Contesting the Nigerian State

Civil Society and the Contradictions of Self-Organization

M. Okome

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137324528
• eBook ISBN: 9781137324535
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

In public choice theory, the received wisdom has long been that self-organization is an impediment to collective action, whether via the tragedy of the commons or a Hobbesian scenario in which self-interest produces social conflict rather than cooperation. Yet as this fascinating collection shows, self-organization and state-society relations have been much more complicated in the context of contemporary Nigerian politics. Given the absence or unwillingness of the Nigerian state to provide essential services, entire communities have had to band together to repair roads, build health centers, and maintain public utilities, all from levies. The successes, failures, and ongoing challenges faced by Nigerian society provide valuable insights into the state's capacity, its relationship with civil society, and the social, economic, and political well-being of its citizens.

CHAPTER 1

CONTESTING THE NIGERIAN STATE: CIVIL SOCIETY AND THE CONTRADICTIONS OF SELF-ORGANIZATION—INTRODUCTION, CONCEPTS, AND QUESTIONS

Mojúbàolú Olúfúnké Okome

This is one of the two books that resulted from the conference, “(Un)civil Society”? State Failure and the Contradictions of Self-Organisation in Nigeria, May 14–17, 2005, sponsored by the Heinrich Böll Foundation and organized by Axel Harneit-Sievers. The conference focused on theoretical and applied understandings of “uncivil society.” Majority of the presentations also centered around whether the failed state designation applied to Nigeria. Given those initial deliberations, and the continued skepticism about the viability of the African state, it remains relevant to consider the concepts: “uncivil society” and state failure as many of the chapters in this volume do.

The conference also considered “(Un)civil society” as a conceptual frame from which to problematize the phenomenon of self-organization in Nigeria. With the deepening crisis of the nation state, there was a reluctance to give Western financial assistance to many corrupt regimes and the weak states they governed in developing countries. In their place, donor agencies and governments embraced nongovernmental organizations that were promoted as an alternative to economic and social development. In this context, many analysts extolled the virtues of self-help and self-organization as an alternative to the state as the responsible agent that fosters economic and political development.

The city of Lagos, the venue for the conference, seems especially serendipitous as a place where one might gain insight on some of the inadequacies of the Nigerian state and the ways in which self-organization is brought to bear by ordinary people who desire solutions to their problems, given the lack of willingness or the absence of the state to provide such services. With a population of 17 million occupying 356,861 hectares, of which 75,755 hectares are wetlands, Lagos is the smallest in land size, but it has the highest population density among Nigerian states. The Lagos metropolitan area has 37 percent of the land area of Lagos state, and over 85 percent of the population of the state. The city of Lagos, called Èkó in the Bini-derived Yorùbá that speaks to its origin, is a megacity, and according to the United Nations, it would become the third largest megacity in the world by 2015.¹ Although Lagos is fun and exciting, some of the more obvious failings of the Nigerian state can be immediately observed as an integral part of the Lagosian experience.

Despite efforts at urban renewal (through the Lagos Megacity Project) by the Fashola administration since 2007, badly planned and crowded Lagos experiences extraordinary traffic jams, or “go-slow” of gargantuan proportions. Its residents have problems with access to reliable potable water supply and electricity, and many of the roads are in poor condition. There are also problems with armed robbery and home invasions.

All Lagosians have experienced its legendary traffic jams in graphic detail. The city’s “go-slow” is so famous that even the occasional visitor is impressed and maybe dumbfounded or overwhelmed by its intractability. However, Lagosians are well aware that through self-organized action, the flow of traffic is often restored without the intervention of state personnel. Self-organization in managing problems can also be found in vigilante efforts to facilitate civil defence in many Lagos and other Nigerian neighborhoods and communities. It is found in the creation of gated communities that block off access to public streets and impose curfews that restrict freedom of movement. There are privately organized efforts in many neighborhoods to pay armed vigilantes to patrol their streets. Those able to afford more personalized and professional service hire expensive private security services to guard their homes. Less-affluent people have adopted more modest and affordable methods to ensure their safety.

Many Lagosians also have to cope with the legacy of poor urban planning that dates back to the colonial era. Access to necessities like potable water provided by the municipality is limited to small pockets of affluence. In many communities, local people can only guarantee access to water by sinking boreholes and buying water from commercial water tankers. The poor must make do with less. They buy their water by the bucket and it is not unusual in the poorer communities to find young children and women carrying buckets and basins of purchased water on their heads. There are also small-scale water vendors who use wheelbarrows to hawk water at slightly more expense for their customers. Many Lagosians like their counterparts throughout the country also generate their own electricity using generators purchased from price points varying from the cheaper ones used by the poor, popularly dubbed: “I better pass my neighbor,” to the huge semi-industrial generators affordable only by the wealthy. More germane to the question of self-organization is the fact that entire communities have also been known to band together to repair roads, build health centers, and repair broken transformers owned by the public utilities company, all from levies.

The conventional wisdom in public choice theory is that self-organization could well lead to collective action problems, in the form of the tragedy of the commons, or the prisoner’s dilemma, or a condition that is akin to Hobbes’s state of nature, where selfish interests propel people into conflict rather than cooperation.² Challenging the inevitability of collective action problems, Elinor Ostrom, the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in Economics (in 2009!, a fact bespeaking the entrenched nature of male dominance in the academy), points to the ways in which self-organization can often produce efficient results that are superior to top-down imposition of rules by institutions including the state. Ostrom gives an alternative that challenges conventional wisdom and presents the possibility of self-organization and self-governance in managing common pool resources (CPR) yielding sustainable and equitable results. She provides a roadmap in the form of eight rules for governing CPRs that yield such results:

1. Define clear group boundaries.

2. Match rules governing use of common goods to local needs and conditions.

3. Ensure that those affected by the rules can participate in modifying the rules.

4. Make sure the rule-making rights of community members are respected by outside authorities.

5. Develop a system, carried out by community members, for monitoring members’ behavior.

6. Use graduated sanctions for rule violators.

7. Provide accessible, low-cost means for dispute resolution.

8. Build responsibility for governing the common resource in nested tiers from the lowest level up to the entire interconnected system.³

What are the meanings and implications of self-organization for Nigerian politics? Is self-organization in Nigeria sustainable and successful? Does self-organization as experienced in Nigeria reveal evidence of Ostrom’s rules in operation? Are these rules meaningful for analyzing the modes of self-organization that we observe in Nigeria? What does the success of self-organization mean for the state, and more importantly, for Nigeria’s democratization?

State–civil society relationship in Nigeria is in flux, not least because of the experience of economic crisis from the mid-1980s, and also the fact that since 1999, the country has been engaged in its latest flirtation with democratization after numerous years of military rule. Nigeria in essence undertook a combination of economic and political liberalization by adopting the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF)-imposed neoliberal Structural Adjustment Program (SAP) and it engineered a move from authoritarianism to multiparty democracy. The SAP failed to achieve the stated objectives. In addition, although there have been three successful general elections since, fundamental questions remain about the nature of the state, and the type of state that will best serve the country to accomplish the goals of economic and political development. Consideration of post-authoritarian state–civil society relations in Nigeria began in a situation where the state was deeply embroiled in a morass of economic and political crises, further complicating these relations, and lending urgency to questions about state strength, as well as the nature of the relationship between state and civil society, and their implication for the political health and well-being of the newly developing democratic system.⁴

Olukotun’s chapter draws our attention to the transition from authoritarianism and the role of the media in the public sphere. For him, the Nigerian, and African state, has failed or is in the process of failing. He agrees with the scholarly assessments that consider the state as “ ‘privatized’ and predatory . . . unable to guarantee the minimal conditions for its medium term survival.” He bases his conclusion on the functional inadequacies of the state, judged by infrastructural decay and consequent dearth of services like electricity, potable water, good roads, and public transportation. He sees the problems of the National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) as emblematic of the ineptitude of the Nigerian state to meet citizen needs that are crucial to functioning in the contemporary world. Olasupo agrees that the Nigerian state has failed for much the same reasons. And for Olukotun in Chapter 3, the state’s inability to properly respond to multiple and endemic ethno-religious conflicts, its failure to learn the lessons of history evoked by the ethno-religious roots of the civil war of 1966–1970; and “rampant corruption in public life as well as the presence of a large informal sector are some of the indices often cited to pinpoint the ineffectiveness of the state.”

Adebanwi in chapter 4 also focuses on the media, but restricts the scope of his inquiry to print media. He considers the relationship between the media and democratization/democracy in Nigeria, emphasizing the key position of the media in “(re)constituting, expanding and defending citizenship rights,” and the salutary effects of activist media on expanding the limits of democratic citizenship. The focus of the chapter on print media, through the analysis of the Citizens’ Forum, fills a gap in our knowledge on the complex and multiple connections between media and citizenship. It also illuminates the inherent contradictions and tensions therein, and the consequences for Nigeria’s democratization. Key to Adebanwi’s explication of the media–democracy nexus is the concept of “radical democratic citizenship,” which conceives of citizenship as “a continual struggle within [the] contingency and therefore constantly shifting relationships of power.” Similarly, Olukotun points out the contradictions, and antinomies of state failure and their effects on contributing to the diminution of the Nigerian public sphere. The press, being a part of the larger civil society, is also affected by the contradictions and antinomies that “afflict the larger civil society,” some of which “derive from the state arena.” These antinomies and contradictions include “corruption, ethnicity as well as institutional decay.” The media have been vulnerable to the neocorporatist overtures made by the state and prominent politicians to recruit from its ranks, foot soldiers, who are paid off to launder their image. Of course, it does not help the fact that many of the media concerns either do not pay their staff adequately, or do not pay them at all, in an economy where economic crisis has increased the vulnerability of the majority to deepening poverty. Consequently, sycophancy and rampant lack of critical reportage proliferates and the media becomes even weaker.

Like the imperial and colonial projects that came earlier, development initiatives and discourse have always been driven by the needs and agenda of the Northern hemisphere and less by those of the South or its peoples. Given the hierarchical world order and the social order that it produces, this language is now ubiquitous, particularly given the donor countries and agencies’ assessment of their priorities, they decided that development assistance should go to nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), rather than to state elites that were believed to be responsible for rising poverty, the decline of the state, and development failures—factors that were adjudged to have caused a crisis of governance. The World Bank and Western-dominated multilateral institutions have been especially influential in driving the process, and the neoliberal perspective that they favor considers lack of skill and will as well as the influence of rent-seeking elites to be emblematic of the failures of development, and by implication, the failure of the state. The assumption by these institutions is that they and the NGOs they sponsor in developing countries are essentially honest brokers who will facilitate the development of more democratic politics and civic engagement, and through these, strengthen the state. Pronouncements by these same international institutions and donor countries make it obvious that the intent is rather, to strengthen NGOs and weaken states that are considered predatory, corrupt, and inept at fostering economic growth. To what extent is this agenda, however well intentioned, geared at serving the best interests of developing countries including Nigeria?

Araoye in chapter 2 asks: “Does civil society in a multi-national post colonial state such as Nigeria promote state building and national development or is it an impediment that renders the state fragile?” He contends that the conflicts in the value systems of ethno-regional and ethno-religious associations are an important cause of the cycle of destructive clashes that have bedeviled Nigeria. Araoye engages the complex interaction between ethno-regional and ethno-religious organizations “and their inability to become instruments for national bridging in the face of the huge bonding potential of self help in the post colonial state environment.” Instead, he argues, they become “vanguard elements in a turbulent dynamic for the partisan appropriation of the state.” The result is state fragility because the ethno-regional and ethno-religious groups desire to simultaneously control the state, and the socioeconomic space in an absolutist manner. Since these competing groups are uncompromisingly opposed to one another, they lack shared values and norms, and each group desires hegemonic control. Politics and social relations are conducted as a series of adversarial and partisan struggles, fostering a bitter struggle to dominate the state. State fragility is the natural consequence of these struggles.

Although we encounter the concept daily, there is no universally acceptable, homogenous, definition of the state. One could proceed by borrowing from Patrick Dunleavy and Brendan O’Lea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1   Contesting the Nigerian State: Civil Society and the Contradictions of Self-Organization—Introduction, Concepts, and Questions
• 2   Civil Society and the Challenges of Development and Nation Building in the Postcolonial African State
• 3   State Failure and the Contradictions of the Public Sphere, 1995–2005
• 4   Mobilizing for Change: The Press and the Struggle for Citizenship in Democratic Nigeria
• 5   Gendered States: Women’s Civil Society Activism in Nigerian Politics
• 6   Feminist Civil Society Organizations and Democratization in Nigeria
• 7   Women’s Associational Life within Traditional Institutions in Yorùbá States
• 8   Sexual Struggles and Democracy Dividends
• 9   Politics in a Sub-Formal Economic Setting: Workplace Investment Cooperatives in Southwestern Nigeria, c. 1986–2011
• Notes on Contributors
• Index