Patrons and Power

Creating a Political Community in Metropolitan Lagos

Sandra T. Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429815065
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Originally published in 1986, this urban political ethnography focusses on Mushin, a large suburb of metropolitan Lagos, Nigeria. It explores the mechanisms which bridge the various social categories to bring about political interaction. The book traces the development of Mushin from a collection of rural villages to its full status as a political community. It analyses structures and processes and the ways in which, since the 19th century, the system has responded to colonial, civilian and military regimes. It examines the tactics ordinary people use to meet their needs and the ways in which political aspirants manipulate the system to acquire and wield power.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

This is a book about power – getting it, wielding it, and perpetuating it. The general wisdom concerning these processes was laid down by Machiavelli, who inaugurated modern political scholarship with his penetrating insights concerning the importance of skill in securing and then keeping political power; by Marx, who insisted that power could not be retained unless it was firmly anchored in a material base; and by Weber, who showed us that power had to be institutionalised to be perpetuated. Each of these political thinkers established principles which thereafter dominated political scholarship with little change.

Yet the patterns of political power – the ways in which some people control others and control rewards – always change. The organisation and distribution of power are continually reshaped to the extent that, while scholars seldom find exceptions to the general principles, the various patterns which the quest for power take are never exhausted. In fact, they unfold in unending kaleidoscopic fashion. As each new pattern is revealed, we expand our understanding of the ways in which some people become politically dominant and others become subordinate. The unprecedented proliferation of new nations during the second half of this century provides an embarrassment of riches in this respect.

My goal here is to explain one of these new patterns. I wish to bring attention to the people of an African city who began at the bottom of their society’s structure of power, acquired resources, and developed political skills. In the process they gained sufficient stature to wield power over others below them, and to gain access to institutions of the state above them.

THE DISTRIBUTION OF POWER IN CONTEMPORARY AFRICA

In sub-Saharan Africa, the creation of new states by European rulers transformed the ways in which political power was distributed. At one end of the spectrum, a literate ruling elite – a foreign elite operating from newly introduced bureaucratic institutions – was superimposed over indigenous populations. Independence did not change this new element in the pattern of stratification. Nor did it change the basic determinants of ruling-elite status: education, relative wealth, and the holding of high office in state institutions.¹ When European powers departed, a highly educated, Western-oriented African ruling elite succeeded to their governmental posts. This was particularly striking in Nigeria, where this study took place, and where 87 per cent of the college-educated population was employed by government, mainly in senior service positions, following independence.² At the opposite end of the spectrum, there was the African public. In contrast to elite leaders, the general public was decidedly less educated, and therefore less exposed to Western ideas, and less economically rewarded than the rulers. Furthermore African societies did not boast a large middle class which, in the West, tended to blur the distinctions between the upper and lower strata. Africa’s relatively small middle class consisted of people who achieved a modicum of wealth, education, or prestige in a community, for example merchants, clerks, school-teachers, or clergymen, and who often occupied local-level political offices. While the middle class provided a thin bridge spanning the gulf between the overwhelmingly large mass-public and the very small elite, it enjoyed considerably less visibility and scholarly attention than the other two extremes.

Colonial rule and the creation of new nations also changed political boundaries. For the most part, small polities were brought together into large states. Some had been old antagonists, others had experienced little contact, but whatever their prior relationships, the new amalgamations engendered antagonisms, as various small groups tried to gain supremacy over one another. The success of stronger groups over weaker ones meant that power became distributed along another axis – that of ethnicity. The dynamics of ethnic group competition had the dual effect of inhibiting the forces of integration and of generating cleavages for which there were few social bridges.

Additionally, the creation of new nations transformed the way in which economic power was distributed. Before the colonial period, wealth, as reflected by the standard of living, was fairly equally distributed. This pattern was altered when colonial powers placed the control of economic resources in the hands of the colonial state and, in so doing, reversed the Marxist proposition that control of political institutions derived from control of the major economic resources. Europeans built empires in response to economic motivations: desires for trading profits, raw materials, and cheap labour. Therefore, they placed the control of overseas resources in their governmental outposts where they could be efficiently extracted and exported. After independence was granted, the new governments perpetuated this concentration of economic power in the governmental sector. Officials who held high offices thus controlled their countries’ economies, while people who did not hold governmental positions automatically had less access to state-held resources and state-allocated wealth in the form of high salaries, pensions, and fringe benefits. All in all, the concentration of economic and governmental power in the hands of the same small elite stratum only reinforced the boundaries between the relatively privileged and the relatively deprived.³

Nowhere were political, economic, and ethnic group cleavages more striking than in the cities. The coming together of elites and masses in Africa’s new states was largely an urban phenomenon. National leaders lived and worked primarily in capital cities and other major urban centres where state institutions were located. Large numbers of workers from diverse backgrounds were attracted to these same places in search of economic opportunities and the freedom of urban living.

Yet the very nature of urban development contributed to the gulf between the ordinary citizens and the officials of the state. The two most prominent features in this respect were the rapidity and the volume of population growth. Before the colonial period, a few cities were found scattered along Africa’s East Coast, in the Western Sahara, and along the Guinea Coast, especially in present-day Nigeria. At the turn of the century, Africa was the least urbanised continent, with a city population of only one per cent. The newly entrenched foreign powers stimulated the development of new cities, especially following the world wars, so that soon after independence, the urban population had jumped to more than 28 per cent. Two dramatic examples tell the tale. The population of Kinshasa, capital of Zaire, increased tenfold – from 208,000 to 2,049,000 – in the twenty-five-year period between 1950 and 1975. The population of metropolitan Lagos did the same between 1952, when it was estimated to have 346,137, and 1977, when it reached 3.5 million people. And this was only a beginning, for both cities are expected to exceed nine million by the year 2,000.⁴

Growth rates of this magnitude presented problems which were insurmountable. Urban institutions were unable to keep pace with mushrooming populations. Industrial, manufacturing, and other large-scale sources of employment failed to grow at rates which could absorb the large numbers of migrants who sought wage employment. This led to high unemployment rates, large sectors of informally or partially employed workers, and extreme poverty and hardship. Similarly, governmental institutions failed to keep up with the forces of urbanisation. They were hampered by a lack of funds, trained personnel, and organisational elasticity, leaving them unable to respond to most residents’ needs for basic services and protection. They were additionally hampered by an inability to disseminate adequate information about official operations and the ways in which services could be secured.

The average person in the cities of new nations, as one observer aptly summed it up, lived in ‘an environment of scarcity’.⁵ The most basic urban resources – things taken for granted in the wealthy nations such as shelter, jobs, and education, or even simple amenities such as licences, water supplies, and public transportation – were scarce resources in the burgeoning cities of the less advantaged world. The few resources which were available, and the limited services public officials were able to perform, went first to those people who were in the most favoured position to secure them – the ruling elites and those close to them. Needless to say, imbalances such as these contributed to the average resident’s feelings of helplessness and estrangement from official institutions.⁶

PATTERNS OF POLITICAL ACTIVITY

Given the gulf between the general public and the official world, the ability of ordinary citizens to participate in, or influence, government affairs was a matter of serious question.⁷ One school of thought held that the capacity of the people at the bottom to influence political processes at the top declined as independent regimes in Africa moved from relatively inclusive to relatively exclusive forms of government. The ordinary citizen had not engaged in much formal political activity under multi-party systems. When military or other regimes removed formal outlets, such as voting, party membership, or certain interest groups, the participation of the common people became even more restricted. Studies which promulgated a departicipation point of view tended to begin at the top of the national political system, to dwell on patterns of government at their widest and most powerful extent, and to concentrate their attentions on corporate, institutionalised, and stable groups.⁸ There was little place in these inquiries for the public, largely because in formal governmental terms there were, in fact, fewer and fewer places where its presence was strongly imprinted.

On the other side, was a school which documented high levels of informal political activity on the part of the non-elite. Such studies examined political action at the bottom of the system and tended to concentrate on small towns, the urban grassroots, or relatively homogeneous enclaves.⁹ One of the most significant contributions of these studies was to hammer home the message that informal relationships and activities had meaningful political content. In this vein, Cohen carefully documented a variety of informal strategies that (minority) ethnic groups employed in order to retain or compete for power.¹⁰ In the old Yoruba city of Ibadan, Hausa traders who lived together in the Sabo Quarter embedded their political activities in an extended network of patron–client relationships and ritual activities. Despite being veiled in an ostensibly non-political guise, these ties enabled the Hausa to rally together and collectively to protect their economically powerful position in the city. The major underlying premise was that shared culture was the key to success. The Hausa, and others like them, were successful in their political efforts because they reinforced them with common values, common goals, and common moral imperatives, all of which grew out of, or nurtured feelings of, common identity. Cohen’s work, and a number of related studies tended to restrict their analyses to relatively contained contexts, as was their intention. But as a consequence, they rarely demonstrated how connections were made across the boundaries of the various segments of the political system.

Still another school focused attention on informal political relationships, but in this case it did so with an eye to examining their ability to transcend the boundaries of class or ethnic group. The goal here was to uncover linking mechanisms. The initial questions asked by this school shifted from the way political functions were carried out by institutions or groups on behalf of people to the way people themselves attempted to fulfil their political needs and goals. The starting point for analysis thus became personal relationships, especially patron–client ties in the broad sense, and the solidarities created from them: networks, cliques, or factions. Once the first layer of informal political relationships was examined, larger and more formal bodies – interest groups, parties, or administrative agencies – were brought into the analysis. At its broadest, this method enabled one to determine, step-by-step, how and by what mechanisms one field of political action became connected to another.

The linking approach in anthropology came of age when research moved from homogeneous to complex societies. At this point, anthropologists were obliged to expand the basic units of analysis from relationships based on status to those based on contract. An important contribution came from Latin America, where patron–client ties (which by definition were voluntary and not ascriptive) were found to be important ways of establishing extra-familial and extra-community relationships.¹¹ A later contribution was action theory, an approach which began with individuals and which, then, added to the mix a particular concern for the values and effects of personal transactions.¹² The two approaches shared common ground in that they treated politics as a process – the dynamic process of acquiring power – and not the static system of exercising it. Hence they were able to move away from concentrating on people who already had power to those who sought it. This shift in focus led to the conclusion that through informal, personal relationships, and the kinds of transactions and interdependencies associated with them, some people reached beyond the confines of ‘we’ and linked themselves into the world of ‘they’ for politically significant reasons and with politically significant results.

A substantial addition to the linking approach came from political scientists who took the client paradigm – the combined patron–client and action theory approaches – and applied it to large-scale political systems in Africa, Latin America, the Mediterranean, and Southeast Asia.¹³ Adoption of the client paradigm grew out of a recognition that old analytic frameworks were not adequately explaining contemporary political systems then under observation.

On the one hand, there was dissatisfaction with the class concept as a primary tool for explaining political action. When viewed from the bottom up, political linkages tended to be more vertical than horizontal. Furthermore, in Africa classes rarely functioned as vehicles for mobilising people, but rather as categories for classifying them.¹⁴ True enough, elites were conscious of themselves as a group and acted to protect their privileged position. But ruling elites were torn by internal factional struggles which forced leaders to cultivate relationships with those below them in order to gain support in their power struggles with one another. With regard to the lower class, the usual vehicles for organising protest across ethnic group lines, especially unions, were too small and fragmented to be effective. Indeed, by the early 1970s the entire wage-earning, working-class population of a country such as Niger...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Lists of maps, tables and figures
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The making of Mushin
• 3 Land and housing as sources of power
• 4 The residential basis of leadership
• 5 The chieftaincy system
• 6 The consolidation ofleadership
• 7 The role of factions in the struggle for power
• 8 The institutionalisation of power
• 9 Conclusions
• Epilogue
• Appendix: Methods of research
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index