Olly Owen

Between vigilantism and bureaucracy: Improving our understanding of police work in Nigeria and South Africa

To date, much of the analytical scholarship on policing in Africa has centred on non-state actors. In doing so, it risks neglecting state actors and statehood, which must be understood on their own terms as well as through the eyes of the people they supposedly serve. This article seeks to develop our theoretical and empirical understanding in this respect by exploring the contexts in which citizens seek to engage state police in Nigeria and South Africa. In doing so it highlights three particularly important uses that police contact may serve, that are currently being overlooked. State police can permit, authorize or limit crime control performed by others through informal regulatory intervention. They can exercise a unique bureaucratic power by opening a case which is valued as a record of right and wrongs to be used in the negotiation of everyday life, not simply as a means to legal prosecution. And finally, taking action ‘off the books’, the police can exercise a coercive power that can be termed ‘police vigilantism’, which citizens may try to harness for their own ends. We therefore argue that we should recognize the continued high public demand for the services of state police forces even in contexts where they fall short of expectations, and more closely analyse the ways in which people utilize and help to reproduce the police forces they condemn.

Positions of Security and the Security of Position: Bureaucratic Prebendalism Inside the State

Richard Joseph’s concept of prebendalism was developed as an explanatory framework for the patterns and practices of electoral politics in Nigeria’s Second Republic (1979–1983). Yet, as Joseph notes (1987), it predates that period, and has equally persisted after. I contend that the explanatory power of the theory is not limited to electoral politics; it also provides a useful blueprint that can be adapted to our understandings of bureaucratic politics and institutional procedure. After all, 29 of Nigeria’s 51 years of postindependence life, and all of its preceding 46 years as an amalgamated colony, have been spent under nonelectoral regimes, where politics took place largely as internal bureaucratic procedures of particular institutions (primarily the military and civil service, but also others such as the police). That is a much longer period spent in the mode of bureaucratic politics than in electoral rule. Given this, it is hardly surprising that a great premium has arisen on being placed inside the state in order to better influence it. This applies both in the crude sense of accessing public goods, and in the more subtle influences that can be exercised over the course of public events and the nature of public institutions.