Wale Adebanwi

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.

Ethno-nationalist claims in southern Nigeria: insights from Yoruba and Ijaw nationalisms since the 1990s

Abstract There are several competing explanations for the rise in ethnic nationalisms in Nigeria, but there is an agreement that identity politics and conflicts tend to incubate and thrive best in underdeveloped settings. To this can be added the crises produced by prolonged military rule, during which the intensity of contestations for power translated the quest for ethnic ascendancy into the rule rather than the exception. This essay provides the contexts and extenuating circumstances in which ethnic nationalisms by the Yoruba and the Ijaw in southern Nigeria became salient and militant from the 1990s onward. Despite concrete variations in their ethno-nationalist projects, the Yoruba and the Ijaw are shown to be similar in several respects: both, for instance, contain salient strands of ‘self-determination’ translating at best to pseudo-separatist inclinations towards the decentralization and devolution of power and authority as constituted presently in Nigeria.

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.

Terror, territoriality and the struggle for indigeneity and citizenship in northern Nigeria

The struggle of the minority ethnic groups against the majority Hausa-Fulani ethnic-amalgam in the north of Nigeria has persisted. As a result of the twentieth-century jihad and politico-cultural and economic factors, Fulani (Muslims) are found in many parts of the minority areas of the geographical north. Many of the minority ethnic groups often claim to be ‘indigenous’ to the areas and regard the Fulani – and Hausa – as ‘settlers’. The struggle for political, economic and social values and rights in these communities often produce violent clashes between these indigenous groups and the settler Hausa-Fulani. This paper uses the territorial claims and counter-claims over indigeneity in the Yelwa area between the Tarok/other ethnic (Christian) groups and the Fulani/other ethnic (Muslim) groups which degenerated into serial blood-letting in 2004 to interrogate the citizen-deficit in Nigeria, and the contradictions of reconciling indigenous rights with citizenship rights in a typical multi-ethnic postcolonial state.

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.

The City, Hegemony and Ethno-Spatial Politics: The Press and the Struggle for Lagos in Colonial Nigeria

The centrality and assumed primacy of Lagos, Nigeria, explained why it was important in the (ethnic) hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of colonial Nigeria, particularly in the context of how this politics was geared toward the appropriation of space—within that particular socio-political formation, over-determined by ethnicity—as explicated in the newspaper press of the period. Two rival newspapers—West African Pilot and Daily Service—are used in this article, as they represent rival claims to ‘ownership’ and ‘primacy’ in spatial politics between the Yoruba and the Igbo ethnic nationalities, to explicate a theoretical position that captures these struggles within the framework of ‘the political forging…and the institutionalization of a pattern of group activity’ in which idealized forms that cohere with the interests of the (ethnic) group are leveraged into ‘commonsensical’ ideas in the pursuit of groups political, economic and social interests.

Territoriality and the Discourse of Ethnic Groups’ Clashes

Conflictual relations at the level of political and civil society are usually replicated, represented and re-presented in the media. Where such relations concern territoriality, the media through a discursive strategy, re-fold space into—or re-bind space with—power, producing a territoriality, which not only reflects the political economy of ethno-spatial struggles, but also amplifies these struggles. This essay focuses on how the symbolic manifestation of territoriality—discursive territoriality—was used in the press, within a time-space tapestry, to structure other manifestations. Media framing of the violent Kataf versus Hausa communal clashes and the trials of accused persons in Nigeria is analyzed within the context of the discursive territoriality, which these “communities of discourses” establish and amplify. This case illustrates the fact that struggle over territoriality is simultaneously struggle over identity, resources and power.

The cult of Awo: the political life of a dead leader

This essay examines the ‘posthumous career’ of Chief Obafemi Awolowo, the late leader of the Yoruba of Nigeria. It focuses on why he has been unusually effective as a symbol in the politics of Yorubaland and Nigeria. Regarding Awolowo as a recent ancestor, the essay elaborates why death, burial and statue are useful in the analysis of the social history of, and elite politics in, Africa. The Awolowo case is used to contest secularist and modernist assumptions about ‘modernity’ and ‘rationality’ in a contemporary African society.

Introduction: Excess and Abjection in the Study of the African State

In his excellent introduction to the volume Civil Society, Public Sphere and Citizenship Dialogues and Perceptions, which he coedited with Helmut Reifeld, Rajeev Bhargava underlined the need to query what analytical purchase the state and other fundamental political and sociological concepts may have (for a non-Western society) by posing the following critical questions: How did they evolve in European societies? Does our [i.e., Indian] society follow the same trajectory? How valuable are they outside the context in which they originated? In particular, what is their usefulness in India? Do they really help us to understand our life-world? Do they illuminate our social and political reality? Or, by forcing upon us a way of looking at ourselves that is fundamentally different from the manner in which we do or should view ourselves, do they instead obstruct a proper understanding of it? Do they have a normative significance and, if they do, what is it? (2005: 13)