Ebenezer Obadare

A crisis of trust: history, politics, religion and the polio controversy in Northern Nigeria

ABSTRACT In the middle of 2003, disagreement over the safety of the oral polio vaccine pitted ordinary citizens and community leaders in the predominantly Muslim north of Nigeria against the World Health Organization, the United Nations Childrens Fund and Nigerias federal authorities. During the crisis that ensued, five northern states (Niger, Bauchi, Kano, Zamfara and Kaduna) banned the use of the controversial vaccine on children in their respective domains. Underpinning Obadares paper is the assumption that the immunization crisis is best understood after considering developments in the broader politico-religious contexts, both local and global. Thus, he locates the controversy as a whole against the background of the deepening interface between health and politics. He suggests that the crisis is best seen as emanating from a dearth of trust in social intercourse between ordinary citizens and the Nigerian state on the one hand, and between the same citizens and international health agencies and pharmaceutical companies on the other. The analysis of trust is historically embedded in order to illuminate the dynamics of relations among the identified actors.

The backlash against civil society in the wake of the Long War on Terror

The enthusiasm for civil society that emerged in the late 1980s and 1990s with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the spread of democratic regimes has been replaced in recent years by a backlash against civil society on many levels and fronts. This has particularly intensified since the attacks of 11 September 2001 and the ensuing global war on terror. This article examines the causes of this backlash within the context of the ‘Long War on Terror’, describes the overt and implicit manifestations of the backlash, and reflects upon the implications for the future. It considers how the growing prominence of concerns about security and the concomitant expansion of counter-terrorist measures across the world threaten the spaces for civil society to flourish and act. It argues that while the manifestations of the backlash, such as the crackdown on NGOs in Russia and the taming of NGOs by bilateral and multilateral agencies, may appear to be disparate, unconnected phenomena, on closer inspection it is clear that they are intricately intertwined.

Pentecostal Presidency? The Lagos-Ibadan ‘Theocratic Class’ & the Muslim ‘Other’

This paper analyses the politics of regime legitimacy through the instrumentality of religious discourse purveyed through a putative Christian ‘theocratic class’ surrounding the Obasanjo presidency in Nigeria. Though the emphasis is on Western Nigerian Christian discourse because of its undeniable influence in the polity since 1999, it incorporates Muslim and northern Nigerian religious discourse in so far as it is seen as constituting the significant discursive ‘Other’ with which the predominantly Christian geopolitical south has historically been in contention. The paper contends that the ‘Pentecostalisation’ of governance has raised the stakes as far as the struggle to define the Nigerian public sphere is concerned, further politicising religion, even as lip service continues to be paid to the secularity of the Nigerian state.

When corruption fights back: democracy and elite interest in Nigeria's anti-corruption war

This essay analyses the construction of the anti-corruption war under the civilian government in Nigeria between 1999 and 2008. We consolidate existing insights in the literature in three key ways. First, we show that in democratising contexts like Nigeria, the gravest threats to anti-corruption campaigns often emanate from a combination of intra-elite rancour and political intrigue. Second, we provide an explanation of what happens when, literally, corruption fights back. Finally, we suggest that where anti-corruption efforts are not backed by other radical institutional reforms, they fall prey to the overall endemic (systemic) crisis, a part of which, ab initio , necessitated the anti-corruption war.

Introducing Nigeria at fifty: the nation in narration

Abstract Nigeria, Africas most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigerias mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by ‘the politics of plunder’? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption? This collection confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralise and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state.

In search of a public sphere: the fundamentalist challenge to civil society in Nigeria

Many polities in transition are undermined by what is commonly called a ‘deliberation deficit’, which means the absence from a given social formation of a common ethos that frames the debate on issues of general concern. In a sense, this scenario can be revealing, for it often highlights some of the nagging issues haunting the process of nation-building itself. This arguably is the case in Nigeria where, in November 2002, violence in the northern part of the country over the Miss World 2002 beauty pageant once again exposed the shallowness of the country’s political foundation, and the lack of a mutually defined ‘civil religion’. The argument has been advanced that the secularization of power is a precondition for the establishment of civil society and the nation-state. One implication of this theoretical postulate is that we cannot begin to imagine a secularized civil society or state in Nigeria in the face of the challenge by forces sworn to religious fundamentalism. In fact, if anything at all, the fundamentalist violence over the Miss World beauty pageant has only illustrated some of the basic contradictions in the Nigerian polity that many recent analyses have failed to apprehend. These include: the sharp dissonance in perceptions of public morality, the loss of confidence in the state as the bearer of a moral project, and the disputed nature of the secular framework itself. Using the Miss World affair as a contextual backdrop, Obadare puts these deeply interwoven themes in perspective, arguing that Islamic fundamentalism in Nigeria endangers a truly independent public sphere of critical deliberation constituted by equal citizens. He concludes by evaluating the prospects for democratic stability in Nigeria in the face of the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism.

Transnational Resource Flow and the Paradoxes of Belonging: Redirecting the Debate on Transnationalism, Remittances, State and Citizenship in Africa

The rise in the volume of known global foreign worker remittances to countries of origin has sparked considerable academic and policy interest. Much attention has been paid to the assumed ‘development’ potential of these financial remittances, an approach which encapsulates the tendency to envisage the consequences of remittance flows in overwhelmingly economic terms. This article takes issue with such an approach, arguing for a refocusing of the debate on remittances in recipient societies on the crucially important, yet largely neglected, political realm. It posits that in formations where a significant aspect of the population relies on external grants for everyday provisioning, questions on the possible implications of their reliance for civic engagement, social citizenship and political allegiance become imperative. The article proposes a conceptual framework for interrogating the effects of the emergence of a discursive ‘remittance class’ for notions of citizenship, state–society relations, and the changing patterns and forms of identity in African and other remittance-dependent societies.

The abrogation of the electorate: an emergent African phenomenon

This paper captures an emerging African phenomenon in which the form of democracy is brazenly used to invalidate its very substance. Drawing on particulars from Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Nigeria, we articulate the re-ascendance and re-invigoration of anti-democratic forces across Africa, and weigh up the challenge that violent erasure of the electoral sovereignty of citizens constitutes to democratic theory and practice.

Revalorizing the Political: Towards a New Intellectual Agenda for African Civil Society Discourse

Who needs civil society? What is civil society useful for? While the foregoing and similar dilemmas dominated the early civil society literature on sub-Saharan Africa, this was soon followed by a steady shift to the analysis of non-governmental organizations. The shift foreshadowed the recent methodological approach to civil society research which emphasizes ‘measuring’ and ‘surveying’ civil society. In this essay, I contend that this approach, to the extent that it seems to totalize civil society as component voluntary associations that can be measured, deepens the crisis of understanding which it aspires to transcend. Yet, although I critique—and reject—this approach, I argue nonetheless that it ought to be seen as an opportunity to reinstate a more theoretically robust and politically driven imagination of civil society, one that problematizes, not just civil society organizations that are, ultimately, only an aspect of civil society, but the civil domain as a whole. While conceding that ‘measuring’ civil society has its own merits, I insist that it comes with a real danger of, first, reducing civil society to organizations, especially organizations that can be measured; and second, distracting students of African societies from the politicality that underpins much of the continents socio-economic woes.

Religious NGOs, civil society and the quest for a public sphere in Nigeria

This article examines the changing role of religious organizations in the dynamics of the public sphere in Nigeria, and does so both in the light of the recognition of the growing importance of faith‐based organizations across the continent, and within the framework of the discourse on religion, civil society and the public sphere. It argues that this is indeed an unstable relationship, with religious forces simultaneously complementing and undermining the public domain. What is also clear from the Nigerian context is that faith‐based organizations are in fact increasingly dissatisfied with what ought to be their presumed marginality in a secular political order. As such, they are using different methods to make their impact felt within the public domain, leading to an intense religious rivalry with serious implications for all involved – religious organizations, adherents, and the state itself.