Azeez Olaniyan

Culture, Corruption, and Anticorruption Struggles in Nigeria:

Most commentators on political and development crises in Nigeria have identified corruption as the prime factor. A number of factors have been adduced as responsible for the prevalence of corruption in the country. However, the aspect of culture is yet to be adequately captured. Yet, the place of culture in the high incidence of corruption as well as the constraints to its entrenchment cannot be underestimated. While the culture of the people abhors corruption, yet, we have various instances where culture has been invoked to support corrupt practices as well as fight against it. This article seeks to focus the angle of cultural dimension to the issue of corruption in Nigeria. It seeks to explain how culture has contributed to the menace of corruption and how it can be invoked for its extermination. In essence, it looks beyond the formal to the informal angle in the issue of corruption discourse in Nigeria.

Foliage and violence: Interrogating forests as a security threat in Nigeria

ABSTRACT The discourse on security challenges in Nigeria has generated much scholarly insight. What is yet to be sufficiently interrogated is the place of forests in the problem. Situating the problem within the context of global occurrences, the study explores security threats posed by the poor management of some Nigerian forests, which has resulted in invasion and exploitation by criminals who engage in militancy, kidnapping, ritual killing, armed robbery, cattle rustling and cannabis cultivation. Using the theory of ungoverned spaces as a foundation, the study locates the major reason for the invasion and use of forested landscape for criminal activities in the Nigerian state, the presence of the authorities in these sanctuaries is either non-existent or, at best, sporadic.

In the Cesspool of Corruption: The Challenges of National Development and the Dilemma of Anti-Graft Agencies in Nigeria

Most theoretical and analytical discourse on national development identified the virulent nature of corruption as development curse. In Nigeria, as in many other soft states, the epidemic nature of corruption and its destructive impacts on the national development has received wider attention in both national and international mass media. Similarly, scholarly literature on the culture of sleaze in many of these countries revealed the depth of the disease. Nigeria, undoubtedly remain at the front page of countries under the siege of sleaze. Its profile as one of the most corrupt nations feeds largely into the crisis of its national development. Conceptually and theoretically, corruption encompassed very distinct social problems of mismanagement of public resources, weak and dysfunctional government institutions, complex relationships between political actors and public moral and economic assets. Indeed, the curse of corruption has assumed more than tantalizingly simple act of sleaze but a clear, complex and contested reality of national underdevelopment. It explains to a large extent the abuse of public power and misuse of entrusted power for private gain in the context of attaining national development. In this paper therefore, a continuation of the literature on corruption that espouses the interplay between the culture of greedy sleaze and national development is given bolder attention. The paper analyses a broad understandings of corruption from the analytical usefulness of an effective national development imperative. It further explains the interventionist roles of the ambitious anti-graft agencies and their contemporary challenges.

Ethnic crises and national security in Nigeria

The article focuses on the interface between ethnicity and national security in Nigeria. It critically explores the negative mobilization of ethnicity in Nigerias fourth republic, and how this has been shaping (and reshaping) the democratization process, particularly in the management of cooperation and conflict over contestations for power and other resources. The re-democratization of Nigeria in 1999 has been preceded with high expectations of meaningful reductions in the high level of insecurity witnessed under the long years of military suzerainty. However, this has not been the case. Rather, what is obtained is an increase in national insecurity on a much larger scale. This article argues that one of the banes of national security in the Nigerian state is ethnic politics, which continues to witness changes in context and character with grave consequences for the future of democracy. The central argument is that ethnicity has always been a major driver of politics and conflicts in Nigeria and the trend is not likely to change anytime soon.

Minorization of the Majority: The Politics of Ekiti State Creation and the Limits of Homogeneity Thesis in Nigeria

Abstract Studies on intra-ethnic relations among the sub-ethnic groups in Nigeria have observed that allegations and counter claims of marginalization and domination among the groups within states are rife. In some paradoxical instances, numerically superior groups allege domination and subjugation by the minorities dominated. This paper, using the agitation for the creation of Ekiti state as a case study, examines the specter of minorization of the majority in the struggle for state creation in Nigeria. The study observes that in spite of its superiority in the areas of demography, education, landmass and homogeneity, Ekiti became marginalized and excluded by the groups who are in the minority. But no sooner than the state was created for them than in-fighting started. This study examines the factors contributing to this paradox. Specifically, the paper concludes that numerically superior groups could become minorities in the context of the latter’s ability to control power or influence power control through possession of economic resources over the numerical majority a democratic setting. This is what we term “a special case minority”.