, identifying the main
culprit as “corruption” in various locations depending on the writer’s
perspective: the NNPC, the marketers, black market connections, and so
on. Ray Ekpu (1999) aptly called it a “harvest season of blunders.” His
summary bears repeating since it shows how clearly the terms of public
engagement were shifting while anger rose: “Before now the buzzword,
the excuse jargon for petroleum price jackup was ‘subsidy,’ to wipe away
subsidy. Now the subsidy argument has abated and the new fuzzword
is ‘deregulation,’ how to let the market determine the price based on a
rendezvous between supply and demand.”
Pressure from the public resulted in the recommended price being
revised downward to ө20 in January 1999, several days before the date
fixed in the ultimatum. With a new budget in the offing, rumors spread
about the minimum wage actually being lowered, reported in the same
article as the oil price.(Komolafe and Ajayi 1998). The link, however,
was less any proposed adjustment in the nominal wage, but rather the
anticipated effects of the price rise on inflation throughout the econ-
omy, including on wages. BBC and CNN carried the news worldwide.
After the civilian government took over in May 1999, it recommitted
to deregulation, stating that the NNPC should sell refined products at
world market prices. The NLC, however, pointed out that wages were
not set at world market prices and that for the new president to argue
this was to fall victim to “selective application of world standards,” and,
therefore, to need “rescue from the hands of oil multinationals” (Adams
Oshiomhole, quoted in Vanguard, December 2, 1999. 15).
the fuel marketers and the customs agents, who are deeply complicit
in smuggling to “most West African countries” (ThisDay, October 20,
2003). In some articles, the points where doubtful practices emerge are
named, for example, between the NNPC and the ports authority, or
at local distribution centers. On the refineries, and the system in gen-
eral, Rasheed Gbadamosi, chairman of the Petroleum Products Pricing
Regulatory Agency (PPPR A), told the organized private sector (OPS)
that “government has spent about US$900 Million (N11.4 billion) so
far in fixing the refineries with no appreciable results” (Aneato 2003).
Omoh Gabriel (2003), writing in the Vanguard, reports the NNPC as
accusing an “oil mafia” of making sure that the refineries don’t work “so
that the nation can continue the present offshore importation of refined
products.” President Olusegun Obasanjo himself says that the subsidy
“is going into the pockets of rich people who are getting richer” (BBC
News, June 7, 2003).
The ethnicity of past understandings of the political community
most implicated in prebendal politics seems to give way here (and in the
latest confrontations over prices), to ideas more associated with class
and special interests, in a more privatized sense than in the 1990s,
when we read of mafias, cabals, and the negative activities of particular
organizations. This raises the question of whether the very concept of
prebendalism may need nuancing and closely examining, depending
on the social and political basis for officeholding. The political topog-
raphy may be quite different if offices are allocated according to, for
example, past military careers and positions as sole administrators, as
distinct from the ethnic networks that predominated in Joseph’s origi-
nal formulation. In this new case, the resource networks may be more
circulating than downwardly distributive through multiple levels of
patronage.
The one gradual shift is in the place of specific offices and functions, as
they figured especially in the last episode. The “blame” shifted down-
stream in the political and administrative hierarchy, resulting in—at some
points—some apparent (at least, voiced) agreement in rhetoric between
the very top and the middle/bottom of the political hierarchy about cor-
ruption and rich mafias. We have no sources on what the marketers and
“smugglers” might have been claiming, but the naira exchange rate with
the CFA franc is probably not irrelevant to a simple profit logic, as well
as the corruption that stems from fixing loyalties as the only method for
creating predictability in a turbulent world. Are people now much more
skeptical that the incumbents of these positions will act in the interests
of the local community than they were in the past? Has the referent for
“community” shifted to a less inclusive level, such that even officials of
one’s own ethnic group are deeply suspected, even profoundly disliked,
by the people? Is this the leading edge of the decline of ethnic norms
altogether, and the corresponding rise of class norms, or norms rela-
tive to occupational alignments in the vast economy that employs and
provisions the people in what Guyer (1997) referred to as the “niche
economy”?
What may have emerged now is still, in one sense, a cacophony,
but a cacophony that is no longer a fog of noise full of question marks
and exclamation points. Consistent ridicule of the public numbers—
the “figures”—begins to relegate them to irrelevance. Charts, tables,
72 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
and graphs, and parodies of them seem less in evidence recently than
they were in the 1980s and 1990s. The records for 2003 begin to
show much greater specificity about responsibility and fault: in offices
up and down the variegated hierarchies of the intersection of oil and
governance.
The kind of overweening “greed” that the whole world demos is now
accusing our global elites of indulging in is also not irrelevant, as Barber
(1982) noted for the Nigerian popular views as early as the 1970s. Here
we would argue for the importance of a truly detailed and sophisticated
comparative and historical analysis of prebendal dynamics on a very large
scale, and a return to another great classic work of the mid-twentieth
century, C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite (1956). Now we are all skepti-
cal about what Nigerian journalists have long called “churning out of
figures.” It was in part a sense that the Nigerian economic perceptions
and expressions were ahead of those in the global North and West that
encouraged us to write the critique of the rhetoric of monetarism in
Nigeria for a more general audience, using debates within Nigeria as the
example. Are the thinkers, journalists, and cartoonists from Nigerian
studies still ahead? Are the Nigerian people at the forefront of perceptiv-
ity about the workings of the world? How would the theories of 1956
(Mills), 1971 (Thompson), and 1987 (Joseph) guide such studies 55, 40,
and 25 years later?
Appendix
List of Newspapers and Periodicals Used in
Guyer/Denzer Project
Abuja Mirror (Abuja)
African Concord (Lagos)
African Guardian (Lagos)
Anchor (Lagos)
Business Times (Lagos)
Classique (Lagos)
74 J a n e I . G u y e r a n d L a R ay D e n z e r
Comet (Lagos)
Daily Champion (Lagos)
Daily Independent (Lagos)
Daily Sketch (Ibadan)
Daily Sun (Lagos)
Daily Times of Nigeria (Lagos)
Guardian (Lagos)
Headlines (Lagos)
Hotline (Kaduna)
Monitor (Ibadan)
National Concord (Lagos)
Newbreed (Lagos)
Newswatch (Lagos)
Nigerian Economist (Lagos)
Nigerian Tribune (Ibadan)
Northern Nigerian (Zaria)
Omega Weekly (Ibadan)
P. M. News (Lagos)
Poise (Lagos)
Post Express (Lagos)
Punch (Lagos)
Quality Monthly (Lagos); changed name to Quality Weekly
Tell (Lagos)
TheNews (Lagos)
ThisDay (Lagos)
TSM (Lagos)
Notes
The Nigerian journalists responsible for the stories are, as far as possible,
named in the text. Without their courageous work no-one could reconstruct
the history of this period or of these debates. The collection of the newspaper
sources was made possible by a Research and Writing Grant from the John D.
and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation for which we give thanks. We are
particularly grateful to Olatunji Ojo, who did much of the clipping (in the
days before online newspapers), to Wale Adebanwi, who wrote background
histories of all the newspapers for us, and to the staff of the newspaper reading
room of Northwestern University. Justin Lee excerpted a series of files. Guyer’s
study of these sources was supported by a fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson
International Center for Scholars in Washington D.C. in the spring of 2003.
1. This archive was set up by Jane Guyer and LaRay Denzer, and collected
in Ibadan by Denzer with the help of Wale Adebanwi and other stu-
dents between 1986 and 1999. Some material has been discussed in an
already-published paper (Guyer with Denzer 2009), devoted mainly to the
public rhetoric.
P r e be n da l i s m a n d t h e P e op l e 75
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3
P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s a n d F e de r a l
G ov e r na nc e i n Nige r i a
Rotimi T. Suberu
Introduction
Richard Joseph’s “theory of prebendal politics” provides and provokes
stimulating analyses of Nigerian federalism (1987, 1998). The theory
shows that the constituent ethnicities of Nigeria’s federal society are the
bases for the organization, mobilization, and legitimization of preben-
dalism’s ethno-clientelistic networks of patronage, corruption, and rent
seeking. Similarly, the innovative Nigerian principle of “federal charac-
ter,” according to which the country’s ethno-regional diversity must be
reflected in all governmental appointments and disbursements, has effec-
tively transformed prebendalism (or the personal, factional, and commu-
nal appropriation of public offices) “from an informal norm of political
competition into a directive principle of state policy,” as claimed by
Joseph (1998, 56). More important, the fragmentation of Nigeria into a
multiplicity of centrally funded, subnational state and local governments
has vastly expanded and multiplied the access points and conduits for the
individual and sectional appropriation of public power and resources.
Indeed, the Nigerian federal system operates almost exclusively as a
mechanism for the intergovernmental distribution and ethno-political
appropriation of centrally collected oil revenues. In short, the system
abets, and is enmeshed and subsumed in an overall context of, prebendal,
neopatrimonial politics.
Yet, the literature on comparative federalism suggests that federalism
is Janus-faced and a “double-edged sword” (Hale 2008). Depending
on historical legacies, socioeconomic context, the quality of political
leadership, and, especially, the ingenuity of institutional design, feder-
alism can significantly advance, rather than subvert, good governance.
Indeed, many scholars and policymakers agree that the federalist or
80 Ro t i m i T. Su be ru
Joseph notes that the “most successful” pathway to political party power
in Nigeria has been “to institute an ‘I eat, you eat’ policy between the
ethno-linguistic, regional and religious communities” of the country
(150). In short, Nigeria’s federal society or ethnic fractionalization pro-
vides the social foundation and infrastructure for the development and
entrenchment of clientelism and prebendalism.
Third, Joseph highlights the ways in which specific features of
Nigeria’s federal practice abet, and are affected and distorted by, pre-
bendal politics. For instance, he describes Nigerian state governors as
comparable to “provincial chiefs in a decentralized patrimonial order,”
and alludes to the ethno-distributive roles of the federal character,
revenue allocation, and political party systems (72). Ref lecting on the
recurrent agitations for the reorganization of the federation’s constitu-
ent state units, Joseph notes as follows: “Indeed, the constant pressure
in Nigeria for the creation of more states is fuelled to a significant
extent by the unrelenting pursuit of prebendal offices” (84).
Fourth, Joseph’s analysis of prebendal politics pinpoints the defin-
ing institutional flaw of the country’s contemporary federal democratic
governance, namely, the absence of truly independent and resilient
institutions, beyond the general federal structure, that can effectively
mediate the intergroup struggles for power and resources in the federa-
tion. The weaknesses of “agencies of restraint” like the courts and the
electoral administration, in particular, have contributed massively to
the depredations of prebendal politics and the erosion of Nigeria’s dem-
ocratic federalism and constitutionalism. As Joseph contends, “until
Nigerians find a way to create institutions which . . . can remain part of
the state . . . and not become instruments susceptible to being captured
by factions of civil society which win (temporary) control of the state,
any hope for a constitutional democracy is certain to be regularly frus-
trated” (169).
A fifth element of Joseph’s work on prebendal politics that is espe-
cially germane to the analysis of Nigerian federalism involves his discus-
sion of potential alternatives to, or pathways out of, prebendalism and
its ruinously cyclical alternations between civilian instability and mili-
tary impunity. At one level, Joseph discusses the political alternatives
in terms of a choice between a “fully pluralistic democracy,” “a provi-
sional semi-authoritarian governing framework,” or a “thoroughgoing
authoritarian” model such as Leninism or corporatism (185). At another
level, Joseph discusses alternatives to the current Nigerian nation-state
model, including “a confederation of self-governing states linked by a
weak central government” (185). Reflecting on the electoral successes
of the Yoruba-based, welfare-oriented, Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) in
western Nigeria in the Second Republic, for instance, Joseph observed,
P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s a n d F e de r a l G ov e r n a nc e 83
“had Western Nigeria been a nation unto itself, the achievements of the
UPN’s political campaign . . . could have established a new model of pro-
gressive party politics for tropical Africa” (120). Indeed, such promo-
tion of potential alternatives to the Nigerian federal entity has become a
constant feature of political reform debates in the country, especially in
moments of intense ethno-political turmoil.
Finally, Joseph’s analysis of prebendal politics highlights some of the
potentially functional implications of prebendalism for democracy and
for federalism. Essentially, for all its destructive and corrosive effects
on the formal institutions of democracy and federalism, prebendal poli-
tics also involves “ideas of representation and participation, of identity
with the government, and especially the bridging between center and
periphery in a geographically extensive country” that are central to the
theory and practice of federal democracy (68). Joseph’s thesis regarding
the more institutionally functional and socially legitimate aspects of
prebendal politics is very pertinent in view of recent scholarly writings
that have critiqued the use of the neopatrimonial paradigm in African
studies. These critiques have faulted the neopatrimonial framework
of analysis, including Joseph’s notion of prebendalism, for overlook-
ing the elements of reciprocity, legitimacy, and accountability that Max
Weber originally identified in patrimonial authority, for elevating the
concept of patrimonialism from one of Weber’s three basic authority
types (the others being charismatic and rational-legal forms of author-
ity) to a fully fledged political regime or governmental system, for
embracing an evolutionary reductionism that sees patrimonialism as a
prerational and prelegal system, for using the patrimonial concept in a
sweeping way to denote all forms of African political pathologies (vio-
lence, corruption, state collapse, authoritarianism), and for ignoring
the fact that elements of patrimonialism or informal personal authority
relationships can complement and even reinforce democratic institu-
tions, economic development, and other formal institutions (Pitcher,
Moran, and Johnston 2009).
Joseph’s notion of prebendalism obviously neither denies the func-
tional aspects of informal patrimonial relations nor does it conflate pat-
rimonial authority relationships with whole regimes or constitutional
systems. Nonetheless, prebendalism denotes a decentralized and ulti-
mately perverse manifestation of neopatrimonial relationships, in which
the formal institutions and offices of the state are fragmented and drained
by the relentless appropriation of their resources for informal private and
sectional ends, with ruinous consequences for economic development,
democratic consolidation, and liberal constitutional models of gover-
nance like federalism. The massive distortion and corruption of Nigerian
federalism by prebendalism is especially sobering because federalism has
84 Ro t i m i T. Su be ru
1. The Late Colonial Period, 1954–1960: This era followed the “amal-
gamation” of the British protectorates of northern and southern
Nigeria into a single country in 1914. The British ruled the country
from 1939 as a highly decentralized unitary state of three adminis-
trative regions, which became the constituent units of a quasi-federal
system in 1951 and of a full-fledged federation in 1954. Each of the
three regions was dominated by a major ethnic group (the Muslim
Hausa-Fulani in the northern region, the Christian Ibo in the east-
ern region, and the religiously bicommunal Yoruba in the western
region), was governed by a party based on that ethnicity, and was
sustained by revenues derived from the marketing of the region’s
agricultural exports (cotton, palm oil, and cocoa in the north, east,
and west, respectively). However, the federal system was beset by two
major challenges that the British left unresolved, namely, the over-
whelming size of the northern region, which was larger and more
populous (although less modernized and less developed) than the
two southern regions combined; and the intense political insecurity
86 Ro t i m i T. Su be ru
(Central Bank of Nigeria 2009). Lagos State, which generates more than
half of its revenues from internal sources, is a “strong” and “striking
outlier” among the Nigerian states. With its “much smaller dependence
on oil revenues than the average Nigerian state” Lagos has performed
comparatively better than the country’s other constituent units on such
indicators of good governance as fiscal responsibility, service delivery
capacity, and governmental accountability (World Bank 2003, 15, 50;
see also Hoffmann and Nolte in this volume).
Nigeria’s current revenue sharing system contains at least five features
that reflect and reinforce neopatrimonial politics and practices. First, the
overwhelming concentration of the most buoyant and lucrative revenue
sources and taxes, especially oil and gas revenues, in the federal govern-
ment establishes the central government at the fountainhead of Nigeria’s
distributional system, thereby reinforcing the political overcentralization
that we have already identified as a pervasive, neopatrimonial, pathology
of Nigerian federalism. Second, the constitutional institutionalization
of an extensive general system of vertical and horizontal revenue sharing
promotes and perpetuates the practice of intergroup distribution or “cake
sharing” as a defining and entrenched feature of the national political
economy and culture.
Third, the overwhelming dependence of subnational governments
on centrally redistributed oil rents as distinct from locally generated
revenues, coupled with the politically unconditional and constitution-
ally automatic character of the intergovernmental transfers represents a
powerful inducement to fiscally irresponsible and imprudent behavior by
these governments. This dependence precludes the efficiency, transpar-
ency, and accountability gains that are often associated with a system of
subnational revenue autonomy, competitive economic decentralization,
or market-preserving federalism (Suberu 2010). The subnational govern-
ments lack any incentives to generate independent revenues of their own,
do not face any hard budget constraints, and have repeatedly opposed
any macroeconomic stabilization efforts that may defer or reduce the
federal fiscal transfers. Subnational revenue dependence also promotes
rampant corruption, breathtaking mismanagement, and extraordinarily
poor service delivery.
Indeed, the use of public resource by state and local governments
“has been characterized by extravagance, waste and opacity; their per-
formance in providing for basic health and education services has widely
been viewed as a shocking and disastrous failure” (Human Rights Watch
2007a, 2). Meanwhile, the entrenchment of practices that discriminate
between state indigenes and nonindigenes, combined with the lack of any
subnational incentives to generate local revenues, precludes the potential
role of interunit mobility as an incentive for fiscally responsible subna-
tional behavior.
P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s a n d F e de r a l G ov e r n a nc e 95
most of these reform proposals do not hold much potential for address-
ing the problems and pathologies of neopatrimonial federalism.
The southern-based agitations for true federalism have been spear-
headed by primarily ethnic or regional organizations like the Yoruba-based
Afenifere, the Ohanaeze Ndi Igbo, Union of the Niger delta, Ijaw National
Congress, Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People (MOSOP), Itsekiri
Leaders of Thought, Movement for National Reformation, the Patriots,
and the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO). Some of their most
radical proposals for restructuring Nigerian federalism call for the aban-
donment of the centrist executive presidential system and a return to
parliamentary rule, the promotion of effective political decentralization
via the consolidation of the 36 Nigerian states into fewer (6–18) and
bigger federating units, the devolution of several currently centralized
policy functions (including policing, mineral resource control, and local
government reorganizations), and the entrenchment of a constitutional
right to ethnic self-determination and secession (PRONACO 2007).
A common refrain in the southern organizations’ agenda for reform
is the convocation of a Sovereign National Conference (SNC), which
presumably would restructure the Nigerian federation into a loose ethnic
union. Largely missing from this southern agenda is a political reform
program that is achievable within the current rules for altering the 1999
Constitution. These rules do not provide for an SNC but require the ratifi-
cation of constitutional change by concurrent legislative super-majorities
at federal and state levels. The southern ethno-regional agitation for true
federalism also lacks a strategy for cauterizing ethnic chauvinism and
separatism, sustaining national integration, enhancing even interregional
development, and ensuring “good governance” or preventing elite cap-
ture of new autonomous subnational units. In promoting the agenda
of resource control, for instance, proponents of true federalism tend to
ignore the substantial revenue decentralizations already in place in the
federation today, and the gross mismanagement of federally transferred
oil rents by the states in general, and the oil-bearing subnational govern-
ments, in particular.
Issues of democratic accountability and good governance feature
more prominently in the federalist constitutional reform proposals of
Nigeria’s civic groups. Indeed, the Citizens Forum for Constitutional
Reform (CFCR), a coalition of more than 100 civic (rather than eth-
nic) associations, is distinguished less by its commitment to any dis-
tinct agenda of federal restructuring than by its advocacy of a populist
referendum-based, rather than purely legislature-dominated, constitu-
tion ratification process. The CFCR envisages a bottom-up, process-led,
people-driven, and participatory approach to constitutional reform
that would enshrine such principles of contemporary democratic con-
stitutionalism as inclusiveness, diversity, participation, transparency,
P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s a n d F e de r a l G ov e r n a nc e 97
Conclusion
Prebendalism, Nigeria’s uniquely decentralized form of neopatrimonial
politics, has degraded the country’s federalism by fostering institutional
overcentralization, promoting a purely ethno-distributive approach to
P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s a n d F e de r a l G ov e r n a nc e 99
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Adebanwi, Wale and Ebenezer Obadare. 2011. “When Corruption Fights Back:
Democracy and Elite Interest in Nigeria’s Anti-Corruption War.” Journal of
Modern African Studies, Vol. 49, No. 2: 185–213.
Bach, Daniel. 1989. “Managing a Plural Society: The Boomerang Effects of
Nigerian Federalism.” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics,
Vol. 27, No. 2: 281–245.
100 Ro t i m i T. Su be ru
Introduction
One characteristic of political life in postcolonial Africa is the weak sense
of, and commitment to, the common good or public interest. This is man-
ifest in the way public resources are privatized, political power abused,
and in the general disregard for legal restraints to the exercise of power,
which undermine political and public institutions. These features, often
referred to as the pathologies of the modern state in Africa or the crisis of
governance, have been attributed to the amoral nature of politics, or the
problem of power that lacks an ethical or normative grounding, or the
moral incapacity of the state in Africa. This lack of a normative anchor
for the institution of the modern state in postcolonial Africa is said to
be responsible for the fragility of the state, and ultimately the collapse of
some states on the continent, as state institutions are undermined and
become vulnerable to centrifugal forces.
The moral dilemma of postcolonial politics in Nigeria has been an
indirect preoccupation of some political scientists. To be sure, a great
deal of effort has been invested in explaining how this dilemma plays
out in politics and economy and its consequences for political and eco-
nomic development. The aim has been to label or, at best, provide an
explanation rather than to chart a path for or catalyze change. Indeed,
the debates on these issues have largely focused on the structural basis
and source of this moral dilemma, whether it is a product of the colonial
104 E . R e m i A i y e de
and draws on those with whom he shares primordial affection and rela-
tions in the unholy enterprise of seizing public funds, and the mercenary
relations this act creates. Second, in the study by Jane Guyer (1994) of
patronage exchanges in the context of rural Nigeria, she observes that the
“sheer volume of money deposited in foreign banks during the oil boom
is eloquent testimony that the demands of a legion of followers may be a
pretext rather than a cause underlying the syndrome of prebendalism.”
In the competitive and shifting context of Nigerian public and economic
life, she argues, “the people have to know how to tap into clientage more
specifically than by vague claims of shared moral community or they sim-
ply fall out of the picture” (30). Her study also shows how this perverted
exchange affects the moral environment in those communities, rendering
intercommunity collaboration in development activities in rural commu-
nities difficult. Besides, the persistent poverty of most rural communi-
ties from where many of Nigeria’s past and present billionaire leaders hail,
bears eloquent testimony to the limited operation of a prebendal logic that
incorporates ethnic reference group. Rather, the spread of moral perver-
sion is clearly evident in the historiography of corruption in Nigeria from
the “10 percenters” in the First Republic to the emergence of a “culture of
corruption” in the country (Osoba 1996; Smith 2007).
Richard Joseph’s book is a major attempt at conceptualizing the moral
dilemma of politics in Nigeria and its adverse consequences on develop-
ment more broadly. It is not just an effort to investigate the reasons for
the fall of the Second Republic; more important, it explores ways to avoid
a repeat of the pitfalls of that republic. While he engages with the ques-
tion of the choices made by elites, groups, or individuals as either goals
or means, he does not explore in detail the question of responsibility
probably because he believes that such choices were conditioned “by the
problem of underdevelopment, by the effects of class formation, and by
the ways and means in which Nigerians often pursue their interests even
when they seem to be acting “outside the political arena” (1987, 30).
Yet, his analysis is full of elaborate display of chicanery, involving elec-
toral fraud, thuggery, oppression of political opponents, and intimida-
tion of journalists and bribery of government officials. His analysis also
features a detailed discussion of the debates about institutional choices.
He shows a variety of possibilities and options, some suggested by the
political elites “which were usually soon trampled underfoot in the drive
to achieve decisive political advantage” (36). Even when such institutions
are adopted there is usually no concerted effort to operate those institu-
tions. This point is emphasized by Post and Vickers (1973, 64) about the
First Republic that “there is no real evidence to indicate that the leaders
of the three major parties had even an unconscious intention of working
the system by mutual agreement in the 1960s.”
We cannot lay the short-sightedness of the postcolonial elites (leader-
ship) and their failure to pay due regard to the consequences of their
C om p e t i t ion, C h a ng e , a n d R e s p ons i b i l i t y 109
Public officials are pushed to the wall to commit crime by the unneces-
sary demands from the society. Immediately an individual is appointed or
elected into office, a lot of pressure is brought on him to bring develop-
ment to their areas; others want him to put money in their pockets . . . The
society need to take a second look at our core value. The same society
who pressurises the public official to steal is not reprimanded but is con-
veniently forgotten when it is time for punishment. (Guardian September
12, 2007. 80)
[T]hat those who threw their lot with power and force as means were
making a pact with diabolical powers, and that as far as one’s actions are
concerned it is not true that “from good only good comes, and from evil
only evil comes,” but that the opposite is often the case. Indeed, any-
one who does not see this is a child where politics is concerned. (2008,
200–201)
leadership, but also among the elites more broadly. It is at the heart
of the weakness of institutions. The notion of political responsibility
is central to institutions since institutions are the outcome of bargains
and trade-offs among the political elite. This is the same whether we
focus on the adoption of federalism as a system of government or ele-
ments of change and restructuring within an existing federal structure,
including such elements as affirmative action, zoning, states, and local
government reorganizations or revenue sharing and tax assignment.
Indeed, responsibility demands that we examine elite-mass relationship
not only in determining the preference of institutions but also in terms
of the consequences of such institutions, and proposing future change.
After all, as Douglas North (2003, 1) makes very clear, institutions
exist mainly to deal with the uncertainties and frictions of human inter-
action. They consist of formal rules, informal constraints, and their
enforcement characteristics. Informal constraints do not show up in
formal terms. Informal norms are more important than formal rules
because they mediate enforcement. Enforcement is never perfect. This
is why responsibility is crucial. In this regard, responsibility relates to
personal maturity and the ability to change the course of one’s action
based on concern about their consequences.
Elements of responsibility according to Winston Davis include (1) a
readiness to bear in mind the consequences of one’s acts; (2) a sense of
when to consult others and when to consult one’s own conscience; (3)
an ability to change one’s plans in the face of consequences boding ill
to other highly valued goals or commitments; (4) a willingness to give a
truthful account of one’s final course of action (2001, 6–7).
As elite theory (Mills 1956; Michels 1962; Bottomore 1982 [1964];
Burton and Higley 1987; Rahat 2007) has emphasized, the hierar-
chical organization of social institutions makes the rule of the elites
inevitable. A minority will always monopolize power. This elite may
consist of a multiplicity of competing groups that encompass political,
ethno-linguistic, bureaucratic, military, and business segments. They
define the values and rules that not only constitute political competi-
tion but also determine how the major issues of society are addressed.
Thus, it is natural that their dominant values and worldview will per-
meate society, perhaps until it leads to a crisis. Wilson (1983, 67) has
suggested that “the demand for positive change or negative rights is
usually a response to an increasing awareness of perversion of the obli-
gations owed by dominant groups. These perversions occur partly as
the conscious choice of some dominant individuals, and partly because
of shifts in underlying social and economic conditions that enhance the
status of some groups and require new justifications for dominance.”
He noted further that “expressions of outrage are not usually univer-
sal throughout society; rather, they are most prevalent within the elite
114 E . R e m i A i y e de
itself or within the strata just below the apex of dominance . . . the social
groups that first demand rights are thus, in one sense, cousins of those
who resist granting them.” This, he claimed, is true for the French
Revolution, the protestant reformation, the Bolshevik Revolution, and
the American Revolution (69).
Thus, political change in Nigeria should come from the elite not just
because they are the source of the great perversion of values that stalk
the land, but also because it is in their interest so to do. Indeed, it is
their historic responsibility. This point is emphasized by Wilson (1983,
64) thus: “those who occupy dominant positions have an additional
obligation for responsibility. As controllers of resources, coercive power,
and ideological authority that can affect the lives of everyone, dominant
individuals especially must demonstrate responsibility if political pat-
ters are to be moral in nature.” They must first reform the values of
governance and then invest in transforming the Nigerian society into
a responsible society. I think the idea of a responsible society, which is
properly the self-regulating society, as identified in democratic theory,
is the outcome of moral maturity of leadership, including such qualities
as reciprocity, empathy, and individual responsibility.
Davis (2001, 7) identifies the following as characteristics of a respon-
sible society:
past and the ongoing efforts to combat corruption in public life to see
how they promote or fail to promote a responsible society.
It is also important to emphasize that political responsibility on
the part of the political leadership has become a major issue under the
current regime of the global system of states. This has been shown in
the movement for sustainability for the responsible use of the earth’s
resources and the historic move by the global community to realize the
Responsibility to Protect (R2P) citizens against a government that has
run amuck. The latter, which is relevant here, is a global norm that has
evolved from the need to protect human rights drawing on the experi-
ence of the Holocaust during the Second World War, the genocide in
the Balkans and Rwanda. In Africa, this norm legitimized the exter-
nal (French) intervention in the postelection crisis in Côte d’Ivoire
and NATO’s engagement in Libya, under the United Nations Security
Council Resolution 1973 and 1975 to establish a ceasefire and ensure a
complete end to violence and all attacks against, and abuses of, civilians
in Libya, which has resulted in the removal of Col. Gaddafi from power
and his eventual death. Irresponsible behavior among the power elite in
Africa’s weak states may be the harbinger of future external intervention
as opposition forces look up to the United Nations for protection.
The subdivision of major groups into several states and the creation of
several minority-controlled states have promoted state identities that are
independent of, and compete with, raw ethnic identities. These states
provide sites for intergroup encounters, a socialization process involving
bargaining and other exchanges that facilitate the resolution of complex
and delicate national issues. State reorganization has transformed the
arenas that groups and parties could dominate as springboards to power,
thereby promoting greater proportionality in relationship between eth-
nic group size and electoral strength. The national spread required in the
electoral formula has also promoted interethnic alignments and coali-
tions. The principle wof federal character has achieved more or less equi-
table representation of the various groups and units in the institutions of
the national government. Finally, the revenue sharing and federal char-
acter principles have facilitated the distribution of revenue and opportu-
nities to state and localities to mitigate interregional disparities and for
fiscal appeasement of separatist units or regions.
Unfortunately, one element that has run through these achievements
is that they are elite-focused and elite-favored. A major justification of
this claim is the fact that these achievements have mitigated conflicts
and increased elite access to resources without a similar record with
relations among the mass of the people. Iwndeed, elite appeasement
has been achieved at the expense of effective integration of the masses
as stakeholders in the federal project. This is because the accompany-
ing primitive accumulation processes have had adverse consequences
on economic development, broad welfare, and social capital (Aiyede
2009). As Suberu (2010, 468) argued, “the revenue allocation system
has been more successful in promoting accumulation among an ethni-
cally and regionally diversified elite group, than ensuring mass-based
social equity across the regions of the federation.” The masses are dis-
empowered economically and politically, and are, therefore, susceptible
to manipulation. Much more worrisome is the fact that this process of
accumulation, underlined as it were by political predation, which is cen-
tral to the whole question of the morality of power, is sustained through
the disorganization of civil society. A major plank of this problem is the
current prevalence of representation without taxation and “free riding”
in the daily experience of citizenship, as federalism is converted into
a formula for distributing political offices as political booty, and for
sharing the national cake in Nigeria’s monomineral rentier state (see
Aiyede 2009). In turn, the disorganization of civil society and disem-
powerment of the masses render democracy meaningless and the whole
political process a cold war between various factions of the elites linked
together by a common commitment to access oil rents. With the preva-
lence of irresponsible, shoddy, and shady governments, at every level,
C om p e t i t ion, C h a ng e , a n d R e s p ons i b i l i t y 117
Conclusion
Nigerian elites have sufficiently demonstrated their capacity to innovate
and deal with problems. But such innovations have come in the context
of elite competition and at great cost to the ordinary citizens. Other
innovations have been measures taken by previous military rulers to sta-
bilize and consolidate their rule. The challenge of institutional innova-
tion in federalism and other state processes in Nigeria today is to shift the
focus of institutional innovation from the concentration on elite political
accommodation to the empowerment of the masses and improvement
of their social conditions. These will involve a redefinition of the notion
of citizenship in practical terms, and the recognition of the responsi-
bility of leadership for the fate of the ordinary Nigerian. It implies the
adjustment of the federal system to put real content into citizenship, not
in terms of de jure rights and privileges that are more abstract than real
but in terms of promoting citizens freedom and responsibility by trans-
forming governance into an instrument for achieving public good.
The thrust of my argument is that elite political responsibility is very
low given the type of institutional innovations in Nigeria’s federalism.
These innovations have largely served the distributive and self-interested
competition for power and its associated material benefits for the elite,
with little or no expression of compassion and concern for the welfare of
the ordinary citizen. In this sense, there is a low level of personal respon-
sibility for the condition of poverty that currently stalk the land and the
corruption that has rendered service delivery dismal. The low level of
personal responsibility reflects the quality of moral development of the
postcolonial leadership. This calls for a more systematic engagement with
the notion of responsibility by scholars and activist interested and com-
mitted to political change. Accountability deficit cannot happen without
deficit in responsibility on the part of the power elite.
There is a need for the movement for responsibility not only in
politics but also in every segment of social life. The driving force of
such a movement will be bringing into public consciousness the link-
ages between political decisions and actions and social conditions, the
118 E . R e m i A i y e de
References
Aiyede, E. R. 2005. “Intergovernmental Relations and the Strengthening of the
Nigerian Federation.” In Nigerian Federalism in Crisis: Critical Perspectives
and Political Options, ed. Ebere Onwudiwe and Rotimi Suberu. Ibadan:
Programme on Ethnic and Federalism Studies, 2005, 220–230.
———. 2009. “The Political Economy of Federalism and the Dilemma of
Constructing a Developmental State in Nigeria.” International Political
Science Review, Vol. 30, No. 3: 249–269.
C om p e t i t ion, C h a ng e , a n d R e s p ons i b i l i t y 119
Be yon d P r e be n da l Pol i t ic s:
C l a ss a n d Pol i t ic a l St rug gl e s i n
Post c ol on i a l Nige r i a
‘Kunle Amuwo
issues of social equity and social justice in official thinking became a dead
letter long ago. For another, on the interface between ethnicity and clien-
telism, the patron need not be of the client’s ethnic, regional, or religious
provenance. Class considerations often come to bold relief. On this issue,
Joseph is very clear:
the Nigerian electorate votes for a variety of reasons, including, but not
limited to, ethnicity. In this way, they resemble voters in other parts of the
world who vote for parties of their areas or localities with which they are
familiar and to whose political ideology or sentiment they subscribe. When
that is done—voting for the AG/UPN/AD, the party of the Yoruba; or
the NCNC/NPP, the party of the Ibo; or the Labor Party in the United
Kingdom, the party of the workers; or the Democratic Party, the party of
the Irish in the United States—the process is informed not so much by
ethnicity as by tradition, habit and origins; anger, and opposition as well
as satisfaction and support. (Amuwo 2010b, 93–94)
Several factors seem to defy the logic of the thesis of prebendal poli-
tics. The reality of subethnic, intra-Yoruba confrontations and tensions
within the UPN is at variance with the logic of intraethnic harmony and
cooperation woven around the party and the imposing personality of
Chief Obafemi Awolowo as the best placed to covet and distribute fed-
eral resources and patronage to his people (Joseph 1991, 119). Awolowo
represented more than the interests of his Yoruba ethnic stock; he was
throughout his political career arguably the most consistent advocate of
Be y on d P r e be n da l P ol i t ic s 127
Had western Nigeria been a nation unto itself, the achievements of the
UPN’s political campaign of 1978–9—and the detailed planning that pre-
ceded it—could have established a new model of progressive party politics
for tropical Africa. Those who opposed the UPN would have constituted
a minority opposition without the power to impede the party leaders in
their implementation of a program which had been diligently explained to
the electorate. However, the western states constitute only one-fifth of the
Nigerian federation. (120)
Even though the same populist program of the UPN could be recognized
as coherent and praiseworthy by people in other areas of the country, other
factors acted to prevent the party from obtaining anything but a derisory
share of their electoral votes. (ibid.)
Be y on d P r e be n da l P ol i t ic s 131
These “other factors” also explain the failure of the UPN “to attract
non-western politicians or intellectuals of recognized stature who also
had access to independent bases of support” (123).4
On the other hand, while acknowledging that the NPN triumphed in
all the five elections in 1979, displaying “an impressive demonstration
of the range of strategies available to Nigerian political actors,” Joseph is
worried about the import of the victory. He contends that it was a success
that “incorporated the seeds of its own undoing.” This is because, for
him, “its rationale was pre-eminently that of prebendal politics in all its
dimensions . . . its demise was foreshadowed by the ultimately destructive
logic of this very set of practices” (129). He suggests that what gave the
NPN “the greatest resonance and the widest appeal”—in contradistinc-
tion to the UPN—was its promise “to be the party which would be the
most capable and willing to give ‘every community and every Nigerian
the opportunities to have all the amenities that all others have” (149).5
As argued elsewhere, “given a shrunken pan-Nigerian public space
from the onset, emergent nationalist/post-independence leaders and
their political parties . . . were driven into their respective primordial,
security and ethnic camps from where they have yet to effectively come
out . . . It was as if they had no choice but to defend their privileged politi-
cal turf against foreign rule” (Amuwo 2010a, 86).
“the North has long been the poorest, unhealthiest, least developed part
of Nigeria lacking the south’s oil resources, banks and businesses.” 9
There is no respite, however, in the pursuit of power for power’s sake.
On February 3, 2011, 22 days after losing the ruling Peoples’ Democratic
Party (PDP)’s presidential primary to President Jonathan, former vice-
president Atiku Abubakar, Adamu Ciroma-led Northern Elders Political
Forum (NLPF)’s consensus candidate, having not yet congratulated his
opponent, declared he and his group were amenable to dialogue—and
horse trading. Atiku demanded for six ministerial slots, but Jonathan
and his entourage reportedly were willing to concede only four. Upon
reported representation to the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) by key
political forces from several parts of the country (including the north-
west and northeast geopolitical zones that did not vote for Jonathan in
the primary), the core north supposedly dropped zoning and rallied the
president with some key personalities in the group joining his campaign
organization.10 But Atiku was simultaneously busy challenging his rival’s
victory. In a petition dated January 28, 2011, but filed only on February
14, he prayed INEC to cancel the primary on several grounds, including
improperly conducted comprehensive delegates list (which allegedly facil-
itated the manipulation of the election process in favor of the president)
and supplementary names presented at the accreditation venue under
pretext they had been endorsed by the chairpersons of the party’s state
chapters (a violation of Section 122 of the country’s 2010 Electoral).11
hikes as that they do not trust a largely roguish ruling elite to spend
accruals from the removal for social-regarding purposes. To be sure,
it is natural and human to want cheap oil, though in relation to the
average national income and purchasing power of over three quarters of
Nigerians, the pump prices of oil have been anything but cheap, contrary
to massive official propaganda. “Far from being wasteful,” writes a cor-
porate observer, “a cheap energy policy boosts economic development”
(Guardian, January 25, 2012).
The Jonathan government not only did a poor job of the prepa-
ration for the removal. It was extremely inchoate and incoherent in
its advertised rationale for subsidy withdrawal. The official reasons
ranged from the need to shore up government revenues in order to
fund critical infrastructure programs; more money required to service
the country’s debt portfolio; and the imperative, according to President
Jonathan, to reposition the country’s economy for future challenges.
In seeming utter desperation, the government went as far as claiming
that fuel subsidies are being financed by loans and that about 25 per-
cent of the national budget goes to fuel subsidies (Ejikeme 2012).13 It
is a curious claim in view of the enormous earnings from oil sales on
the international market since the beginning of the Fourth Republic
in May 1999. Nigerians are also entitled to wonder how annual huge
budgetary outlays on social infrastructures have been spent. After all,
as Sachs (2012) controversially reminded us during the mass protest,
the much-trumpeted $8 billion savings from subsidy removal is only
about 4 percent of the country’s GDP. The government also claims it
pays a subsidy to importers to keep the prices low. As Adichie (2012)
has argued, “it is strange reason for raising prices, as though the gov-
ernment is incapable of policing fraud.” Government’s economic argu-
ments are deeply flawed, not least because oil prices have almost always
gone up, never down, something that is clearly alien to market forces.
Between 2003 and 2007, the Obasanjo government adjusted pump
prices upward ten times (Nwozor 2009, 28). The Jonathan govern-
ment, like its predecessors, runs, at best, on mixed or partial market
rationality or efficiency. At worst, the PDP and corruption rule, and
the result can only be a “perpetuation of a culture of waste” (Punch,
July 15, 2011).
Moreover, government chose to ignore expert advice and sober reflec-
tions from several sources, including the National Assembly and the
Manufacturers’ Association of Nigeria (MAN). The government could
not tell Nigerians the exact amount the country had spent on oil subsidy
in recent years, including in 2011. Whereas the government earmarked
ө500 billion for the subsidy in that year, the amount had, by year end,
ballooned to either ө1.4 trillion (according to Finance Minister and
Coordinating Minister for the Economy Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) or
138 ‘Ku n l e A m u w o
allies and proxies are stupendously rich. In the final analysis, subsidy
removal may be a creeping war against the Nigerian masses by a gov-
ernment with transformation rhetoric but is not prepared to attack class
privilege and malfeasance.
The way forward is very simple: remove the middlemen; fight the
good fight of anticorruption in the oil sector; and revamp the refiner-
ies and build new ones.17 If successive governments have failed to do
these things, it is precisely because the logic of the class interest of the
ruling elite dictates market injustice rather than social justice. It is the
perpetual dilemma in modern capitalist democracy: how to entrench
morality in public politics by effectively neutralizing political corrup-
tion. A ruling elite that claims it is desperate for money to fix social
infrastructure should think outside the box. It could repatriate stolen
monies stashed away in western vaults, including the $100 billion the
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) claimed has been
looted from the public treasury since the return of franchise in 1999
(Nwozor 2009, 31).
When the National Assembly awards its members jumbo or out-
landish salaries and allowances, false note or dissension hardly enters
the political calculus, let alone primordial identities or party differ-
ences. As it was in the Second Republic, so it is in the Fourth. In 2011,
Nigerians were shocked to their marrows to learn from the Central
Bank governor that about 25 percent of federal government’s overhead
in 2010 was gulped up by the National Assembly. The figure put out in
the public space is about ө136 billion for just 469 people (360 repre-
sentatives and 109 senators). Nigerians were also surprised and angry
to hear that their lawmakers are in the habit of appropriating “wages
for themselves far beyond what has been prescribed by the Revenue
Mobilization, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (R MAFC), the
agency statutorily responsible for fixing public office holders’ salaries”
and that their gross take-home pay is outrageous and unsustainable.18
Yet, the R MAFC chair announced to a bewildered Nigerian populace,
in June 2011, that the legislators’ total package was up for upward
review. While the commission claimed that an attempt to reduce the
high incidence of political corruption informed the proposal to raise
public officers’ emoluments in 2007, it has been a Herculean task to
wean the National Assembly out of sundry financial scandals. For
instance, the leadership of the House of Representatives (2007–2011)
appeared to have engaged in a relentless and persistent unilateral
approval and payment of unbelievably high allowances to legislators.
Dimeji Bankole’s tenure as Speaker was enmeshed in, among others,
a ө2.3 billion car scam and misappropriation of ө 9 billion out of the
2008 capital vote for the House.
140 ‘Ku n l e A m u w o
Concluding Remarks
We have suggested in the foregoing, both explicitly and otherwise,
that the epochal character of British colonialism and its main spin-off
effects constitute the principal barrier to the creation of a genuinely
pan-Nigeria state and society and the articulation of a sense of national
awareness, a conception of who a Nigerian is, a proper national iden-
tity. The starting point necessarily has to be the recomposition of the
country’s hollow federal, democratic polity. The present ruling elite is
not likely to be enamored by this project, nor would it be realized on a
platter of gold, hence the need for sustained class and political struggles
(see also Aiyede in this volume). A strong state, a Bill of Rights, a new
social contract that transcend all known primordial cleavages and privi-
lege the welfare of the majority are all a sine qua non for a new Nigeria
not bogged down by the heritage of colonialism and contemporary
manifestations of neocolonialism.
The week-long, pan-Nigeria mass protest in January 2012 against
subsidy withdrawal, a tellingly class act, ably coordinated not just by
organized labor unions but, more significantly, by civil society initiatives
such as Occupy Nigeria and Save Nigeria Group (SNG), may be a first
step in the direction of recomposing the country’s political economy in
the interest of the disadvantaged majority. Both horizontal and vertical
political struggles deserve intensification.
A major chunk of the class and political struggle should be the imme-
diate valorization of chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution. The chapter
is entitled “Fundamental Objectives and Directive Principles of State
Policy.” These objectives and principles first featured in the 1979
Constitution but have remained meaningless because they are nonen-
forceable. The summary of the provisions is that “the security and the
welfare of the people shall be the primary purpose of government.” It is
high time the Nigerian people embarked on a class struggle to demand
that the provisions become justiceable. If this is done, government at
all levels would be required by the principle of force majeure to use the
country’s immense resources in the interest of the people. The next step
would be “deep state-society synergies that underpin a developmental
state.” This would be anchored on “a conception of a strong interven-
tionist developmental state and a strong, self-activated civil society dom-
inated by organizations representing the working class in its broadest
sense (including the unemployed, students from working class families
and the rural poor” (Pillay 2008, 47).
If Nigeria does not get it right within the contemporary context of
Boko Haram-driven Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism in the coun-
try, the Ojukwu recipe—of a confederation of self-governing states,
linked by a weak central government—on the eve of the declaration of
Be y on d P r e be n da l P ol i t ic s 141
Notes
1. According to a March 2012 report, at least 80 percent of the ownership of
Nigeria’s oil reserves is controlled by a handful of highly connected northern-
ers, notably emirs, princes, retired generals, and former ministers. See Donald
Ojogo, “How North cornered Nigeria’s oil blocs; Revealed: 80% of ownership
of the nation’s oil reserves is in the hands of some influential northerners; North,
South-South in battle royale over oil,” Nigerian Tribune, March 9, 2012.
2. A governor in Southwest Nigeria whose 2007 election was validated late in
2010 after a protracted politicolegal battle told this writer in January 2011
that, from his experience with his own entourage that was forced to spend a
long time at the barricades, Nigerian politics is not only about rent, it is also
about integrity, principles, and public service.
3. See “Niger Delta: Armed Struggle, Last Resort, Says Dokubo-Asari,”
ThisDay, May 18, 2011
4. Yet, Joseph cited, approvingly, and based his prebendal reading of Awolowo’s
politics on a less than convincing depiction of Awolowo as “a factional polit-
ical fighter surrounded by devoted lieutenants” (124) by Adisa Akinloye and
Adeniran Ogunsanya, two of his fiercest critics. The accusation that within
Awolowo’s Committee of Friends “those invited could perceive a tighter
‘circle of friends’ and nothing was done to alleviate that suspicion” cuts both
ways: bring in people of doubtful political and ideological provenance and
lose your closest and surest allies.
5. Joseph equally compared Aminu Kano’s original populist People’s
Redemption Party (PRP) with NPN’s Shehu Shagari: “Of all prominent
142 ‘Ku n l e A m u w o
politicians in Nigeria in 1978–9, Aminu Kano was the one who most
directly and convincingly argued the case for the freedom and equality of
women.” Quite predictably, however, whereas the party would easily mobi-
lize “the kind of enthusiastic popular following in the North that could not
be matched by Shehu Shagari and the NPN,” it was hard put to become “a
fully national party.” Aside of poverty of funds and materials by the PRP,
the stranglehold of political conservatism in the North explains this failure
(149).
6. Mannir Dan-Ali, editor of the Abuja-based Daily Trust, claimed that when
the results of the April 16, 2011, presidential election that pitched incum-
bent Goodluck Jonathan against former head of state Muhammadu Buhari,
which showed the former leading comfortably, he received “text messages
saying things like ‘we have been conquered.’” See “Nigeria Risks Further
Bloodshed as Divide Grows,” Reuters, April 20, 2011.
7. In May 2011, Professor Ishaya Haruna Nok, national president of the
Platform of the Southern Kaduna People’s Union (SOK APU), called on
government to constitute a Sovereign National Conference (SNC) to allow
Nigerians find solutions to the problems of zoning and other socioeco-
nomic challenges facing the country. More specifically, he demanded “a
platform for dialogue among northern minority and majority tribes,” to
discuss intranorth differences such as religion, politics, culture, and struc-
ture. He notably added: “There is no need to continue to fool or deceive
ourselves that we are one Arewa when in reality we are deeply divided
and even scheme from time to time to kill and destroy the property of
Christians. The lives of the minorities in the North have been and are
still being threatened. The Hausa-Fulani are carrying out ethnic cleans-
ing against the minorities in the North by constantly destroying their
churches, property and killing them.” See Saxone Akhaine, “Southern
Kaduna Leaders Back SNC, Say One North Deceitful.” Guardian, May
19, 2011.
8. See “Sanusi Blames Northern Leaders for Set-Back,” Daily Trust, March 18,
2011
9. “Nigeria Risks Further Bloodshed as Divide Grows.” Reuters, April 20,
2011.
10. See Clifford Udujihe and Henry Umoru, “I Am Ready for Negotiation—
Atiku,” Vanguard, February 4, 2011 and Saxone Akhaine, “Arewa Leaders
Soft Pedal on Zoning, Back Jonathan,” Guardian, February 15, 2011
11. Other grounds were: circumscription of delegates’ independence in exercis-
ing their vote because state delegations were led by governors; no special con-
gress where the 774 special delegates who voted for Jonathan were elected;
change, a few days to the election, of state working committee members and
local government chairpersons while known supporters of the president were
allowed to vote in place of disenfranchised statutory delegates. See Olusola
Fabiyi, “Atiku Asks INEC to Cancel PDP Primary,” Punch, February 15,
2011.
12. “Party Congresses and Undemocratic Acts,” Editorial, Daily Sun,
January 10, 2011. See also “Democracy Is Not War,” Editorial, This Day,
December 30, 2010; “Party Primaries and Electoral Violence,” Editorial,
Be y on d P r e be n da l P ol i t ic s 143
Punch, January 10, 2011; and “The Bumpy Road to April Poll,” Editorial,
Nigerian Tribune, February 9, 2011. Senator Ikechukwu Obiora, rep-
resenting Anambra South, like Donald Dike, former Cross Rivers State
governor before him, confessed in December 2010 that “we rigged 2007
election.” See Vanguard, January 1, 2011. To the best of my knowledge,
neither of the two men was arrested and questioned by the state security
service.
13. See Okereocha (2011) and Willy Eya, “Oil Subsidy: Jonathan and the Devil’s
Alternative.” Daily Sun, December 18, 2011.
14. See Louis Iba, “Fuel Subsidy Removal: The Gains versus the Losses.” Daily
Sun, January 3, 2012.
15. See Dare Adekambi and Qudirat Hakeem-Apampa, “How Cartel Presented
Water as Petrol to Justify Bloated Subsidy,” Nigerian Tribune, January 3,
2012.
16. Cf. “Smugglers Received N669 Billion Subsidy Last Year.” ThisDay, January
19, 2012.
17. This is the rational recipe proposed by Professor David-West. He argues
that the federal government has not built new refineries because of the
interests of the oil cabal and their allies in government. See “Why Federal
Government Refused to Build New Refineries—David-West.” Vanguard,
January 25, 2012.
18. In December 2010, the Senate president reportedly earned about
$586,667.00 monthly, compared to the American president’s annual salary
of $400,000. Each senator and representative earn, respectively, ө15.18
million and ө10.59 million as monthly salaries and allowances. There are
also quarterly and constituency allowances that run into additional mil-
lions of naira per person. Further, each senator and representative is enti-
tled to respective severance package of ө 6 million and ө 5.9 million upon
completion of their term. See “Still on National Assembly’s Jumbo Pay
Debate,” Punch, December 23, 2010; Everest Amaefule and Olamilekan
Lartey, “Jumbo Pay: Senators, Reps Set for More Pay as RMAFC Review
Emoluments,” Punch, December 23, 2010. In four years, federal law-
makers gulped ө339 billion, yet actual salary on pay slips amounted to
only ө18.245 billion. See Martins Oloja, “Legislators’ Pay as Burden on
Economy,” Guardian, June 19, 2011.
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State as a Resource in Itself.” Review of African Political Economy, Vol. 9, No.
24 (Summer): 4–21.
Soyinka, Wole. 2006. You Must Set Forth at Dawn. Ibadan: Bookcraft.
146 ‘Ku n l e A m u w o
Posi t ions of Se c u r i t y a n d
t h e Se c u r i t y of Posi t ion:
Bu r e auc r at ic P r e be n da l ism
I nsi de t h e Stat e
Olly Owen
Introduction
Richard Joseph’s concept of prebendalism was developed as an explan-
atory framework for the patterns and practices of electoral politics in
Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–1983). Yet, as Joseph notes (1987), it
predates that period, and has equally persisted after. I contend that the
explanatory power of the theory is not limited to electoral politics; it
also provides a useful blueprint that can be adapted to our understand-
ings of bureaucratic politics and institutional procedure. After all, 29
of Nigeria’s 51 years of postindependence life, and all of its preceding
46 years as an amalgamated colony, have been spent under nonelectoral
regimes, where politics took place largely as internal bureaucratic proce-
dures of particular institutions (primarily the military and civil service,
but also others such as the police). That is a much longer period spent in
the mode of bureaucratic politics than in electoral rule. Given this, it is
hardly surprising that a great premium has arisen on being placed inside
the state in order to better influence it. This applies both in the crude
sense of accessing public goods, and in the more subtle influences that
can be exercised over the course of public events and the nature of public
institutions.
Neither is it surprising, given the continuities in political economy
since the publication of Joseph’s book, that many institutions of state have
leaned toward a prebendalist logic that remains the organizing core of
the political system. Given the primacy of the civil security agency in an
148 O l ly O w e n
recruitment into the police. Recruitment into the Nigeria Police Force
takes place in annual exercises, one each for each of the three cadres—
rank and file, inspectors, and senior officers—each having its own entry
requirements and training scheme. The exercises are large—a 30-year
standard term of service would imply that 12,500 officers need to be
replaced annually even if the institution is just to replace lost personnel;
the trend, however, is toward expansion, so recent recruitments have
been larger.6 Recruitment exercises take place simultaneously across
the 36 states and Federal Capital Territory, and are handled in the first
instance by the State Police Commands. The federal Police Service
Commission, composed of a board representing various regional and
professional backgrounds directing a full-time bureaucracy, has com-
petence over recruitment, but this is delegated to the police, while the
commission seeks to exercise an oversight function. Forms are issued at
State Command level, and the initial process is conducted by the state’s
Police Public Relations Officer (PPRO). Candidates for rank and file
admission must be between the ages of 18 and 25, and have a secondary
school completion certificate with credits in a minimum of five subjects,
including English and maths. Candidates may also have further educa-
tional qualifications such as the National Diploma (ND). Prospective
inspector cadets must be within the same age bracket, and for them
the ND or a National Certificate in Education (NCE) is a compulsory
requirement. Those seeking admission to the senior officer stream as
cadet assistant superintendents must be between the ages of 23 and 28,
and have a university degree at minimum of upper second-class hon-
ors. Traditionally, the system prefers law and social science graduates,
though there are in reality a wide variety of graduates within the police.
In addition they must fulfill certain physical criteria on height and
build, and must be able to provide attestation as to their place of origin,
probity, and past conduct and social status. It is noteworthy that women
must not be married and/or not pregnant. After initial evaluation7 the
potential recruits pass up the hierarchy, through levels of further exami-
nation, evaluation, and elimination, until the lucky few are admitted to
training institutions: one of the country’s Police Training Schools for
rank and file recruits, or the Police Academy at Kano for the senior and
inspectorate cadets.
My period of fieldwork in (pseudonymized) Dutsin Bature town, in
Gida State police command during 2010 and 2011 overlapped with a rank
and file recruitment exercise. Over its course, I became aware of how the
official process itself gave rise to a “shadow” process that derives from it,
and was used by prospective entrants to negotiate and navigate the official
process. The issue of recruitment first surfaced on June 14, 2010, when an
inspector at a small satellite station told me that the police were planning
to recruit 40,000 people across the country; this news was confirmed by
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 153
A guy comes past to discuss entry form with Inspector B. The applicant is
currently working for a microfinance bank. [ . . . ] At the internet café the
constable I know from the Commissioner’s office is with a friend who has
collected police form (which is on sale already printed out, at web café).
(June 15, 2010)
You get people’s mothers standing outside the window with the answer
sheet begging, “please pass this to my daughter; she’s not too bright, she
just needs to pass exam” and if you refuse, you’re evil; “it’s because of you
my daughter didn’t join police.”
By the time [names three prominent traditional rulers in the state] and all
those small-small chiefs, then three senators from the state all bring their
candidates, what poor man has chance?
By the time they are recruited, they will be trying to find ways to influence
their posting back [to the state] and then come election time they do their
masters’ bidding.
The nexus between local political authority and the chances of success
in joining a federal institution are even more subject to a further layer
of complex conditionality due to the formal procedure, which—in order
to achieve the ethno-regional balance known as federal character, which
will be discussed further below—invokes the category of “indigeneship.”
Indigeneship in Nigeria is both a legal and a “folk” category, being used
in both government and popular discourse to differentiate between cer-
tain civic rights of those originating in a place and those merely resident
there (Ostien 2009). Although not contested in my fieldwork site in the
same way as locations such as Jos or Kano, where it has been a central
and divisive political dynamic, the mobilization of the constitutionally
undefined, yet emotive, category of indigeneship allows holders of local
political office a powerful locus of intervention in the process, and an
opportunity to filter who is able to fulfill the criteria. The local govern-
ment chair must sign and stamp the indigene form and the police form,
which must also be signed by a village head.10 This is of secondary signif-
icance here but is worth remembering in situations elsewhere, in which
the term is so contested that local officeholders have refused to sign such
forms for those they consider do not “belong” and, therefore, should not
be entitled to state employment.
In addition to requiring the involvement of these personages of the
local state, the application also then requires access to at least a senior
officer and a member of the judiciary. This is sometimes a problematic
process for the applicant (given the very limited knowledge they may
have of the applicant’s character) and it is not risk-free for the officer
156 O l ly O w e n
I witnessed this process again in July 2011, when two youths approached
a chief superintendent in my presence asking for the same favor, and when
asked where they were referred from, gave two contradictory names. In
such circumstance, the only guarantee is the officer’s own judgment of
character. The understandable reluctance of senior officers with careers at
stake to take this leap into the unknown for persons unknown to them also
reinforces the emergent self-selecting nature of the police as a state class.
Added to that is the fact that “having someone who is there” already helps
as a prerequisite—providing “access to access.”
to the field after a break in November 2010, new rumors were circulating
through the system:
November 11, 2010: Inspector B says they cancelled the previous recruit-
ment exercise. I asked how much does it cost, and he said there’s no fixed
amount but that “I wouldn’t join police now—first I wouldn’t have the
money.” [ . . . ] Then they tried to do recruitment again but only Higher
National Diploma-holders up, but then northern states complained because
it’s unprocedural and tilts against them because of education.
The inspector’s implication here was that the attempt to raise the quali-
fication level of entrants was defeated because the northern states com-
plained that this exceeds what is set down as an educational requirement
in the recruitment rules: That in turn would mean that their own young
applicants would be less successful in applying to the police because levels
of formal higher—and even secondary—English-language education in
the north are, for historical reasons, significantly lower than in southern
states.11
The 2010–2011 recruitment and promotion exercises were an extended
stop-start process subject to continual delays and reschedulings, reflecting a
tussle for control of the process between Force Headquarters and the Police
Service Commission. From my limited insights, I believe that the com-
mission’s genuine desire was to reassert its constitutionally mandated over-
sight in the pursuit of high-quality personnel to improve the capacity of the
police force, and in that fitted with an ongoing drive to take a serious role
in police reform on the part of the commission as constituted at that time.12
Yet that is not how it was interpreted by everyone. Within the police, and in
circles accustomed to dealing with the cut-and-thrust institutional politics
of recruitment, promotions, and postings, some saw it quite instrumentally,
a new wrinkle derived from the business-as-usual of bureaucratic politics,
and as such just as likely to result in a compromised result. Inspector K 13
saw it this way:
People will say they are selling forms—HQ won’t know but the information
will leak out from Force Headquarters or the Police Service Commission.
Then they come here to do screening—the first list had only about three
names of indigenes, the rest were Igbo, Hausa, etc. (June 10, 2010)
As noted above, it is standard practice that application forms for state and
private bodies are often sold, for a nominal fee, from outlets (such as banks)
with nationwide networks. “Selling forms” as cited here refers instead to
the malpractice of influential persons hoarding (or conversely, prereleas-
ing) application forms and selling them at inflated prices for personal
gain. In fact, the inspector’s cynicism extended to even the possibility of a
158 O l ly O w e n
See, if you try to do thorough recruitment now, you won’t get up to 20.
Cos they will have certificate, go to internet their name will be there,14 but
ask them to work they can’t do.
In fact, no one realizes better than the police themselves the corro-
sive effects of poor-quality personnel, and they go to great lengths
to repeatedly screen and rescreen applicants, especially for the senior
cadre. Of course, it follows that the competition to join the senior
cadre, with its greater access to mobility, opportunity, pay, progres-
sion, and social elevation, is correspondingly higher. In fact the recruit-
ment process evolves under twin pressures, the interplay between the
people “cheat-proofing” the processes, and those trying to find new
ways to gain marginal advantage. The entire process is a continual
struggle between institutional meritocracy and professionalism on one
hand, and personal instrumentality and particularism on the other. A
female assistant superintendent laid out for me the recruitment process
she herself had undergone in the recruiting exercise about five years
previously:
Application starts at local government level. All the candidates from that
level were screened by the local area commander (usually an ACP) who
in this case was a very straightforward Yoruba man, known for not tak-
ing bribes and for checking up on checkpoints to make sure that his men
did not extort motorists. Secondly, the 1,000 persons who cleared that
process were checked at the state command, where “they don’t compro-
mise on schooling certificate.” Thirdly, 215 candidates cleared from that
level were sent to zonal command (overseeing three states) for another
screening and then were sent on to Force Headquarters in Abuja for more
screening, from which the list was trimmed down to 30. Finally, the 30
candidates who cleared Force Headquarters were sent for final interview
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 159
at the Police Academy, Wudil, Kano State, where 15 were dropped and a
final 15 selected to undergo the training course.
Only 1.5% of the candidates from this particular state (a large state in
the central part of the country) were therefore eventually successful, and
though the odds may be better in a smaller state where there are fewer
suitable applicants, and/or policing is a less popular career option, it can
be seen that it is still a hugely competitive process. Of course, the con-
verse of the careful and multistage selection process is that it may also
allow serving officers—of progressively more senior rank—the opportu-
nity for personal intervention, to influence or attempt to influence, the
process as it goes on.
In fact, the challenge of securing employment in contemporary
Nigeria is such that a sizeable number of graduates from polytechnics and
even universities apply to join as constables. Since the official require-
ment for a constable recruit is Secondary School Leaving Certificate,
and since the minimal educational requirements are also interpreted as
maximal— that is, overqualification is made a grounds for disqualifica-
tion from the already overpopulated applicants list—many graduates or
diploma-holders hide their higher qualifications in order to be enrolled
as secondary school certificate holders..
Money, too, is mobilized in desperation. One informant, a police
inspector (with, I was aware, a tendency to hyperbole), claimed that by
the time it reaches the latter stages of the process, ASP candidates are
paying from ө200,000 up to ө500,00015 to influence the process. This
informant was, however, an inspector and had not been through that
selection personally. Interestingly, another senior officer claimed to have
knowledge of some people who paid up to ө100,000 to pass and yet
didn’t get selected. Though it is also possible that such persons represent
disgruntled low bidders, and that some paid more and consequently did
pass, the officer who related this to me said that they themselves had
not personally paid anything, and indeed I knew them to come from a
family background that could not easily mobilize money. They deduced
that in general—“give or take”—overall the right people (i.e., the best
candidates for the job) tend to get in.
That someone who emerged as one of the lucky few might seek to
vindicate the system’s logic is perhaps unsurprising. But it points us to
an important modifier of the literature on corruption and/or infor-
malization of state processes. The tendency in scholarly, advocacy, and
public discourse on corruption is usually to assume—without further
interrogation—that bribery and corruption works— that it is function-
ally effective and pays off for the person trying to manipulate the sys-
tem. The further implicit assumption is that it has entirely displaced
meritocracy as the logic of the system. This holds through not only
160 O l ly O w e n
the broader analyses (Chabal and Daloz 1999) but also some recent
fine-grained ethnographic work on corruption in state practice (Smith
2007; Blundo and Olivier de Sardan 2006). The assumption, however,
is not fully supported by my observations during fieldwork, wherein I
came to understand attempts to resort to corrupt practice in such situ-
ations as one tactic among many, and not always a successful option. In
an analogous process, Willott (2009) documents the strategies used to
negotiate access to higher education in a particular federal university, a
life opportunity that is similarly an arena of class formation and status.
In this sphere, also a context of heightened competition for a limited
public good, corruption can be deployed both alongside or instead of
social capital and identity-based claims to secure access. Yet in discus-
sion of these themes, many Nigerian academics asserted to me that such
a picture of university admissions is not nuanced enough—they cited,
for instance, the existence of a minimum grade “floor” beneath which
no amount of favoritism is likely to help an applicant, alongside the
continued admission of candidates with no strategy of access beyond
merit as based on school grades.16 The general lesson to be drawn from
both the police and university examples is that this kind of corruption is
sometimes better understood as a system for gaining an edge over purely
merit-based qualification, not as a system that has entirely supplanted
the possibility of merit-based performance, as the gloomiest analyses
would have it.
What does prove more successful than money, however, seems to
be social capital. The officer mentioned above added that in his opin-
ion, it’s not cash that helps, it is “connections”—for example, if you
know a deputy inspector-general, your chances may immediately look
different if you can persuade them to endorse your application. And
likewise both police and university informants in Nigeria asserted the
importance not just of identity-based but affinity-based links in form-
ing and imagining social capital. Such practices also create at the out-
set the formation of vertical connections of personal obligation and
indebtedness and mean that from entering the police personal loyalties
may be important to some persons in a way that structures their own
subsequent trajectories through the institutional career. Personalized
loyalties indeed reemerged as relevant when understanding linkages
within the police institution and the “office politics” of postings and
opportunities.
Thus far, in identifying the emergent self-selection of the state class,
and in noting emergent ties of loyalty that might cross-cut formal com-
mand and career structures, we might seem to be tacitly labelling such
practices aberrant.17 But there is in fact a comparative managerial case
to be made that nepotism might not be all “bad” despite the frequent
normative assumption. Certainly it is antimeritocratic in the sense that
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 161
for the literate are limited, and, therefore, from which skilled labor emi-
grates. This is indeed what we find; the “Middle-Belt” or “North-Central”
states of Benue, Plateau, and Kogi; neighboring minority-ethnicity areas
of southern Kaduna State; ethnic-minority (often Christian) areas of
Borno and Adamawa in the northeast zone; the less urbanized eastern
Yoruba-land States of Ondo, Osun, and Ekiti; and areas of the Niger delta
or “South-South” states away from the core nodes of the oil industry, such
as inland Delta State, northern Edo State, Akwa Ibom, and Cross River,
are all known for producing police officers. In fact this seems to apply
to the uniformed services more generally—regions such as Benue, Kogi,
and Plateau are notable recruiting grounds for military and paramilitary
services alike.
That the tendencies above have emerged as a result of economic pres-
sures and personal preferences, rather than from state policy, is clear because
of a set of institutional practices intended precisely to stop domination of
any of the apparatus of the federal state by any particular ethno-regional
group. I refer here to the concept known in Nigeria as “federal character,”
which dictates that any national institution’s personnel make-up should
reflect the ethno-regional diversity of the entire nation.24 A host of bod-
ies exist precisely to ensure this provision is adhered to in the constituent
organs of state. In fact the Police Service Commission itself was one of
these bodies, set up in response to 1957’s Willink Commission of enquiry
into the concerns of minority groups about their positions in a future
independent Nigeria. Federal character provisions that ensure “balance”
through quota and positive discrimination practices have undoubtedly
been successful in achieving their primary goal of preventing any par-
ticular ethnic dominance in the country’s organs of state, but have given
rise to a number of unintended secondary dynamics. Chief among these
is their relationship to political structures and action, and even the shape
of administrative units themselves (Suberu 2001), but also their reifica-
tion and invigoration of the contested category of “indigene,” on which
is based the claim to be “counted” in issues that invoke federal character,
as illustrated above.
In policing, however, there is a more subtle interplay. Using a souve-
nir yearbook from a Nigeria Police Academy cadet class within the past
decade, I noted that the total of 615 ASP cadets in that recruitment
group was, although representing all states, somewhat unevenly distrib-
uted. The least number from a single state was seven—an outlier, from
the still-urbanizing Federal Capital Territory of Abuja, and the most,
24, from Edo State. The modal average was 15, 16, or 17 candidates
per state, which distribution accounted for almost half of the states.
Yet this pattern can be considered equitable only if the issues of relative
population size, and of the internal heterogeneity of certain states are
excluded.
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 165
selection criteria may still leave states such as Kebbi or Sokoto under-
represented; in the year sample I examined, the least-represented states
(excepting FCT) were 5 states with only 13 cadets each; all of them were
such nonurbanized states from the north of the country.
Even at this stage, candidates will be aware that it is not just their
start in the system that is at stake, but their future prospects. Since, until
shortly before the time of writing, promotion at a number of levels to
the next significant cadres of senior management also followed a federal
character quota logic, in order to reinforce balanced ethno-regional rep-
resentation in the senior leadership levels (those levels at which preben-
dalism—in the direct sense in which Joseph intended it—becomes a more
obviously relevant consideration) the likely future ceterus paribus promo-
tion prospects for a new ASP cadet from Benue, for instance, looked very
different to, and probably slower than, those that may unfold for a new
cadet from Zamfara. On an individual level this may generate resentments
and mitigate against the fuller internalization of a deethnicizing profes-
sional esprit de corps that is at the same time being constructed in the
academy class and after. We should, therefore, recognize that not just rep-
resentation, but aspiration to promotion and high position, depends on
a complex interplay in which apparently antidiscriminatory and “balanc-
ing” practices may work differentially for participants of different back-
grounds: A certain amount of uneven-ness and asymmetry is present from
the outset.
This filtering and differences of opportunity then makes both the
individual tactics of enrolling in the police and the options for com-
munal tactics of entryism very different propositions in states of differ-
ent populations, locations, and educational profiles; the practices are as
such fundamentally uneven, and any discussion of recruitment practices
needs to acknowledge this even as it attempts to discern general systemic
logics.
Entryism
The premium upon state employment, access to security institutions,
and a place in the state itself is reflected in a discernible set of trends
we may analytically refer to as “entryism.” More usually employed in
politics to describe the takeover of a party vehicle by a particular faction
by means of cumulative membership and infiltration strategies, we may
adapt it here to conveniently describe the means by which communities
may employ mobilization strategies to insert their own members into
state institutions.
Before describing the modes of such action, it is worth noting that it
cannot always be assumed to be a deliberate and planned tactic. We may
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 167
police, before, but now . . . ” The implication was that a place in the security
agencies had become desirable in the context of new marginality and inse-
curity (and no doubt also in light of the economic decline and shrinkage
of economic opportunity that continued conflict has brought to Jos).
Likewise pastoral Fulani informants, perhaps the least likely group that
the urban Nigerian public would consider as police material due to their
distance from formal education, urban centers, and concerns of advance-
ment in settled “conventional,” social, or economic registers, referred to
their reluctance at joining the police in the same frame as other strategies
of engaging with the formal and the state as participants. That is to say,
they made reference not only to normatively avoiding the state (and the
police) but also to the emergent need to engage with it, under the rhetoric
(as expressed in English) of “becoming wise.” Cattle-rearers, nomadic or
seminomadic, often unschooled, and used to dealing with state agencies
through communal representation, interaction with traditional institu-
tions, or selected brokers, sometimes spoke to me of such contexts, where
becoming wise was portrayed as the remedy to situations of interaction
where they had been taken advantage of by those more fluent in the realm
of state and paperwork. 26 Thus the overarching “we don’t . . . ” applied to
activities such as joining the police was qualified by reference to “those of
us that have become wise.” Wisdom here seemed to have the connotation
not of intelligence but of the process of “wising-up,” having the realities of
the world impressed upon one through bitter experience. A representative
of MACBAN,27 the umbrella Fulani ethnic-economic association asked
me in the course of fieldwork what I, as an educated supposed “expert,”
would suggest to remedy the negative and prejudicial treatment that he
alleged that cattle-rearers received at the hands of the police. My liberal
reformist suggestions of engaging with community policing programs
were received with a detached politeness that made their irrelevance obvi-
ous. This contrasted dramatically with the attentiveness of his response
when I asked “why don’t you send your sons to the police?”
There is a sense, then, for those who are latecomers to the strategies of
entryism, and indeed to the wider complex of insertion and accommoda-
tion within the machinery of the modern state, that to be left out is to
be left behind, to lose the chance for agency, and to risk being structur-
ally excluded from the opportunity for agency in the future. To be left
outside the state is to become permanently disadvantaged persons in the
state-reliant process of elite class formation. To be existentially secure,
itself a deferred status always seemingly incompletely achieved, is to be
active on the field of play of the Nigeria state “game.” Having “some-
one who is there” in the police is a part of that, all the more important
in that it gatekeeps the important issue of human security and position
of relative victimhood vis-à-vis others who might manipulate the state
against one.
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 169
Conclusion
Entryism, like prebendalism in Joseph’s political analysis, and like neo-
patrimonial systems in general, benefits both ends. In a milieu where life
opportunities are as scarce and precarious as in contemporary Nigeria’s
youth employment market, it is a sensible strategy for the individual. And
in a cultural context where a historically strong communitarian under-
standing of personhood is reinforced by a political system that deals with
its citizens on the basis of their membership of ethno-regional groups,
it makes sense for communities. “Having someone who is there” for the
community and “acquiring relevance” for the individual are reciprocal
sides of the same equation.
Before concluding our discussion of entryism as key to the micropolitics
of prebendalism, it is pertinent to recall that this does not only rest on a
relationship between an individual and a communal group, whether eth-
nic or otherwise defined. It also, as we discussed above, invokes the much
closer and powerfully deployable sphere of family, which is not completely
disconnected from the ways in which people understand themselves to be
situated in wider communal groups. Kinship and family, we should remem-
ber, interposes between a crude reading of Joseph’s prebendalism as a pact
solely between a person and a group; the choices that are made in life strat-
egies are not only a matter for individuals or more obviously “politically”
mobilized identity groups.
In the end, though, the stakes are the same for all parties. Joining
the state is a route to social mobility, whether that is newly achieved or a
matter of securing established position. Being in and up is opposed with
170 O l ly O w e n
the clear and unpleasant dangers of being out and down, which are com-
munal and familial concerns no less than they are individual.
A friend in the Nigerian civil service once told me that the career
advice given by a family friend was to “be of use to yourself, so you can
be of use to them,” which is as neat a formulation of the principle as is
needed.
This then is prebendalism as it is lived in the everyday. Power is gifted
communally to privileged individuals in the hope that they will con-
tinue to exercise their membership in state institutions in a way that will
reproduce for other members of that community a means of securing a
privileged avenue to access, and an anchor in the process of state class
formation. Joseph’s formulation of prebendalism showed how that works
in tying constituencies into the state through the power-brokering of
formal party politics. Yet I have argued above that it is equally present in
the everyday processes of negotiating means of entry into state institu-
tions such as the police, and, therefore, being able to influence the state
by being part of its organs. Meanwhile, when considering the working of
prebendalism in these arenas, we must recognize that it is not the path
chosen by all, and that it maintains a complex coexistence with another
set of formal imperatives, designed to ensure the professional and non-
partisan functioning of the offices of state through whose procedures
individual careers must be advanced.
Notes
1. Mbembe uses “exception” slightly differently in a number of contexts; here
it is relevant to consider the concept in the light of the existence of people to
whom and for whom rules are applied differently on account of their privi-
leged position or lack of it.
2. Due to the sensitive nature of policing, it was a condition of my fieldwork
that names and locations be anonymized/pseudonymized. In order to ensure
the confidentiality of interviewees and other informants, police officers are
referred to by rank, and sometimes role, gender, and/or ethno-regional ori-
gin where I have considered those additional details pertinent. Transcriptions
from fieldnotes are inset in smaller font, and explanatory or editorial com-
mentary within, that is, in square brackets.
3. N304,737,303,692 = US$1,847,600,000 as of December13, 2011. The
figure is from the 2011 FGN Budget (proposal), Budget Office of the
Federation Federal Ministry of Finance, www.budgetoffice.gov.ng
4. The baronial attributes of powerful high offices that are both to do with
the provision of security, and are politically significant, should prompt us to
recall the medieval-feudal derivation of Joseph’s original theory.
5. I have used “indigene” and “nonindigene” for their currency as political
labels rather than as analytical terms, while reserving my own judgment on
the relative credibility of those positions. Readers should also note that—as
we will explore below—recruitment into the police itself bureaucratically
P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 171
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P o s i t ions of S e c u r i t y 173
P r e be n da l ism a n d
I de n t i t y Pol i t ic s
7
Background
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, the struggle for democracy in
Nigeria contends with a resurgence of politically charged ethnic and reli-
gious consciousness, and the enduring pull of traditional political institu-
tions and values. More and more mass movements are protesting against
real and imagined grievances under the platform of religious, ethnic, or
tribal associations. Politicians are appealing more and more to ethnic
and religious sentiments in their electoral campaigns and in bargaining
for power, position, and individual material interests. Western-educated
elites are terminating their careers in the modern professions in order to
become traditional rulers; an even larger number of elites are spending
enormous amounts of money to acquire traditional chieftaincy titles in
their communities. Apart from many protracted court cases over appoint-
ment to traditional chieftaincies, some communities have violently
reacted against the imposition of unwanted chiefs, or to demand for the
creation of new chiefdoms. These developments indicate the continued
salience of traditional political institutions and values in what Richard
Joseph terms “prebendal politics” in Nigeria.
Although Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria is not, in the
first instance, a historical study, Richard Joseph appreciates the relevance of
history for understanding contemporary politics. On the first page of the
book, he states: “One basic contention of this study is that fruitful discus-
sions about Nigeria’s present and future depend upon a prior understanding
178 Mu h a m m a d S . Um a r
declared ideals does not mean that the jihad did not change anything at
all. Changes resulting from the jihad included the political unification
of the hitherto autonomous Hausa states under the central authority
of the jihad leaders in Sokoto, and the enthronement of Islamic ideas
in sarauta political institutions, renamed as emirates after the Sokoto
jihad (Abubakar 1980; Balogun 1970; Kani and Gandi 1990; Usman
and Alkali 1979). But the extent of change is difficult to determine
because some changes seem more apparent than real, thus illustrating
the longevity of sarauta and the complexities of interactions between
the two different political systems of sarauta and Islam, made more
complicated with the advent of democracy.
The continuities and changes were vividly recorded by Henry Barth
in the course of his travels in the Sokoto caliphate c. 1851–1852. He
documented the continuing existence of the sarauta political practices
condemned by Shaykh Usman dan Fodio, most notably the continuing
imposition of numerous un-Islamic taxes and the traditional offices and
titles. Nevertheless, Barth observed significant changes that included
the political unification of the various Hausa states under the author-
ity of the Sultan of Sokoto, which operated virtually as a federation by
recognizing local traditions in the midst of the broader Islamic dispen-
sation. Perhaps more significantly, Barth also noted the extension of
the sarauta system over non-Hausa communities that were conquered
and incorporated into the Sokoto Caliphate, with the ambiguous con-
sequences of fostering political homogeneity out of ethnic and cultural
heterogeneities, but also generating grievances especially from the
areas that Adeleye (1971) termed as “undigested conquests” within the
Sokoto caliphate.
On the important issue of sarauta conformity with Islamic gover-
nance, Barth gives us no clear idea. Barth portrayed the campaigns of the
reigning Sultan Aliyu dan Bello (1842–1859) and his district governors
as mere slave raiding, pure conquest of territories, or ineffectual attempts
to suppress the continued resistance by the guards of the old regime
(Barth 1890, 1:260, 416, 2:160, 177).
The issue of Islamization in the Sokoto caliphate has been conten-
tious. Hiskett (1973) observes that Shaykh dan Fodio’s attempt to
impose Islamic ideals on sarauta can be easily criticized for falling short
of the declared ideal. Hiskett observes that the “more useful approach
is to measure the changes that did occur; and consider to what extent
these approximate to the deliberately sought goals of the reformers,” and
contends that Shaykh Usman dan Fodio did succeed in replacing sarauta
with “a central imamate of an established Islamic form.” Clearly, centu-
ries of interactions between sarauta and Islam have created organic links
that are not so easy to separate, thus the more changes seem apparent the
more continuities lay deeply underneath.
H aus a C u lt u r e , I s l a m, D e mo c r ac y 185
the Muslims of northern Nigeria is the aspiration for rule of law that
can hold political authority accountable, thereby reducing or eliminating
altogether the abuses of patrimonial traditions of sarauta that can easily
translate into prebendal politics.
The changes and continuities in sarauta-emirate political institutions
and values discussed above were introduced in northern Nigeria from
1903 to the beginning of decolonization in 1945. Their full impact and
long-term consequences began to manifest themselves more clearly dur-
ing zamanin siyasa, the era of electoral democratic politics c. 1945–1966.
Beginning with the adoption of the Richards Constitution in 1946,
these years witnessed the introduction of electoral politics and forma-
tion of political parties in the 1950s, Nigeria’s independence in 1960,
Nigeria’s first republic and civil war c. 1960–1970, and creation of 12
states that ended northern Nigeria as a single regional political entity in
1967. Having survived Islamic revolution of the nineteenth century and
colonial rule in the first half of the twentieth century, sarauta-emirate
system now for the first time faced the challenge of electoral democracy
in zamanin siyasa, the turbulent era of party politics.
exchanges between Sa’adu Zungur and Mudi Spikin on the crucial choice
between monarchy and republic (Yakubu 1996 and 1999; Furniss 1995,
1996) are strong indicators of the real political conflicts in the compet-
ing visions of the respective roles for sarauta, Islam, and democracy in
Nigeria as a modern republic. The real and potential conflicts between
sarauta-emirate and democracy cannot be denied.
One key area of conf lict is the handling of political opposition.
Viable political opposition is indispensable in a democracy. It is expected
that political opponents will be allowed not only to criticize policies
and programs of those in power, but also to openly seek to gain power
through free and fair elections. In addition, those holding power are
allowed to seek openly to retain power through the same process. And
while holders of power can take advantage of incumbency to ensure
their reelection, they must do so within clearly defined constitutional
framework and electoral rules and regulations. Whitaker demonstrates
that the acceptable ways of neman sarauta (seeking sarauata office) are
in many respects the same as those of democratic electoral campaigns:
criticism of the incumbents, forming alliances with supporters, and
persuading kingmakers of one’s own merits and competence, promises
of material rewards, and so on. Yet, there are significant differences
between democratic norms of political contests and the acceptable
means of neman sarauta. The sarauta political value of deference to
hierarchy restricts open criticism of incumbents, while sarauta politi-
cal values of longevity in office and holding power firmly allow a wider
spectrum of action for incumbents to deal with political opponents.
Generosity and patrimonialism are great assets for neman sarauta, but
they are liabilities if seen in democratic politics as favoritism and nepo-
tism. Political songs and poems composed for the ruling NPC and the
opposition NEPU reveal clearly that traditional political norms of def-
erence to hierarchy, longevity in office, and holding power firmly had
very negative inf luence in NPC’s handling of NEPU’s political opposi-
tion by articulating intimidation and suppression of political opposi-
tion in the vocabulary of sarauta political values. Similarly, NPC poets
and singers utilize Islamic discourses to vilify political opponents as
amply demonstrated by (Paden 1986; Miles 1988). But political oppo-
sition did exist, and sarauta political values do not completely reject
the legitimacy of political opposition. Furthermore, by appealing to
Islamic traditions of activism, NEPU added a very powerful support
for the legitimacy of political opposition by demonstrating that laws
should provide the framework for legitimate political opposition.
Here we see clearly the disarticulation of Islamic political norms from
the sarauta elements even in the modern era, and after centuries of the
fusing of the two political traditions.
192 Mu h a m m a d S . Um a r
Among the important points in this song are: (1) the invocation of God
as the grantor of temporal power, hence the futility of political opposi-
tion; (2) the emphasis on the aristocratic pedigree of Ahmadu Bello as a
descendant of the illustrious Sultans of Sokoto (Mu’azu and Alu Babba);
H aus a C u lt u r e , I s l a m, D e mo c r ac y 193
and (3) the painful difficulty that awaits even formidable political oppo-
nents who dare to challenge the God-appointed holders of political
power, expressed in the metaphor of the scars observable on the body
of the lion that collided with elephant. Despite the invocation of the
Islamic political notion of power belonging to God, the thrust of this
song is securely anchored in sarauta conception of political power, which
is clearly more incompatible with democratic norms.
Another equally revealing song addressed to Maj-General Hassan
Usman Katsina, who served as the Chief of Staff to General Yakubu
Gowon, head of state in the 1970s, challenges Maj-General Katsina in
the following words:
NPC wanted to conserve were in fact not Islamic political values, but the
hereditary succession and aristocratic entitlements. The different appeals
to Islam to justify NPC conservatism and NEPU radicalism in the con-
text of the electoral democracy of the First Republic indicate clearly that
Islam can be compatible with democracy. Yet, invocations of Islam in the
multireligious society of modern Nigeria create problems for the popular
participation of non-Muslims. The NPC resolved the problem by mut-
ing their invocation of Islam when campaigning among non-Muslims,
but without much success. In fact, NPC’s strong identification with the
Islamic heritage of Sokoto Caliphate limited its appeal in the Middle
Belt where the legacy of Sokoto represented not only a different reli-
gious tradition, but also memories of conquest and political subordi-
nation. Similarly, NEPU’s handling of the problem of both embracing
Islamic political tradition of activism while at the same time resisting
NPC’s application of the Shari’a courts to suppress NEPU members was
only expedient, not wholly satisfactory, for as Muslims, NEPU members
could not easily reject the validity of Shari’a even as they resisted its polit-
ically motivated enforcement. The ambivalence of NPC and NEPU in
handling the Islamic factor demonstrates the subtle, and hence difficult
to discern, articulation of political values from different systems.
It is arguable that the democratic value of majority rule justifies appeal
to Islam since it is the religion of the majority of people in northern
Nigeria. Furthermore, it is also the case that only by appealing to Islam
that political parties could canvass popular participation of Muslims. But
both arguments are valid only partially. Majoritarian democracy must
allow the realistic possibility of ousting one majority from power by
another majority. If Islam is the only basis of gaining majority votes,
it follows that non-Muslims could only replace Muslim majority by
converting to Islam. Democracy also requires that political opposition
should have the right to criticize policies and programs, and even the
legitimacy of those in power. The real difficulty of utilizing Islam as the
basis of political legitimacy in the multireligious society of Nigeria posed
formidable challenges to democracy in the First Republic, and still does
so in the present dispensation.
The 1976 Local Government Reform effectively removed
sarauta-emirates from the formal structures of power by subordinat-
ing them to the authority of local government, and replacing traditional
aristocrats with modern bureaucrats, who should theoretically func-
tion according to rational legal authority rather than traditional patri-
monial authority. The bureaucrats who took over as appointed chairmen
and secretaries were not accountable to popular control through demo-
cratic elections. Instead, they were responsible to the military regime
that appointed them. The tendency of bureaucratic elites to resist popular
H aus a C u lt u r e , I s l a m, D e mo c r ac y 195
Conclusion
Clearly, the insights into prebendal politics that Richard Joseph offered
can be enriched by taking due account of the continuing impact of deeply
entrenched traditions of sarauta and emirate political institutions and
values that have evolved over several centuries. Since he is not a historian,
Richard Joseph is justified in making only brief historical excursions and
allusions when necessary for explaining his key concepts or providing
contexts for his contentions. In contrast, this chapter’s relatively more
detailed historical tracing demonstrates that multiple trends and diver-
gent tendencies are the critical components of the historical evolution
of Hausa sarauta and its interactions with Islam and democracy. The
pertinent conclusion here is that several outcomes are bound to emerge
when different political systems come into contact. Similar elements from
the different systems can merge together to function well, such as when
Islamic activism combined with sarauta acceptance of political rebellion
as a legitimate mode of political opposition to provide the ideological
support for Shaykh Usman dan Fodio’s jihad. The same dynamic explains
how the Islamic conception of rule of Shari’a law translated easily into
the mass support for reintroducing Islamic criminal law within current
196 Mu h a m m a d S . Um a r
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H aus a C u lt u r e , I s l a m, D e mo c r ac y 199
M e di at i ng Just ic e: You t h, M e di a,
a n d “A f f e c t i v e Just ic e” i n t h e
Pol i t ic s of Nor t h e r n Nige r i a
Conerly Casey
I was made to be a criminal not because of what I have done, but because
of what I stand for.
Graffiti by “Justice,” a daba (urban ward gang) leader in Kano City
R ecent protests across North Africa and the Middle East testify to
public outrage at the failure of postcolonial states to produce “justice”
in their governance structures. Attempts at the federal level in Nigeria
to enact justice and institute accountability have led to changes to the
Independence Constitution of 1960 in 1963, 1979, 1989, and 1999, to
the deregulation of capital in the 1990s and the primacy of the market,
and to demilitarization, in 1999, coinciding with democratic elections.
Inflation in the 1990s, and unprecedented levels of poverty and insecu-
rity that accompanied these efforts, mediated and refracted in political
allegations of blame, galvanized Christian and Muslim reformist net-
works, as well as groups of armed youths who use violence to control the
means of coercion. These armed groups gain advantage in conflicts over
state and national sovereignty, the control of public space, and the appro-
priation and distribution of resources, their views and actions defin-
ing imaginings of Nigeria in national, transnational, and social media
(Abbink and Kessel 2005 ; Adebanwi 2005, 2008 ; Akinyele 2001; Baker
2002 ; Casey 2007, 2008, 2009; Comaroff and Comaroff 2006 ; Mbembe
2001; Nolte 2004 ; Obadare 2006 ; Pratten 2007; Smith 2004, 2007).
As the implementation of Shari’ah criminal codes in northern Nigeria,
and regime change in the context of the Arab Spring confirm, young
people have the capacity to reform and enact diasporic, micronational,
202 C on e r ly C a s e y
Islam and Christianity affect “the long term impacts of the exercise of
power across space, but also the limitations of such power” (191).
Global reconfigurations of security, finance, and media, in the 1990s,
led to increased public concern about the “neocolonial” dimensions of
globalization, fueled by affective remembrances of British colonial racism
and domination and of Salafi/Wahhabi fundamentalism, which resulted
in realignments, in Nigeria, of patron-client systems and voting blocks
(Casey 2008, 2009, 2010). Multinational corporate control of Nigerian
national and state politics, and the pressures and bribes ushered in with
neoliberal deregulations of capital, amplified public rage about past, pres-
ent, and anticipated inequities and injustices, affective responses to the
(in)justices perpetrated by states and multinational corporations that con-
solidate financial and military power to control energy, food, and water
resources. In the predominately Muslim states of northern Nigeria, petro-
leum security prompted concern about political access to, and control of,
Nigerian oil and oil “revenue sharing,” as well as distress about Muslims
living under the US-led or coalition military occupations and wars in
North Africa and the Middle East. Growing awareness and visceral affec-
tive remembrances of domination renewed public debate about the causes
of human torment, past, present and anticipated, and the proper role of
religion in national and state politics, education, and approaches to health
and healing.
In the course of ethnographic study, begun in 1991, I was alerted to
the recognition and treatment of suffering in Kano’s medically and reli-
giously diverse communities. These settings allowed me to meet Nigerians
of all sectors of society, including youths who had experienced and meted
out physical and metaphysical forms of violence. From 2000 through
2002, and again in 2004, my research shifted to the politics of neoliberal
capitalism and religious orthodoxies in northern Nigerian patron-client
networks, particularly with ‘yan daba (urban ward gang members), ‘yan
banga (political vanguard), ‘yan farauta (hunters), ‘yan tauri (people pro-
tected through ritual magic against weaponry), and ‘yan Hisbah (Shari’ah
law enforcers). The young people of these groups were heavily involved in
national and state politics and many took part in the large-scale violence
that preceded the implementation of Shari’ah criminal codes in 12 states
of northern Nigeria. This ethnographic work brought into focus an array
of “affective” concepts and enactments of “justice,” meant to “stand in”
for government (Casey 2008, 2009, 2010; Clarke 2009; Comaroff and
Comaroff 2004, 2006; Mbembe 2001; Tsing 2005).
In this chapter, I offer two perspectives on justice and the affective forms
of justice that occurred during the implementation of Shari’ah criminal
codes in Kano State. One is meant to capture the expressive aspects of jus-
tice, and the other presumes a priori realms of public experience and under-
standing that mediate suffering and the cultural, religious, and political
204 C on e r ly C a s e y
forms of justice Muslim youths draw upon to make sense of their torment.
My argument engages the everydayness of prebendalism in street-level logic
about the Nigerian state, and access to Nigerian oil wealth, and to Kano
State wealth, derived from federal oil revenue sharing as well as from finan-
cial assistance to the Kano State government from sources in North Africa
and the Middle East. I hope to suggest some of the real-virtual remap-
pings of self-other relations, and newly forming networks that evoke and
alter memories of injustice, generating new experiences and expressions of
affective justice. My research suggests the uneasy reliance, in Nigeria, on
secular and religious legalism as well as on extrajudicial violence to assure
justice, (re)enacts real-virtual experiences of authorized violence as justice in
Nigeria’s heavily mediated publics. Given the temporal and spatial dimen-
sions of Nigeria’s publics, and the centralization and dispersal of authority in
the 1990s, what are the meanings of justice for Muslim youths in northern
Nigeria? How does affective justice, operating in policy, law, popular justice
mechanisms, political, economic networks, reforming publics—enter into
imaginaries and actions of “democracy”?
Peter Ekeh’s (1975) analysis of two African publics that have shaped
Nigerian governance are critical to my views of the prebendalism operating
in contemporary Nigeria. Ekeh’s African publics, derived from colonial,
autocratic superstructures, and from African communal structures—the
former secular, amoral, and bureaucratic, and the latter articulating an
array of communal moralities—make clear the frictions, in Nigeria, of
ethics, policy, and law. Media, in print, broadcast and Internet-based
forms, have become additional terrains on which media publics form
political publics and, through debate, expose the limits and hypocrisies
of liberal universalism, and of communal religious and/or ethic custom-
ary law, as these systems have been applied in postcolonial states (Casey
2008, 2009, 2010). These diverse media channel and repeat affective
information that reverberates with remembrances of colonial, communal,
and postindependence governance, and with the systems of authority and
legitimacy that operate globally, including those that routinely authorize
violence. Such memories form what Damasio (2000) terms “composite
memories,” or memories that hold a link between categories of fact and
categories of internal states, which jell with time and experience.
Composite memories of “unjust governance” and “authorized vio-
lence” emerge in everyday conversations about politics in Nigeria,
but they also rise to collective consciousness via print, broadcast, and
Internet-based accounts of political systems, local and transnational, in
moral appraisals of particular politicians and systems, as affective com-
munal and collaborative reconstructions of them, and in embodiments
and acts of memory that evoke, alter, and reinscribe colonial and com-
munal experiences (Stoller 1995; Casey 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010). These
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 205
those who, alongside Kano state and the federal government, had armed
themselves to fight against ‘yan Mai Tatsine.
The ‘yan daba, a reserve army of unemployed youths, have acted in ways
that suggest that they can metamorphose into a tribal army some day. In
1999, when Hausa residents of Sagamu town in Ogun State had a clash
with their Yoruba hosts, it was the ‘yan daba group that organized a repri-
sal attack against Yoruba residents in Kano. (1–2)
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 209
Mediating justice
Reconfigurations in global finance, security, and media communications,
and postmilitary transitions to “democracy” opened new possibilities for
Nigerian and Kano state neoliberal and religious reforms to policy and
law, but as authorities at federal and state levels seized the signs, resources,
and publics they wished to restructure, they created new power centers in
the gaps between the legal and illegal, the legal and ethical, the state and
the nonstate with oscillations of democratic and autocratic authority (see
Comaroff and Comaroff 2004). Heavily mediated images and events of
9/11 and its aftermath—of the World Trade Center bombings and the
reprisal US bombings in Afghanistan and Iraq, amplified “affective” forms
of justice as political publics engaged global and Nigerian national media
refractions of injustice and violence. Media refract, channel, and repeat
“affective information,” fracturing and instantiating the appearance of
continuity, temporal, spatial, and affective, between authorizing political
centers and publics.
210 C on e r ly C a s e y
words and deeds of the Prophet Muhammad (Gumi with Tsiga 1992,
165). Mohammad Sani Umar (2001, 133) notes that “the Wahhabi/Salafi
espousal of this overwhelming emphasis on the centrality of Shari’ah in
Islamic beliefs and practices is comparable to the legal positivism that
pervades modernity.” Stressing other aspects of modern life—the pro-
motion of social justice and equality, a preference for bureaucratic rules
over charismatic authority, universal education, including the education
of women, and the provision of social services and amenities—‘yan Izala
converted thousands of Nigerian Muslims to their form of Islamic ortho-
doxy. The intellectualism of the Izala leadership, along with vast funding
from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq (prior to the 2003 US War in Iraq)
contributed to a rapid explosion of Izala publications, radio and television
programs, and cassettes, which competed with media from other parts of
Nigeria and the world.
Increased religious proselytizing, surveillance, and political, religious
conflicts—framed and legitimated by state, legal, and media rationali-
ties—and unprecedented levels of poverty compromised the abilities of
young Muslim Hausa, whether Sufi or recently converted to reformist
sects, to maintain lafiya (balance in all areas of life—social, spiritual,
psychical, and physical). Young Muslim Hausa, living in the Gari, began
avoiding non-Muslim media, vigilantly reading the litany of prayers that
Sufis recite (Hausa, wuridi), until they lost a sense of time, place, and
identity, and disturbed their relatives with shouting and bizarre behav-
ior. Spirits from faraway places such as India, the United States, and
the Sudan possessed women and men with greater frequency, causing
new symptoms such as trance “dancing like they do in Indian film” and
“American break dancing,” interspersed with paralyses (Casey 1998,
2008). Kano State government officials banned Bollywood films in
2001, suggesting that their song-and-dance sequences endangered pub-
lic spirituality and health. Debates within various healing communities
about the prevalence and signification of rashin lafiya (imbalance in all
areas of life) led to a focus on the excessive consumption of non-Muslim
media among Kano youths, and to mistrust and xenophobia, culminat-
ing with increased “orthodox” spirit exorcisms. During these exorcisms,
Hausa malams, funded by Wahhabi/Salafi Muslims from Saudi Arabia
and Egypt, forcefully read the Qur’an into the ears of possessed per-
sons, “heating up” the spirits, while placing pressure on them to convert
to Islam before expulsion. Malams, in Wahhabi/Salafi networks, con-
verted humans and spirits, selling their taped audiocassette readings of
the Qur’an as self-help. These global networks for Islamic education and
health care built and staffed schools, hospitals, and clinics, most notably
the Makkah Specialist Eye Hospital.
Well-funded at a time when the Nigerian national government was in
a fiscal “state of emergency” and neither providing regular salaries for
212 C on e r ly C a s e y
government employees, nor social services and amenities for the poor,
members of reformist movements became rapidly absorbed with the
needs of Muslims, essentially taking over many government functions.
In the process, they converted hundreds of Sufis, through education and
free spirit exorcisms, to Wahhabi/Salafi reformism. Conf licts between
reformist Muslims and nonreformist Sufis and ‘yan Bori emerged in
response to the sensory structures associated with Sufi and Bori ritual
uses of music, dance, perfumes, and amulets, visiting the tombs of Sufi
saints, Bori spirit possession ceremonies, and excessive feasting and
celebrations, practices that draw spirits to humans. Reformist Sunnis
considered all of these practices forms of shirk , bid’a, and sab’o (blas-
phemy), and to be economically excessive, with reformist Shi’a concur-
ring that many of these practices were emblematic of, or infused with,
animism and Western capitalism. Yet, what constituted shirk , bid’a,
or sab’o, or the conspicuous consumption of Western capitalism, was
always a matter of interpretation and debate. For instance, in times
of political conf lict, most notably the 1999 violence in Kaduna, over
the proposed implementation of Shari’ah criminal law, many reformist
Sunnis and Sufis relied on tauri ritual forms of medicinal protection,
heightening enmity between reformist and nonreformist patron-client
networks.
The struggle to implement Shari’ah law in Kano State drew together
reformist Muslims in public debates with protesting nonreformist
Muslims and Christians, exacerbating mediated conflicts over historical
perceptions of Nigerian ethnic and Islamic authenticity and belonging
(Ado-Kurawa 2000). Similar to the Islamic state forming coalitions in
Iran, Algeria, and the Sudan, the emerging Kano Independent Shari’ah
Implementation Committee presented Shari’ah as a democratic alter-
native to, and strong critique of, colonialism and the elitism and cor-
ruption of federal and state politicians, appealing to Muslims of diverse
sects and factions. ‘Yan daba agitated alongside other Muslim youths for
the implementation of Shari’ah criminal codes, yet with others deemed
“marginal Muslims,” became the immediate objects of ‘yan Hisbah
preaching and surveillance (Casey 2008). Through bitter political strug-
gles with Kano State governor, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso, the emir, Alhaji
Ado Bayero, and the Sufi establishment, members of reformist sects,
pressed for the implementation of Shari’ah law, drawing support for the
claim that Nigerian national and Kano State political, religious leaders
had benefited from corrupt financial arrangements with Americans and
Europeans:
We have to confront the evildoers. The Hisbah exist and have 100% sup-
port from God. Most of the vices committed by poor people . . . are because
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 213
of the poor leadership in America, England and Switzerland. Why did they
allow our leaders to go and take our money there?3
Muslim and Christian critics of ‘yan Hisbah complained that the insults,
intimidations, and violence of ‘yan Hisbah were outside of Shari’ah
law, insisting that most of the “troublemakers” were not Nigerians,
but, Nigerien or Chadian, perhaps ‘yan Tatsine. Global, national,
regional, ethnic, and gendered dimensions of religious ideology and
practice became central discourses in a shift from the policing of “un-
Islamic practices,” to the profiling of “un-Islamic people,” a conf la-
tion of ethnicity with Islamic authenticity that sharply differentiated
ethnic Muslims who supported the implementation of Shari’ah crimi-
nal codes from those who opposed it. ‘Yan Hisbah vigilantly profiled
Muslims living in ethnically plural spaces, Muslim ethnic minorities,
and people who, by virtue of their region of origin, religion, or ethnic-
ity, they considered “marginal Muslims” or polytheists, and thus, “out
of place.” Yet, as complaints from Muslims and Christians mounted,
members of the Independent Shari’ah Implementation Committee
Sirhul (community of elders) and Shura (Islamic judges) also began
to condemn as “un-Islamic,” the heavy-handed approaches to Shari’ah
implementation that ‘yan Hisbah employed. At question were con-
cerns about political realignment in federal and Kano State sectarian
patron-client networks that constituted voting blocks, the limits of
state intervention in personal, domestic, and communal affairs, and
the identities of individuals and groups that would benefit and suffer
under a Shari’ah system.4 Arguments centered on the need for Muslim
unity in approaches to federal politics, to ensure justice by gaining
federal political and military positions that would secure access to and
control of oil and oil revenue sharing schemes. In Kano State, Muslim
sectarianism resulting in differing perspectives of morality and justice
in terms of the public good led to vehement debates over marriage and
the control of one’s bodily desires, the moral use of public space, and
of Kano State funds to support Muslim needs and lifestyles compliant
with a Salafi rendering of Shari’ah law. The mediation of justice in
public venues led to allegations by Salafi political and business leaders
that the Emir and Kano State governor Kwankwaso were decadent
and corrupt, self-interestedly lavish in their attentions to Nigerians
in their own patron-client systems, while neglecting the needs of
the poor. Growing political support for Salafi leadership, backed by
financial assistance, particularly from Salafi individuals and groups in
Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq (prior to the 2003 US War in Iraq) and
Egypt brought together unexpected coalitions of Muslim networks. In
2000, ‘yan daba agitated alongside ‘yan Hisbah to implement Shari’ah
214 C on e r ly C a s e y
an almajiri to the ground for forgetting to say his prayers. The crowd
cheered and laughed.
‘Yan daba differentiated respect-respect, a form of social regard they
felt unable to attain, and fear-respect, which they used to regulate social
and patron-client relations in centralized government systems, and in
what Mbembe (2001, 78) terms “private indirect government,” “inde-
pendent power centers, linked in unstable chains where parallel decisions
co-exist with centralized decisions, where everything and its opposite
are possible.” Kano State political and religious elites, power brokers in
unstable chains of power, instructed ‘yan daba and others in their net-
works to hoard, bribe, and blackmail officials, undermining equivalences
between commodities to control prices of basic household necessities
such as agricultural food products, water, and petroleum. The privatiza-
tion of public resources, the unstable, soaring prices for food, water, and
energy, and the downsizing of civil servants blocked intrafamilial and
intracommunity transfers of wealth, opening people to religious reform
in governance and to new patron-client networks. Hundreds of formerly
employed Kano State government workers joined ‘yan daba networks to
obtain the basic necessities of life, and as the value of people and things,
of life and death, shifted, allegations of political and religious excess,
witchcraft attack, and spirit possession became entangled sources of fear
and desire (Casey 2008).
These new physical and metaphysical venues for producing wealth,
settling scores, and consolidating public and private funding for business
ventures insinuated themselves into the dynamics of emerging markets
and the religious politics of Muslim patron-client networks. ‘Yan daba
began routine visits to sarakuna Bori or boka (native doctors) for herbal
medicines to aid their Indian hemp smuggling. ‘Yan Hisbah cracked
down on prostitution, the use of alcohol, and the illegal sale of alcohol,
street drugs, and petroleum. The rates of petty theft decreased, but those
of rape and violent crimes against individuals rose, which the media
attributed to ‘yan daba “rampages,” even though there was no evidence
to support these claims.6 What emerged was competition between ‘yan
daba and wealthy businessmen from North Africa, the Middle East, and
Eastern Europe, to control newly forming global networks to smuggle
the prostitutes, drugs, and alcohol, forbidden by the Shari’ah system,
and rivalry with ‘yan Hisbah and their reformist networks, over public
and private funds, securitization and the control of public space for reli-
gious economic and social activities. Mbembe (2001, 86) views this as
“a process in which international networks of foreign traffickers, middle-
men, and businessmen are linking with, and becoming entwined with,
local businessmen, ‘technocrats,’ and warlords, causing whole areas
of Africa’s international economic relations to be swept underground,
making it possible to consolidate methods of government that rest on
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 217
Demo crazy
“Demo-crazy, Crazy demo, demonstration of craze . . . ,” is part of
Fela Kuti’s refrain in his song, “Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense,”
a vehement critique of the madness of learning a “democratic” system
of governance from colonial and neocolonial authorities—those with
“colomentality” and no legitimacy. Marked by inflation, austerity, cor-
ruption, mismanagement, and stealing, the shift to democracy in Nigeria
reordered relations and structures of power and authority, reconfigur-
ing the people who control the means of coercion in unstable networks
that encompass centralized state and “private indirect” government. The
fragmentation of authority in Kano State across these networks was evi-
dent in the signs and meanings of democracy for ‘yan Hisbah and ‘yan
daba. ‘Yan Hisbah found the Shari’ah legal system to be consistent with
a democracy of “majority rules”:
We are all Muslims. Shari’ah will help us to know each other better. In
this way, crimes will be reduced and the rich and poor will be the same
under the law.9
We can stop our activities perhaps . . . but you should remember that if a
person is just killed without committing any offence, do you think if the
Shari’ah doesn’t do anything about it that we will let the matter rest? To
me, you cannot give advice to ‘yan daba after such a thing . . . The Shari’ah
says if you kill a man, you should be killed too. So why should you kill and
not be killed?10
Justifying his violence against women who had “disrespected him” and
non-Muslim political rivals, a ‘dan daba said:
We do this violence because there isn’t any authority that we can go and
report to. You yourself could be your own authority. Even I, myself, I am
my own authority. If you do something wrong to me, I could pass my
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 219
The frictions of policy and law in postcolonial Nigeria bear the weight
of history, and the historical registers of language and body associated
with colonial, communal, military, and neoliberal patron-client systems
that claim to care for the needs of Nigerians, but not their citizenship
or human rights. Such competing systems of governance, as they lose
authority and legitimacy, and particularly the ability to provide for the
minimal needs of their constituents, routinely authorize violence to bring
individuals, communal groups, and patron-client networks into compli-
ance, but with what system?12
languages and laws to claim wealth and to identify crimes against persons
and states. Affective justice, in states such as Kano, articulate with heavily
mediated global realignments of power, finance, and security, which sepa-
rate the “law abiding” from the “criminal,” the “legal” from the “ethical,”
the “state” from the “nonstate,” to hide neoliberal criminalization of the
poor and the racialization and Orientalization of lawlessness. Reactivating
felt conflicts over the distribution of wealth and the morality of inequity
and domination, reformist Muslims, evangelical Christians, ‘yan daba, ‘yan
Hisbah, and other armed youth groups in Nigeria absorb and (re)produce
colonial, military, and communal mediated displays of state and religious
excess and power, embodied in the head of state—whether the Nigerian,
British, Libyan, Saudi Arabian, Iranian, Chinese, or US head of state. These
absorptions and reproductions of power camouflage and reveal prebendal-
ism in Nigerian networks that are linked to global multinational state and
patron-client systems of finance, communication, and security. Authorities
in these networks use the frictions of policy and law—the regulatory slip-
page and gaps—as sites in which to amass power and wealth, and through
control of media conglomerates, to essentially “locate” prebendalism else-
where, hiding theft on a grand scale.
Notes
1. Personal communication with Professor Phillip Shea, Department of
History, Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, July 19, 2004.
2. Bori is widely regarded as animism or a spirit possession cult that predated
Islam (Besmer 1983; Greenberg 1946; Palmer 1973; Tremearne 1914).
Scholars describe the Bori spirit possession rituals, practiced in Kano State
as religious opposition to Islam, and as the expression of alternative or oppo-
sitional gender experience (Callaway and Creevey 1994). ‘Yan Bori (follow-
ers of Bori) consider themselves Muslims, while Kano reformist Muslims
variably refer to them as “fallen Muslims” or “pagans.”
3. Out of concern for the safety of my research participants, I have chosen to
safeguard the identities of all research participants unless they hold public
office and have the expectation that their views will be made public. I offer
group affiliations and dates of my interviews to provide some contextual
framing. This quote is taken from an interview with a member of Hisbah,
Kano, Nigeria, August 3, 2001.
4. The Kano State government formed a Kano State Shari’ah Implementation
Committee to address charges that ‘yan Hisbah of the Independent Shari’ah
Implementation Committee had abused their powers. They retained most of
the ‘yan Hisbah from the Independent Committee, but provided increased
supervision and a written code of conduct.
5. Interview with a hunter, ‘ Yadda ‘Kwari, Nigeria, October 26, 2000.
6. Many ‘yan daba participate in ‘daukar amarya (literally, carrying away a
bride), kidnapping and raping women whom they feel have “slighted”
or disrespected them, but these rapes are rarely reported. According to
M e di at i ng Jus t ic e 221
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9
Et h no -R egiona l ism a n d t h e
Or igi ns of Fe de r a l ism
i n Nige r i a
Olufemi Vaughan
state and society (for an excellent theoretical explanation, see Ekeh 1974).
Sklar’s Nigerian Political Parties opened up an important non-Marxist
conceptual framework for the articulation of how communal (ethnic,
subethnic, regional) political elites defined collective political action in
intense struggles for the scarce resources of wealth, status, and power
(1963).
Focusing on the processes of institutional transformation during
decolonization, C. S. Whitaker, in a compelling critique of modern-
ization theory, contends that an emergent northern Nigerian political
class—politicians and Islamic rulers—neither clung to a strict pattern
of “traditional” government nor accepted “modern” elements indis-
criminately. For Whitaker, political development in Nigeria’s northern
region did not involve a straightforward movement from a traditional
Islamic aristocracy to a more modern pattern of constitutional democ-
racy. Rather, political change during this transitional era was a com-
plex combination of both elements. In fact, to underscore the dynamic
interactions between the prevailing structures of society and modern
political institutions, Whitaker rejected the fashionable binary of social
change during global decolonization that tended to present traditional
and modern as distinct analytical categories. To emphasize the centrality
of a complicated process of political change and continuity—as well as
the fluid interplay of the past in the present—Whitaker coined the term
“dysrhythmic” to explain the “interdependence” inherent in complex
processes of traditional and modern, revealing dialectical tensions, not
immutable age-sanctified rules (1970) (for a good theoretical perspec-
tive, see Tambiah 1973).
In this chapter I wish to provide a revision of a foundational aspect
of Joseph’s interpretation of power configurations in Nigeria, especially
in the context of the interconnections between ethnicity and class in the
formation of the Nigerian postcolonial state. My analysis in this chapter
will be limited to the transitional period between the Nigerian colony and
the postcolonial state that emerged after political independence in 1960.
Specifically, I focus on the structural basis of the prevailing communal
identities that served as the locus of power configurations in the Nigerian
state and society. Because Joseph’s book primarily focuses on major issues
that shaped Nigerian politics during the failed second attempt at constitu-
tional democracy from 1979 to 1983, I wish to reflect on the contributions
of Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria by analyzing the structural
basis of ethno-regionalism in Nigeria’s initial attempt at a modern consti-
tutional government during the decolonization process. By analyzing the
construction of ethno-regional politics and democratic transition during
decolonization, I hope to anchor Joseph’s brilliant structural analysis of the
politics of prebendalism, especially his deft analysis of neopatrimonialism
230 O l u f e m i Vaug h a n
Conceptual Perspectives
In analyzing Nigeria’s historic engagement with constitutional democracy,
I start with a conceptual analysis of the prevailing structures of society
on which modern political institutions were imposed during the decolo-
nization process. In this context, we should note the creative responses
of indigenous political structures to the problems of modernization that
evolved in Nigeria since the late nineteenth century. While these structures
were integral to the process of social stratification and politics, they would
have significant consequences for the struggle to legitimize the Nigerian
state immediately after World War II. Under the control of British author-
ities, constitutional reforms during this period of uncertainty required
the imaginative integration of antecedent structures with the agencies of
the modern nation-state. The Nigerian experience exemplifies the dyna-
mism of enduring traditional structures in modern national politics—a
process that was effectively entrenched under the British colonial system
of indirect rule (Afigbo 1971; Atanda 1973). The resilience of these com-
munal structures is intimately connected to the formation of the Nigerian
state itself. This is most apparent in the ways dominant ethno-regional
political classes emerged to contest state power during the decolonization
process.
As the driving engine of modernization, these ethno-regional politi-
cal classes constructed and utilized communal structures as the medium
for collective political action. Drawn from evolving ethno-regional blocs,
ethno-regional political classes, as local and regional powerbrokers, attempt-
ing to harness collective political and social action, were deeply invested in
communal doctrines that extolled the corporate character of local com-
munities, even as they insisted that because of their expertise in Western
ideas, they were the natural modernizers of the emergent Nigerian state
(Hodgkin 1961; Smith 1991). This ethno-clientelist structure, drawing on
Joseph’s concept, planted the seed for the rentier state that subsequently
dominated postcolonial Nigerian politics.
This is particularly significant because the theories and practices of
colonial rule, along with a largely inefficient native authority system,
were grafted on to contested neotraditional structures and doctrines in a
turbulent and fluid nineteenth-century context. Rather than respond to
the established traditional political order, these shifting contours of com-
munal identities would provide the conceptual framework on which sub-
jective ideological interpretations, drawn from a contested past, would
define the dominant ethno-regional blocs in the transformative historic
moment of decolonization (Smith 1991; Ranger 1993). With particular
E t h no -R e g ion a l i s m a n d F e de r a l i s m 231
the Egbe were established in major Yoruba cities and towns, senior obas, as
descendants of Oduduwa, presided over the inaugural ceremonies. Their
dedication to the ideals of the Egbe was such that, in many cases, obas
presided over local Egbe meetings in their own residences and palaces. In
many cases throughout the region, some outspoken obas could not conceal
their enthusiasm for the Egbe, serving as propagandists and spokesmen for
the organization, while others encouraged wealthy townspeople to make
significant financial contributions to the Egbe’s special endowment fund.
Obas also reinforced their special ties with the Egbe by conferring honorary
and traditional chieftaincy titles on its most prominent leaders. Despite the
obvious political, pecuniary, and other considerations that often accom-
pany the conferral of these chieftaincy titles, the titles evidently enhanced
the prestige of local Egbe leaders as influential native sons within their own
ancestral hometowns and as new regional Yoruba politicians. The obas’
monopoly over these highly valued symbols of influence, power, and pres-
tige was a source of material reward, as the obas often accepted gifts and
money for conferring the titles. This title-giving process reinforced strong
ties between the obas and the new Yoruba nationalist modernizers through
the institution of the Egbe (Arifalo 1981).
Despite this formidable sociopolitical organization, the Egbe’s agenda
was still too parochial to provide the expansive institutional base neces-
sary for competitive regional elections, which was mandated by the 1951
Nigerian Constitution. The Egbe leaders realized that a political platform
organized along the lines of a modern political party was essential to chal-
lenge the influence of its old regional foe, the NCNC, in Yoruba communi-
ties. On March 22, 1950, Awolowo, the brain behind the formation of the
Egbe and its secretary-general, along with seven Egbe associates, met in his
Ibadan residence to inaugurate a new political party—the Action Group,
the party that established the foundation for Yoruba collective political
action for about four decades. The primary objective of this new political
party was to gain control of the western regional government in the 1951
regional election by mobilizing Yoruba opposition against the prospect
of an NCNC government in the newly established western region. Given
the NCNC’s earlier influence in southern Nigeria, regional elites insisted
that only a Yoruba ethno-national party could effectively articulate the real
aspirations of the Yoruba people in Nigeria’s unfolding federal republic.
Furthermore, as noted earlier, the Igbo State Union (an ethno-national
Igbo organization similar in structure and mission to the Egbe) had
assumed a visible role in the political activities of the NCNC by the late
1940s. The ties between this Igbo ethno-national union and the NCNC
were so close that Nnamdi Azikiwe, the famous Nigerian nationalist and
NCNC leader, assumed the position of the leader of the Igbo State Union
from 1948 to 1952. To Azikiwe’s detractors, involvement of an ethnic
Igbo with an organization committed to the advancement of his own
238 O l u f e m i Vaug h a n
Concluding Remarks
A major dimension of Nigerian decolonization was a struggle of traditional
and modern elites for state power at the local, regional, and federal levels
of governments. For the politicians who subsequently controlled each of
the dominant regional parties—the AG in the western region, the NCNC
in the eastern region, the NPC in the northern region—ethno-national
organizations and traditional political structures were vital to the initial
strategies of legitimization that sustained regional power configurations
during the decolonization process. In addition to these communal and
indigenous modes of political legitimacy, the inheritors of state power
also emphasized the importance of education and modern development
that the old guard, traditional rulers generally tended to ignore. The pro-
cesses of political institutionalization that emerged during this critical
transitional period thus involved a strategy of mobilization that sought to
240 O l u f e m i Vaug h a n
But even in the intervening years of military rule, from 1966 to 1979,
when formal partisan politics were outlawed by successive military regimes,
the prevailing political alignments that were based on the imbalances of
the precarious relations between the Nigerian postcolony and its diverse
structures of society during the decolonization process exhibited the persis-
tent dynamics of alliances and tensions among Yoruba ethno-regional pow-
erbrokers as intermediaries between local communities and the regions,
within Nigeria’s problematic federal system.
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Post, Kenneth and Michael Vickers. 1973. Structure and Conflict in Nigeria,
1960–1966. London: Heinemann.
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Ranger, Terence. 1993. “The Invention of Tradition Revisited: The Case of
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Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
242 O l u f e m i Vaug h a n
Th e P r ec a r iousn e ss of
P r e be n da l ism
David Pratten
Introduction
A critical aspect of Richard Joseph’s argument in Democracy and Prebendal
Politics is easily overlooked. His analysis of the short-lived Second Republic
(1979–1983) is well-known for identifying access to public office as the
dominant political imperative in Nigeria, and that ethnic and regional
identities became entrenched as a result of this quest for state resources.
Less evident, however, is the basic, taken-for-granted motivation that sus-
tains this prebendal system—insecurity.
Insecurity has several senses in Joseph’s work. In the first instance he
observes that individuals seek attachment to “big men” for protection
and advancement in conditions of insecurity where “legal guarantees of
physical security, status and wealth are weak or non-existent” (1987, 68).
Joseph, therefore, draws on Sandbrook’s (1972) analysis of patrimonial-
ism where insecurity, conflict, and disorder were seen to derive from the
“institutionless arena” of African postcolonial political life. In a related
sense insecurity also appears in Joseph’s work to refer to the politics of
exclusion in Nigeria. In the conclusion to Democracy and Prebendal
Politics he compares the Nigerian model with Clapham’s (1982) analysis
of Ethiopia and agrees that the appropriation of critical resources by one
particular group over another generates a sense of “vulnerability and inse-
curity” that spurs on further patrimonial behavior. This is a vicious circle
in which insecurity produces the very behavior that generates exclusion
and further insecurity. Hence, as Joseph states, “in Nigeria, this sense of
244 Dav i d P r at t e n
managing it, we may ask with Bubandt and others, how useful is the idea
of “vernacular insecurity” (2005, 277)?4
In Nigeria, for example, it is apparent that the subjectivities of young
men in the oil-producing Niger delta region are fostered out of a general-
ized and profound sense of insecurity. In the creole pidgin of southern
Nigeria this is captured in the concept of “the rugged life.” This con-
ception of a tough, arbitrary, unpredictable life—in Annang of ntime
ntime —trouble, akeme itipe —of anything can happen. How useful is
this emic, vernacular perception of the rugged life in understanding the
lived experience, the life worlds of young southern Nigerians. Is the rug-
ged life a vernacular version of “radical insecurity”—a structural, episte-
mological uncertainty?
It is important not only to interrogate vernacular understandings of
the concept of insecurity, but also to be more specific about general-
ized states of uncertainty and insecurity. On the whole scholars have
addressed the concept of insecurity holistically, aptly reflecting the depth
and range of its impact on subjectivity and experience. To analyze these
processes, however, it is also necessary to delineate the key axes upon
which uncertainty is experienced—material, physical, epistemological,
and political. This context of radical insecurity is neither paralyzing nor
entropic, therefore, but productive of modes of youth action—a politics
of youth—based on niches youth carve out for profit and protection,
evidence and truth. Hence, against this context of material, physical,
epistemological, and political insecurity we must also trace the politi-
cal processes that seek to conjure up “safe, imagined communities” and
those contradictory practices that, while disordering, seek order and
security.
The material insecurity of Nigerian urban and rural economies
continues to be marked by stark inequalities. For the large cohort of
“youth” in the delta region livelihoods are marginal and mobile. Many
who are “stuck in the compound” find themselves in this precarious
position precisely because a senior family member, their father, uncle, or
mentor, had not been able to complete the sponsorship of their educa-
tion, apprenticeship, or training. The material insecurity of the Nigerian
urban and rural economies generates a range of practices for young peo-
ple to get by. This cohort of the dispossessed turn to the transport sec-
tor in droves—touting at motor parks and riding motorbike taxis. It is
against this context that the figure of the agbero—the motor park tout
emerges. Agbero is a derogatory term for motor park touts common
throughout southern Nigeria.5 An agbero is usually a young man who
loads passengers into taxis and buses, carries luggage, and can impose
fines and impound unlicensed vehicles. Most definitions refer to agbero
as street thugs, miscreants, and small-time extortionists. Agbero is a sort
Th e P r e c a r iou s n e s s of P r e be n d a l i s m 247
Delta Boys
I had known one young man from the village where I’ve lived in Nigeria
for about four years before the following events unfolded. He was 20
when I first met him, and struck a tall, confident pose. Akpan is a rugged
guy.9 He had been in student cults even at Okoyo Secondary School. He
was a bunkerer in Warri, a street gang (dewell ) member in Port Harcourt.
He’d been an agbero tout in Mile One watersides in Port Harcourt.
When I first caught up with him he said he had joined agaba, a banned
cult, for all the familiar reasons (friendship, protection, and the perfor-
mance) but also to use the spirit to identify the person responsible for the
unexpected deaths of members of his family (including his elder brother
who had been an armed robber).
Like many young men who had lived, worked, and fought on the
streets of Port Harcourt he had come home to Ukanafun, a local gov-
ernment nearly two hours away, in 2003 after the clamp-down on the
street gangs. In neighboring Ogoni villages these gangs had moved into
the villages and had become implicated in local violence and chieftaincy
disputes (Nyiayaana 2011). On his return Akpan had been working in a
new motor park. Like many village and local government councils there
is overwhelming pressure from young men to be given jobs by the pol-
iticians they supported during the elections. Often this means “tout-
ing” or loading passengers in the motor park to earn fare-commissions.
There is such demand for this work, in fact, that local governments try
to create new opportunities to employ the young men—such as invent-
ing new time slots or, even better, to license whole new motor parks like
the one Akpan worked at, which was established in 2004 for vegetable
goods. Working at motor parks and getting handouts, now regularized
as skills acquisition programs, are familiar mechanisms by which local
authorities attempt to keep violent youth on side and in check.
On December 4, 2007 Akpan and several of his friends, who together
called themselves the “Niger Delta Boys,” intercepted a shipment of 49
drums of stolen (“bunkered”) oil being smuggled in drums through the
creeks and out to suppliers along the main Aba-Uyo expressway. It had
250 Dav i d P r at t e n
become common practice for youth of each village through which the
shipment passed to be “settled” with several thousand Naira in order for
the route to be secured. The police and local government officials were
also said to have been paid off to look the other way or provide protec-
tion in the case of the police. On this occasion, however, Akpan and his
mates decided the settlement was not sufficient and stole this “stolen”
fuel from “proper” militants, the real, heavily armed groups of Rivers
and Bayelsa States. They quickly returned to Akpan’s village with a heavy
machine gun and in the ensuing shootout recovered their oil drums and
left one of the village boys dead.10
When I arrived for fieldwork over Christmas 2007 I heard that Akpan
had been in police custody at area command for the past two weeks.
When the police had swooped on December 14 they had arrested 28
“youths”—though they released 23 of them 3 days later (many had paid
ө50,000 for bail). The remaining five, including Akpan, had been kept
in custody because the village council (the chief and elders of the village)
had written a petition against the boys, the Niger Delta Boys, for causing
the trouble with the bunkered fuel and because, allegedly, they had been
pocketing a flat rate fee that they were supposed to return to the village
authorities for the running of the vegetable motor park.
On January 7 Akpan was released and I caught up with him and his
friend Aniefiok who had also been held. I bought them beers and they
told me a story I found incredible. They said that at the Ikot Akpan Abia
police headquarters they had been held in a room with 30 others. The
room was so small, and the number of men so large, they could not sit
or lie down. They stood, they told me, for three weeks. When they com-
plained about the swelling in their lower legs, and showed me the running
sores on their feet and calves I began to understand. The rations they
received were so meager that they could as well have gone without food
for one week. Many did not survive this ordeal. Still others, as their cases
were progressed, were taken outside and shot. Akpan presented his sur-
vival as the triumph of his personal power, that his own spiritual, medici-
nal protection had kept him alive. A local politician, a former State House
of Assembly member, whose guy-name is “Progress” eventually bailed
the boys—no weapons had been found in Akpan’s home and no charges
were brought. The boys who were released, I later discovered, were loyal
to Progress’ political Godfather (a man who is appropriately nicknamed
“Force”) and now these troublesome young men owed him their lives.
The community’s reaction to Akpan’s release and returning home
merits a brief footnote. He said he was mobbed by friends and neighbors.
Some wanted to know upon whom he would take revenge for the peti-
tion—“who will you finish first” they asked. Others, the more persuasive
as it transpired, urged him to attend church. To repent, to forgive, to be
reborn? He wasn’t sure, but he liked the attention, he had overcome an
Th e P r e c a r iou s n e s s of P r e be n d a l i s m 251
ordeal that proved his strength, he was feared, and for the first time since
childhood he took his seat in the Qua Iboe Church and prayed.
Akpan’s story resonates with the concept of radical insecurity, and of
the rugged life. The uncertain loyalties of patrons—elders who support
and then accuse young men; politicians who denounce but secretly bail
them. The unpredictability of authorities who are at once complicit in a
smuggling trade they are combating. The assertion of identities of “vil-
lage youth” securing ever more precarious economic niches. The con-
ceptions of masculine power and protection through which the events
are perceived—with contesting registers of spiritual presence bringing
closure and order to events.
It is in this context of insecurity, a rugged, precarious life requir-
ing vigilance and fortitude, that young men are liable to recruitment
into prebendal political networks. These Niger Delta Boys, vulnerable
to being denounced (in this case by village council elders), were incor-
porated into the client network of the ruling political party precisely
because of their marginal position. Indeed, the precariousness of elec-
toral politics, the need for “hard men” on election day who can “deliver
the vote” (by fair means or foul), fosters precisely this patron-client
relationship between political godfathers, officeholders and candidates,
and marginalized “youth.” As Joseph identified, insecurity and vulner-
ability leads to the very behavior that generates exclusion and further
insecurity.
“Thanksgiving”
This is not to imply that youths such as Akpan are merely “victims”
of a prebendal system. Rather than identifying the dual possibilities
of such youth as “makers” and “breakers” (Abbink and Kessel 2004;
Honwana and Boeck 2005), it is important to recognize that their criti-
cal and violent potentiality is configured in precisely the creative forms
and insurgent tactics by which marginality becomes a resource. As the
following sketches illustrate, the apparent impunity with which youth are
produced as clients is only one dimension and requires that we account
for those practices by which youth navigate the terrains of the prebendal
republic.11
These repertoires of accountability operate within a framework of
implied or explicit violence and at various opportunistic nodes of redis-
tribution. Hence, within these spheres youth groups have presented
various responses including vigilantism, screening political candi-
dates, monitoring local government expenditure, checking the award
of compensation payments to local chiefs, threatening contractors and
parastatals to complete development programs, and monitoring price
controls. These modes of vigilance and accountability are configured
252 Dav i d P r at t e n
local council hall. Live cows, bags of rice, motorbikes, sewing machines,
and cash were presented to chiefs, party loyalists, and, of course, youth.
Young men waited many hours to receive their shares, over which fights
and scuffles ensued in the evening.12 The publicity and public nature of
the distribution belied the explicitly personal, prebendal process at work.
It is through such work that politicians attempt to ensure support and
security during the festive period.
Failure to meet the youth’s expectations can lead to the familiar pro-
test of dirtying a politician’s clothes (with sand and water), but it can
also have more violent consequences. On December 16, 2007, the hon-
orable member representing the Ukanafun constituency at the Federal
House of Assembly was due to give a thanksgiving service at the Qua
Iboe Church in his home village. The night before, however, young men
from a neighboring village broke into his compound and kidnapped
his brother—demanding ө200,000 ransom. They had supported the
Assembly man in the 2007 elections. Their actions were interpreted gen-
erally as an attempt to seek recompense for their electoral efforts, and as
a claim that since entering office the honorable member had not redis-
tributed sufficiently well. Kidnapping has increased across southeastern
Nigeria in recent years—originating from the insurgency against foreign
oil companies and their workers, and extending out of the creeks and
into the hinterland where family members of prominent wealthy fami-
lies, and those with access to political funds, have been held to ransom
(Osumaha and Aghedo 2011). In such circumstances prebendal office-
holding is precarious indeed.
A final ethnographic sketch also concerns gift-giving but the con-
sequences here are more nuanced than that of the examples of distri-
bution and nondistribution above. On December 25, 2007, the local
government chairman distributed his “Christmas presents” to friends
and supporters. He controls a sizeable monthly revenue allocation. On
Christmas day he presented a hamper to the Paramount Ruler, the
most senior traditional chief in the community. The chief and his fam-
ily expected luxury goods commensurate with his status—yams, goats,
expensive imported whisky. Instead the hamper contained toilet paper,
cornf lakes, and washing powder. One of the chief’s sons said—“you
might give such a gift to a school girl, but not to a chief.” In response
to this insult the chief’s family returned the hamper. “There must
be some mistake” the chief’s son said when he handed it back to the
chairman’s rather perplexed looking wife. In local lore, “the returned
gift is a tragedy to the giver,” and as such the local government chair-
man would either see that the delivery boy had seized items from the
hamper, or he would realize that the gift was not of sufficient value
commensurate with the Paramount Ruler’s status. The following day
the chief sent a note to the council itemizing the hamper’s contents.
254 Dav i d P r at t e n
Conclusion
To appreciate the myriad ways of being and knowing that can account
for the contradictory and contingent ways in which order, security, truth,
and justice are sought, however, perhaps the rugged life, the frame-
work of radical insecurity, provides a useful perspective. Akpan’s narra-
tive, for instance, demonstrates how radical and rugged insecurity can
be for political supporters subject to the uncertain loyalties of patrons.
Yet youth also stand at the vanguard of a specific, localized mode of
“insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008) pressing, sometimes violently,
to involve themselves at moments of redistribution. The cultural logic
of impunity represented in the literature on patrimonialism in Africa
(Bayart 1993; Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou 1999; Chabal and Daloz 1999;
Schatzberg 2002) tends to depend on highly individualist conceptions
of the state and of political action, and emphasize the role of leaders and
“big men” at the expense of the lives, politics, and collective actions of
ordinary people (Mustapha 2002). It is necessary, therefore, to examine
the tactics of those who have yet to win and to study these localized
struggles, and to recall Joseph’s assertion that prebendalism is animated
by insecurity. From this point of view, we are directed to understand
the ways in which a long history of material and ontological insecurity
in political fields is marked by the multiplicity of normative and regula-
tory regimes that produce techniques that evade a reductionist focus on
institutions and interests.13
Th e P r e c a r iou s n e s s of P r e be n d a l i s m 255
Notes
1. It is estimated that there are around 100 gangs in the oil city of Port
Harcourt, for example, whose members are said to represent “a standing
army of the dispossessed” (Africa Confidential, September 10, 2004).
2. On this point, see, for example, Füredi 1997, 2005; Glassner 1999; Robin
2004.
3. For comparative, historical overviews see Comaroff and Comaroff 2005;
Waller 2006.
4. Béland also concludes that “among the most pressing issues that require
scholarly attention are the cross-national variations in the construction of
insecurity. . . . and the extent to which the framework developed in . . . ref-
erence to advanced industrial societies applies to countries of the global
South” (2007, 336).
5. Agbero is a Yoruba word meaning “conveyors of passengers.” In
Hausa-speaking areas Dan Tasha refers to the same category.
6. See, for example, Wole Soyinka’s play The Road that includes a character
Samson Baba Agbero—King of Touts, Champion of Motor Park (Soyinka
1965).
7. To the public all motor park workers may be described as “touts” but impor-
tant differences are derived from their union membership. Members of the
NURTW (Nigerian Union of Road Transport Workers) who are licensed
drivers and conductors distance themselves from their fellows who do not
pay dues..
256 Dav i d P r at t e n
8. This revelatory logic applies in many familiar contexts in rural Annang soci-
ety such as the disposal of poisons, and in the display associated with initia-
tions and transformations of status (Pratten 2007).
9. I have used pseudonyms throughout.
10. For the broader context on the insurgency in the Niger Delta and its associ-
ated criminality——of bunkering, illegal refineries, and kidnapping——see
Obi and Rustand 2011.
11. On the concept of navigation as a metaphor for youth agency see Utas 2005;
Utas, Vigh, and Christiansen 2006; Vigh 2006.
12. Apart from Christmas the other key event in an officeholder’s tenure (in
terms of keeping supporter’s happy) is the 100th day in office. When people
complained that the State House of Assembly Member for Ukanafun in
2004 had done nothing for the community, he arranged a distribution at
the primary school within two months. Recipients were prescreened and
he distributed the following: 56 motorbikes (Klink, Skygo, and Grand
King), 10 Singer sewing machines, 10 bicycles, barbing kits for young men
(including clippers, mirrors, and generators), ө10,000 for elders, and a car
(Mercedes 190) for the PDP chapter chairman.
13. Ruth Marshall, personal communication.
References
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Conflict in Africa. Leiden: Brill.
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Sept: 1–3.
Apter, A. 2000. “IBB=419: Nigerian Democracy and the Politics of Illusion.” In
Civil Society and the Political Imagination in Africa: Critical Perspectives, ed.
J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ashforth, A. 1998. “Reflections on Spiritual Insecurity in a Modern African
City (Soweto).” African Studies Review, Vol. 41, No. 3: 39–67.
Bayart, J.-F. 1993. The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly. London:
Longman.
Bayart, J.-F., S. Ellis, and B. Hibou. 1999. The Criminalization of the State in
Africa. Oxford: James Currey.
Beck, U. 2006. “Living in the World Risk Society.” Economy and Society, Vol.
35, No. 3: 329–345.
Béland, D. 2007. “Insecurity and Politics: A Framework.” Canadian Journal of
Sociology (Cahiers canadiens de sociologie), Vol. 32, No. 3: 317–340.
Bubandt, N. 2005. “Vernacular Security: The Politics of Feeling Safe in Global,
National and Local Worlds.” Security Dialogue, Vol. 36, No. 3: 275–296.
Chabal, P. and J.-P. Daloz. 1999. Africa Works: The Political Instrumentalization
of Disorder. London: James Currey.
Clapham, C. 1982. Private Patronage and Public Power: Political Clientelism in
the Modern State. London: Pinter.
Comaroff, J. and J. Comaroff. 2005. “Reflections on Youth: From the Past to
the Postcolony.” In Makers and Breakers Children and Youth in Postcolonial
Africa, ed. A. Honwana and F. d. Boeck. Oxford: James Currey.
Th e P r e c a r iou s n e s s of P r e be n d a l i s m 257
R e c onsi de r at ions
Epi log ue
Th e L ogic a n d L eg ac y of
P r e be n da l ism i n Nige r i a
Richard Joseph
My country faces one of the most trying periods in our 52-year history:
terrorist attacks; calls for splitting the country along ethnic lines, insecu-
rity, inhumanity and alarming decay in our medical and education sys-
tems. It is now the children’s turn to follow in our parents’ footsteps, to
take on the challenges of our time.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani1
for brief periods in 1983 and 1984”; and “Nigerians with whom he inter-
acted on a personal and professional basis while lecturing at the University
of Ibadan.” The final sentences of the 1987 book can also be recalled:
The “author” I foresaw could not write the “triumphs and travails”
sequel because the Third Republic, contrived during the military regime
of Ibrahim Babangida, 1985–1993, was stillborn. The “current cycle of
military rule,” to which I referred, started in December 1983 with the
overthrow of the Second Republic. It lasted until April 1999, in other
words, even longer than the first military era, January 1966–October
1979, which included a 30-month civil war. The “long view” I proposed
for considering “the contemporary historical period” has, a quarter cen-
tury later, no end in sight. Also awaited is the process of dynamic interac-
tion to achieve the goals of “consensual politics, government efficiency,
economic resiliency and public ethics.”
Richard A. Joseph . . . is usually credited with first using the term preben-
dalism to describe patron-client or neopatrimonialism in Nigeria. Since
then the term has commonly been used in scholarly literature and text-
books. The Catholic Encyclopedia defines a prebend as the “right of mem-
ber of chapter to his share in the revenues of a cathedral.” Joseph used the
term to describe the sense of entitlement that many people in Nigeria feel
they have to the revenues of the Nigerian state. Elected officials, govern-
ment workers, and members of the ethnic and religious groups to which
they belong feel they have a right to a share of government revenues.
Joseph wrote: “According to the theory of prebendalism, state offices
are regarded as prebends that can be appropriated by officeholders, who
use them to generate material benefits for themselves and their constitu-
ents and kin groups . . . ” As a result of that kind of patron-client or iden-
tity politics, Nigeria has regularly been one of the lowest ranked nations
for political transparency by Transparency International in its Corruption
Perceptions Index.
Prebendalism has also been used to describe the nature of state-derived
rights over capital held by state officials in parts of India in the early 18th
Century. Such rights were equally held to be of a patron-client nature
and thus volatile. They were thus converted where possible into hereditary
entitlements. Max Weber discussed the prebendalism of India in the early
Middle Ages in his book The Religion of India.
264 R ic h a r d Jo s e p h
office and the officeholder; the office is not private property; the office-
holder is a salaried official subject to the discipline of the hierarchy within
which he is embedded; offices are defined functionally; and officehold-
ing is based on technical competence . . . All of these were . . . characteristic
of the Chinese bureaucracy from the time of the state of Qin” (270) and
repatrimonialized during later dynasties in the second century BCE.
Eventually, “the Qin effort to eliminate feudalism and create an imper-
sonal modern state was undone; kinship returned as the primary avenue
to power and status in China, a situation that lasted until the later years
of the Tang Dynasty in the ninth century” (140). Interestingly, for stu-
dents of Africa, “kinship and patrimonialism reinserted themselves as the
organizing principles of Chinese politics” (140). To a remarkable degree,
Fukuyama delineates the dynamics of a prebendalized patrimonial order
familiar to students of postcolonial Africa, including the role of kinship
ties “as the primary avenue to power and status” (140). Two millennia
after the Qin era, a prebendalized system emerged in France. Fukuyama’s
use of the terms “patrimonial officeholding” and “venal officeholders”
are similar, in many regards, to how I, and the contributors to this book,
use the term prebendal. His interpretation of what happened to the state
in prerevolutionary France depicts, I would contend, the extreme preben-
dalizing of a patrimonial order: “the actual purchase of small pieces of the
state, which could then be handed down to descendants . . . Government
offices . . . sold to the highest bidder . . . Government . . . was privatized
down to its core functions and public offices turned into heritable private
property” (339).
In postcolonial Africa, it is only at the very summit of the political sys-
tem, and notably that of the head of state himself, that efforts have been
consummated to render the office heritable. This can be seen in such
countries as Gabon and Togo. It is also instructive to be reminded by
Fukuyama of the French coinage of such terms as the rente —to refer to
“the selling of public offices to private individuals, entitling office holder
to a revenue stream that the officeholder controlled”—and the paulette,
entitling a rente holder to “convert his office into heritable property by
bequeathing it to his descendants in return for a fee” (340–341). When
Nigeria and other African countries are looked at through the prism of
prerevolutionary France, the challenges appear utterly daunting: “The
system created by the French government was an absolute nightmare.
It virtually legitimized and institutionalized rent seeking and corrup-
tion by allowing agents to run their public offices for private benefit.”
“If modern public administration,” Fukuyama wrote, “is about the
observance of a bright line between public and private, then the ancien
régime represented a thoroughly premodern system” (339). In reading
Fukuyama, I was reminded of the key insight that came to me in Nigeria
Th e L o g ic a n d L e g ac y of P r e be n d a l i s m 273
The French Revolution was able to reestablish a bright line between public
and private interest by simply expropriating all of the old venal office-
holders’ patrimonies and lopping off the heads of the recalcitrant ones. A
new political system in which recruitment into political office was to be
based on merit and impersonality—something the Chinese had discov-
ered nearly two millennia earlier—was then brought to the rest of Europe
by the man on horseback . . . The nineteenth-century German bureaucracy
that became Max Weber’s model for modern, rational public administra-
tion did not evolve out of patrimonial office-holding, but rather styled
itself as a conscious break with that tradition. (371)
If you have an office but have not stolen – if you have not helped your
family – they are actually going to curse you . . . So there is pressure from
everybody that you should take as much as possible . . . You eat on your
behalf but also let some crumbs fall on those who are with you.
People are seeing their relatives and friends in high offices and they
don’t care how they get the money as long as the money is going to the
village and they benefit.
If the State is allowing people like this [high-level public officials] to
continue with looting, why should I be stopped from giving a clinical
officer a hundred shillings to get faster heath care service.39
How to engage not just political elites but citizens at all levels in the
process of system transformation is the challenge confronting virtually
all African countries. Three decades ago, I declared that “ways must be
found to protect the state-power . . . from being prebendalized and then
squeezed of its resources to satisfy the unceasing struggle among massed
communities and their (self-serving) patrons for access to the public till.”40
Sadly, there is no different message to be shared today. At the heart of the
development process in Africa must be a revolutionary transformation in
how state offices are perceived and used.41 What can be added, follow-
ing Fukuyama, is how profoundly difficult a goal this is to accomplish.42
It took a very bloody revolution to transform the highly prebendalized
system of monarchical France. No responsible person would call for such
a cataclysmic event in Nigeria today. The country is currently wracked
by terrorist violence that is provoking intercommunal and interreligious
warfare. Is it possible for the equivalent of the French Revolution to take
place in Nigeria via open, transparent, and democratic means? The tech-
nology is available today to make publicly known virtually every sum that
is allocated to every office in the Nigerian federation (with the excep-
tion of “security votes” for federal and state executive officers). A power-
ful weapon against prebendalism is the cellphone in the hands of many
Nigerians. The great creativity of Nigerians, and other Africans, in using
and adapting communication technologies means that they possess some
of the key instruments to effect the necessary transformation.43
During the prolonged global economic recession, accompanied by a
crisis in governance, media revelations of corruption in many countries
appear daily. Nigeria, which has become infamous for corrupt practices,
is in a position to play a leading role in reversing them. Will Nigerians,
especially the younger generations, knowing all they do about their own
country’s experiences, and the upheavals in many countries worldwide,
take ownership and responsibility for engineering this transformation? I
ended the 1987 book on a note of “moderate optimism.” Sadly, I can no
longer use the term “optimism,” even with qualifiers. In my March 2012
lecture at Brown University on the topic “Can the Nigerian Project be
Salvaged,” I said, using the metaphor of a sporting match, that Nigeria
Th e L o g ic a n d L e g ac y of P r e be n d a l i s m 277
was now in “injury time.”44 In his remarks to the September 2011 con-
ference on democracy and prebendalism, Governor Kayode Fayemi
stated: “We have failed as a people to confront the fundamental struc-
tural challenges of our national togetherness and collective political life.
Unless we . . . reorder the fundamentally flawed logic on which Nigeria
has operated until now, we will not be able put the national state in the
service of the diverse people who constitute it.” Prebendalism is part of
this “fundamentally flawed logic.” Those who were children when I first
wrote about prebendalism are now adults. To paraphrase Adaobi Tricia
Nwaubani, they cannot wait for their children to take on “the challenges
of our time.” By then, there may be no Nigeria to be salvaged.
Notes
1. “Reform in the Name of the Father,” New York Times June 17, 2012. Ms.
Nwaubani is the author of the novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance
(Hyperion, 2009).
2. From his song “Authority Stealing.” This is also the title of Wale Adebanwi’s
book, Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in
Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012).
3. In addition to the grants from these colleges, I was the recipient of a
Fulbright grant, a research grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, both for
1978 and 1979, and a research grant from the Ford Foundation. The latter
supported a sabbatical at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard
University in 1981, where some of the writing was done.
4. Democracy and Prebendal Politics: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic
(Cambridge University Press, 1987). A Nigerian edition was published by
Spectrum Books in 1991.
5. Ibid., 198.
6. Published in the Journal of Modern African Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (1978):
221–239.
7. Ibid., 1.
8. “State and Class in Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative
Politics, Vol. 21, No. 3 (November 1983). This collection was also published
as a book: Nelson Kasfir, ed., State and Class in Africa (Frank Cass and
Company, 1984). My essay was reissued in other publications, such as Peter
Anyang’ Nyong’o, ed., Estado y Sociedad en el Africa actual (El Colégio de
Mexico, 1989), and Peter Lewis, ed., Africa: Dilemmas of Development and
Change (Westview Press, 1998).
9. http://www.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art20110914175915
10. ht t p:// lordb a n k s .com/2 011/0 9/on- p ol it ic i a n s - a nd- prof e s s or s
-the-prebendal-conference-event/
11. Democracy and Prebendal Politics, p. 65.
12. Ken Post and Michael Vickers, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–
1965 (Heineman Educational, 1973). It is pertinent that chapter 5 on
“Clientelism and Prebendal Politics” in my book is preceded by the chapter
on “Politics in a Multi-ethnic Society.” Also pertinent is the analysis and
278 R ic h a r d Jo s e p h
28. Ibid., 51. All citations from van de Walle, unless indicated, are from this
book chapter.
29. Third European Conference on African Studies, Leipzig, Germany, June
4–7, 2009.
30. Ibid., 4.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. New York: Farrah, Straus & Giroux, 2011.
33. “The Pattern of History,” Journal of Democracy, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January
2012): 18.
34. As shown by Jacqueline Klopp, the power of these barons often rest on
vast landed properties obtained through the control of state offices. “Kenya
Struggles to Fix Itself,” Current History (May 2012).
35. I raised these questions in a preliminary way in my talk, “Beyond
Prebendalist Systems: State, Democracy, and Development in Africa,” at
Stanford University on April 25, 2012. See http://africaplus.wordpress.
com/2012/04/30/beyond-prebendalist-systems-state-democracy-and-dev
elopment-in-africa/
36. Ibid., 153.
37. Democracy and Prebendal Politics.
38. “Class, State, and Prebendal Politics,” 22.
39. Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, Jan Teorell, “Why Anti-Corruption Reforms
Fail—System Corruption as a Collective Action Problem,” The Quality
of Government Institute (University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2012, 16.
For similar commentaries in Nigeria, see Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture
of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
(Princeton University Press, 2008).
40. “Class, State, and Prebendal Politics,” 34.
41. See Richard Joseph, “Smart Partnerships for African Development: A New
Strategic Framework,” Special Report, United States Institute of Peace, May
15, 2002.
42. Anne Persson et al., explain why most anticorruption programs fail, and
why the system we have described as prebendalism require a collective action
approach quite different from the usual panoply of reforms.
43. Sahara Reporters, an Internet media company began by a former student
activist in Nigeria, Omoyele Sowore, is an example of the capacities that can
be tapped by committed and innovative Nigerians.
44. See my lecture, “Can the Nigerian Project Be Salvaged? Growth, Democracy
and Security,” delivered at Brown University on March 13, 2012: http://
africaplus.wordpress.com/2012/03/29/can-the-nigerian-project-be-salvag
ed-growth-democracy-and-security/
C on t r i bu t or s
Responsibility to Protect (R2P), 115 Senate, 84–5, 91, 109, 129, 143n18
responsible society, characteristics SGF, See Secretary to the
of, 114 Government of the Federation
Revenue Mobilization, Allocation Shagari, Shehu, 6, 141n5,
and Fiscal Commission 162, 240
(RMAFC), 139 Shakur, Tupac, 215
Reynolds, J.T., 189–90 Sharia laws, 12
Ribadu, Nuhu, 41, 109 Shehu Shagari regime (1979–1983),
Richards Constitution (1946), 189, 6, 240
234 Siollun, M., 167
RMAFC, See Revenue Mobilization, Sklar, Richard L., viii, 5, 227–9
Allocation and Fiscal Smith, Daniel Jordan, 209
Commission Smith, M.G., 185–6
RNC, See Royal Niger Company SNC, See Sovereign National
Roitman, Janet, 244 Conference
Rothstein, Bo, 275 SNG, See Save Nigeria Group
Royal Niger Company (RNC), 185 social media, 201
R2P, See Responsibility to Protect SOKAPU, See Platform of the
Southern Kaduna People’s
Sachs, Jeffrey D., 137 Union
Salafi/Wahhabi fundamentalism, Sokoto, 56–7, 65, 92, 162, 165–6,
203, 207, 210–12 172n21, 178, 182–6, 192–4,
Sandbrook, R., 243 205, 234
Sanders, I. T., 107 Sokoto Caliphate, 178, 182–6,
Sanusi, Lamido, 69, 132, 138 192–4, 205
sarauta, 178–81 Sonibare, S.O., 238
sarauta-emirates, 186, 189–97 Sovereign National Conference
sarki (political office), 179–80, 186 (SNC), 12, 96, 142n7
Satiru uprising, 185 SSS, See State Security Service
Save Nigeria Group (SNG), 140 state building, vii–viii
Second Republic (1979–1983), State Security Service (SSS), 138
viii–ix, 6–7, 10–12, 14, 16–17, state-in-itself, 18
25, 29, 35, 47n5,12, 53, 82–3, state-for-itself, 18
87, 90, 92, 104–5, 108, 125, “states of emergency,” 214–17
127, 129, 132, 139, 147, 192, Suberu, Rotimi, 15, 61, 79–99,
202, 240, 243, 262 115–16, 121, 123, 164,
Secretary to the Government of the 234, 268
Federation (SGF), 129 subsidy debate of 1986–1988,
security and prebendalism, 147–70 63–4
and entryism, 149, 162, 166–9 Sultan Aliyu dan Bello
and federal character, 163–6 (1842ñ1859), 184
and joining the police, 151–6 Sultan Muhammad Bello, 185
and policing, 149–51 Sultan of Sokoto, 162, 184, 192
and standards, 156–61 Sunni, 207, 212
and the state, 161–3 Suwarian tradition, 181
Index 299