Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria

Critical Interpretations

W. Adebanwi, E. Obadare, W. Adebanwi, E. Obadare

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137280763
• eBook ISBN: 9781137280770
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica africana

Richard Joseph's seminal 1987 book Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria represented a watershed moment in the understanding of the political dynamics of Nigeria. This groundbreaking collection brings together scholars from across disciplines to assess the significance of Joseph's work and the current state of Nigerian politics.

Part I

GOVERNANCE AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PREBENDALISM

1

THE ROOTS OF NEOPATRIMONIALISM: OPPOSITION POLITICS AND POPULAR CONSENT IN SOUTHWEST NIGERIA

Leena Hoffmann and Insa Nolte

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 understood as part of a process of appropriation and assimilation by African elites and their followers in the modern state structures presumably created 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 according 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 partially outside of the state (Pitcher, Moran, and Johnston 2009). Thus, neopatrimonial politics both reflect and reproduce the heterogeneous roots, and the great diversity of locally embedded forms of inequality and dependence, on which the modern African state was built.

In southwest Nigeria, patrimonial politics have been driven by strong notions of Yoruba culture and identity since the colonial period. Because of the repeated failure of Yoruba nationalist leader Obafemi Awolowo (1909–1987) to be elected to power at the national level during his lifetime, Yoruba politics in the former western region, which he ruled as its first premier,¹ have long been opposition politics. However, the centralization of the Nigerian state in 1967, designed primarily to reduce the autonomy of Nigeria’s large ethnic groups, and thus the possibility of secession that had been enhanced by the previous regional administration, meant that the overwhelming part of Nigeria’s national wealth was also controlled by the central government. As a result, regional networks were confronted with the ability of the central government to reward those local groups and leaders who distanced themselves from ethno-national opposition politics. In this context, the appeal to a distinct Yoruba identity was important for opposition politics in southwest Nigeria. Apart from providing an ideological core to a politics skeptical of the center, the validation of Yorubaness confirmed and justified the ongoing importance of the locally rooted traditional and modern institutions that were crucial to the functioning of southwestern patronage networks (cf. Bayart 2005).

However, the confinement to opposition politics also created an ideological space that transcended ethno-nationalism. As Joseph has suggested, by the 1980s, Yoruba politics were characterized by tensions between the emphasis on local identity on the one hand and, on the other, a strong general critique of the dominant version of Nigerian patrimonialism because it did not provide for progressive politics, and especially not for enough investment into education and infrastructure (1987, 109–125). Beyond this, as the country’s centrally controlled oil revenue came to dominate Nigeria’s political economy increasingly, Yoruba politics were shaped by considerations about the costs of reciprocity. The practical pressure and temptation of central funds could be resisted only through an ongoing investment in locally embedded patron-client relations. But local networks, with fewer resources to draw on, were under greater pressure to create local support by emphasizing social redistribution and addressing developmental questions.

The historical trajectory of Yoruba politics since 1999 suggests that, both in the context of these tensions and wider transformations of Nigeria’s political landscape, the appeal to a specifically Yoruba oppositional political identity was not primordial or immutable. Since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule in 1999, the dominant political party of southwest Nigeria has changed twice. While the 1999 elections had confirmed an opposition party throughout the southwest, in 2003, the region’s hitherto unbroken trajectory of supporting opposition politics was ended in 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 consent 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 expression. While this form of participation is subject to local systems of inequality itself and does not reflect the ideals underlying electoral politics, it also suggests that local political outcomes are not always a dependent variable of external causalities.

Thus, if patrimonial politics hollow out or weaken the modern state, on the one hand, they can nonetheless express popular claims and aspirations, on the other. As these claims and aspirations are aimed, both directly and indirectly, at the state’s control of central funds and its ability to transform lives through the provision of education and infrastructure, they also confirm the state’s ongoing importance.

BACKGROUND TO YORUBA POLITICS

The emergence of a specifically Yoruba politics in southwest Nigeria reflects several separate yet linked strands of ethnogenesis. While the area known today as Yorubaland has not been united politically at least since the sixteenth century, it was long dominated by the western Yoruba Oyo Empire. After the collapse of Oyo and during the intra-Yoruba wars of the early nineteenth century, the warrior city of Ibadan soon came to dominate Yorubaland, seeing itself as the natural successor to Oyo. However, local struggles over the establishment of regional hegemony were curtailed by British expansion. All the same, European ideas of enlightenment and nationhood were enthusiastically appropriated by local intellectuals throughout the Yoruba-speaking area, and intersected with different forms of self-reflection, self-assertion, and celebration to form a vibrant cultural nationalism of the Yoruba (cf. Peel 1989 and 2000; Doortmont 1990; De Moraes Farias 1990; Ojo 2009).

During the decolonization period, the creation of a largely independent western region, which was dominated by Yoruba speakers, provided the basis for a transformation of Yoruba cultural nationalism into political nationalism. Intellectually as well as organizationally, this process was dominated by the UK-educated lawyer Obafemi Awolowo, who built up the dominant political party of the region, the Action Group (AG), by transforming a wide range of local, precolonial, and colonial communities and networks into sections of a well-articulated Yoruba ethno-nationalism. Awolowo’s political strength was that he relied on the ideological and material support of networks rooted in local life. Confirming the relevance of the existing traditional elite through a celebration of shared Yoruba origins and customs, Awolowo’s vision of progress through education, social solidarity, and infrastructural development also attracted the educated, and in particular aspirational youth and other “ordinary” people, whose ability to mobilize existing social and cultural links in his support entrenched politics deeply in everyday life (cf. Vaughan 2006; Nolte 2004, 2009).

While also emphasizing more general enlightenment discourse, Awolowo drew on earlier cultural celebrations of the Yoruba to argue that, like all of Nigeria’s ethnic nations, the Yoruba had their own historical trajectory and as much legitimacy as their European counterparts (Awolowo 1947, 47–54). Thus, he legitimized Yoruba ethno-nationalism both against the colonial powers and against rival nationalist leaders.

As the first premier of the western region during the 1950s, Awolowo confirmed the importance of enlightenment ideas for Yoruba social solidarity by prioritizing access to education for wide sections of the population. However, the competitive nature of Awolowo’s intellectual and political leadership also created resentment,³ and Awolowo failed to win the national elections during the First and the Second Republic. As a result, the section of Yoruba politics that strongly identified with his leadership was increasingly entrenched as the politics of opposition to a central government. In a system where access to the state “remained disproportionately important in the struggle for resources for upward mobility” (Joseph 1987, 55), Awolowo’s opposition politics occupied an interesting position because they were both based on the revalidation and modernization of local patrimonial networks, and founded in an idealistic opposition, rooted in both redistributive rhetoric and practice, to the neopatrimonial structures dominating national politics.

Much more powerful than the regional networks controlled by Awolowo, Nigeria’s central government relied on a mixture of seduction and coercion—the “carrot and stick approach”—to expand its networks into the southwest. Following intraparty disagreements over principles and leadership within the AG in the early 1960s, a local faction of erstwhile followers of Awolowo claimed a sufficient enough ideological convergence with the northern-led coalition government to form an alliance for the 1964 regional and 1965 federal elections. Organized as the Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP), this faction dispensed material incentives and deployed coercive powers that had been expanded by its affiliation to the national government. In the Second Republic, Awolowo’s control of the party remained unchallenged, but because the former western region had been divided into smaller states, his control of local administrative structures was harder to maintain. Straddling a position between class-based redistributive politics and the clientelism associated with ethno-nationalist mobilization (Joseph 1987, 125), Yoruba politics were again associated with resistance to the central government’s attempts to manipulate the opposition.

Confronted with the steady expansion of centrally based patronage networks through both co-optation and coercion, the increasing adoption of demands ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction   Democracy and Prebendalism: Emphases, Provocations, and Elongations
• Part I   Governance and the Political Economy of Prebendalism
• Part II   Prebendalism and Identity Politics
• Part III   Reconsiderations
• Note on Contributors
• Index