Moral Economies of Corruption by Steven Pierce

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MORAL ECONOMIES OF CORRUPTION

STE VEN PIERCE

STATE FORMATION AND POLITICAL CULTURE IN NIGERIA


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State Formation & Political Culture in Nigeria Steven Pierce

Duke University Press Durham and London 2016


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© 2016 Duke University Press. All rights reservedPrinted in the United States o America on acid-ree paper ∞

Designed by Courtney Leigh Baker

ypeset in Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Pierce, Steven, [date] author.

Moral economies o corruption : state ormation and

political culture in Nigeria / Steven Pierce.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical reerences and index. 978-0-8223-6077-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-6091-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)

978-0-8223-7454-1 (e-book)

1. Corruption—Nigeria. 2. Political culture—Nigeria.

3. Nigeria—Politics and government—o 1960.

4. Nigeria—Politics and government—1960– . itle.

3089.5.654 2016

306.209669—dc23

2015029176

: All Fingers Are Not Equal , © Victor Ekpuk

Duke University Press grateully acknowledges the support

o the Department o History at the University o Manchester,

which provided unds toward the publication o this book.


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For Elango


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CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: Corruption Discourse and the Perormance o Politics 1

. From Caliphate to Federal Republic

1 A ale o wo Emirs 27

Colonialism and Bureaucratizing Emirates, 1900–1948

2 Te Political ime 63

Ethnicity and Violence, 1948–1970

3 Oil and the “Army Arrangement” 105

Corruption and the Petro-State, 1970–1999

. Corruption, Nigeria, and the Moral Imagination

4 Moral Economies o Corruption 153

5 Nigerian Corruption and the Limits o the State 188

Conclusion 219 Notes 231 Bibliography 257 Index 277


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Like many well-beloved children, this book was an accident. It came about

as I moved between two big research projects, one on the history o land law,

the other on the politics o criminal law. Indeed, the research that has gone

into it was originally planned (and unded) or those ends. As I worked on

the two projects, my mind kept drifing back to my many conversations with

a remarkable man, Malam Isa Muhammad. In many ways, Malam Isa was an

ordinary talaka, commoner; he was a armer, and he was very poor. He wasdistinguished, however, by a razor-sharp intellect and a biting wit, and he had

enjoyed a career as an activist in the Northern Elements Progressive Union

and People’s Redemption Party, lef-wing parties during Nigeria’s First and

Second Republics, respectively. Spectacularly knowledgeable about the politi-

cal history o his town, and about the travails o its poorer residents, Malam Isa

was also gifed at sensing when I did not understand concepts to his satisac-

tion. His patience and generosity made all the difference to me in some trying

times. And his insistence on telling me about his comrades’ problems in his

own terms is what ultimately led to this book.

While I was nishing my rst book, Jim Brennan invited me to the Ari-

can history seminar at the School o Oriental and Arican Studies () at

the University o London, which I took as an opportunity to revisit a point

Malam Isa had pressed, and which I had not resolved to his satisaction or

mine. Among Hausa-speaking people in northern Nigeria, there seemed to

be several different ways o talking about corruption, only one o which ac-

corded with my own understanding o what the word entailed, and I presented

a paper laying out the concepts and the problems they highlighted. Te audi-

ence pushed me hard, helping me to think through the problem suffi ciently to


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x Acknowledgments

turn my paper into a proper article. Along the way, I was helped enormously

by the editors and anonymous readers or Comparative Studies in Society and

History, where it appeared. While I was a reugee rom Hurricane Katrina,

Shannon Dawdy invited me to the University o Chicago, where I presented a

near-nal version o the article. Ralph Austen made me rethink the basic logico what I had written, while Jean and John Comaroff picked up on what had

been almost a throwaway line and pointed out that it raised a book’s worth o

questions. Te rest ollowed rom there.

I owe proound thanks to countless people in Nigeria or their help, advice,

patience, support, and criticism. I have beneted rom my affi liation with and

support rom many institutions: Bayero University, and especially its Depart-

ments o History, Nigerian Languages, and Islamic Legal Studies, and rom its

Centre or Democratic Research and raining (Mambayya House); the KanoState History and Culture Bureau; Arewa House; and the Nigerian National

Archives (Kaduna). Hajiya Aisha Shehu, head o research and documentation

at , and the Honorable Proessor Haruna Wakili, then director o Mam-

bayya House, provided me with institutional home bases and greatly acilitated

my work. Usman Aliyu, as ever, provided wonderul research assistance, and a

great many people shared their wisdom. Because o the somewhat sensational

subject matter o this book, I have or the most part structured my narrative in

a way that avoids oral history, and the interview material that is presented is orthe most part noncontroversial. I am deeply, personally grateul to everyone

who was willing to talk to me. I hope this text adequately signals my intellec-

tual debts without placing anyone in a diffi cult situation.

Tis book was written while I was a member o the School o Social Sci-

ence at the Institute or Advanced Study (). I am grateul to Proessors

Didier Fassin and Joan Scott or their intellectual leadership and or the op-

portunity to participate in their seminars on moral issues and on secularism.

My arguments were shaped and enriched by conversations with Didier and

Joan and with my ellow members, especially Laurie Green, Kimberly Hart,

Cecile Laborde, omoko Masuzawa, Jeffrey Stout, Judith Surkis, and Winni

Sullivan. I made nal revisions on the manuscript while a senior ellow at the

Käte Hamburger Kolleg/Centre or Global Cooperation Research (), Uni-

versity o Duisburg-Essen and on a sabbatical rom the Department o His-

tory at the University o Manchester. My thanks to Drs. Alexandra Przyrembel

and Volker Heins, who headed my research unit while I was at , and to

my colleagues while I was there, especially Sarah van Beurden, Morgan Brigg,

Jaroslava Gajdosova, and Abou Jeng. I am equally grateul to my riends and

interlocutors here at Manchester, Laurence Brown, Paulo Drinot, Pierre Fuller,


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Acknowledgments xi

Anindita Ghosh, Bidisha Ray, Natalie Zacek, and Zheng Yangwen. I thank

Proessors Paul Fouracre and Hannah Barker, who gave permission or me to

take my ellowships while they headed my department. My research has been

generously supported by the U.S. Social Science Research Council, American

Council or Learned Societies, Wenner-Gren Foundation or AnthropologicalResearch, the British Academy, the University o Michigan, ulane University,

and the University o Manchester.

I am grateul or the challenging comments I have received rom many

audiences, at , the University o Chicago, Nottingham rent University,

the University o Birmingham, Vanderbilt University, , Indiana Univer-

sity, the University o Newcastle, Royal Holloway College, the University o

Leeds, the University o Durham, , and Queen’s University Ontario, as well as

at the annual meetings o the American Historical Association and the EuropeanCongress on World and Global History. While they probably don’t remember it,

Ibrahim Ado-Kurawa, Misty Bastian, Charles Piot, Rabi’u Shatsari, Linda Pollock,

Mamadou Diou, Lessie Jo Frazier, Mahmood Mamdani, Greg Mann, Abosede

George, David Pratten, Michael Watts, and Rudi Gaudio have all made sharp

comments that made me reconsider key aspects o my argument. Te anony-

mous readers or Duke University Press and my editor, Miriam Angress, have

vastly improved the book with their careul attention to my argument and its

implications. With such interlocutors, this book should be much better than itis; the ault or that, o course, is mine rather than theirs.

I owe many people thanks or personal and proessional support over the

years. Frederick Cooper has been, as always, kind, helpul, and challenging or

this project. Luise White is the soul o generosity and never hesitates to slap

me when necessary. Gracia Clark and Adeline Masquelier have been voices

o cool sanity and ercely intelligent interlocutors. Phil Shea was extremely

helpul as I was rst thinking through this project; his loss impoverishes us all.

Moses Ochonu and Sue O’Brien have long been the two people on whom I try

out my ideas on northern Nigeria and whose approval gives me aith I’m onto

something, and Leena Hoffmann has recently become another prized critic.

Lisa Lindsay, Will Gould, Jonathan Saha, and Arvind Rajagopal have been pa-

tient as I repeatedly tried out my ideas on them. Kerry Ward has not only been

another trusted critic but gave me the title or the book.

Tis work has been sustained by many others as well. Patrick Loomer and

Ana Carden-Coyne have been wonderul riends all the way through the writ-

ing o this book. Te loss o Stephen Vella still hurts, as does that o my grand-

mother, Betty Bowman. I can’t adequately describe my debt to Anupama Rao.

Her erce brilliance is as ormidable as her steadast loyalty, and I hear her


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NorthernRegion

EasternRegion

WesternRegion

Map 1. Tree Regions, 1939–1963


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NorthernRegion

EasternRegion

WesternRegion

Mid-WesternRegion

Map 2. Four Regions, 1963–1967


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NorthesternState

KwaraState

KadunaState

KanoState

NorthasternState

Benue-PlateauState

WesternState

LagosState

BendelState

East-CentralState

Rivers

State

SouthasternState

Map 3. welve States, 1967–1976


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SokotoState

NigerState

KwaraState

KadunaState

KanoState

BauchiState

Plateau

State

BenueState

BornoState

GongolaState

OyoState

OndoStateOgun

State

LagosState

BendelState

AnambraState

ImoState

Rivers

State

CrossRiverState Map 4. Nineteen States, 1976–1987


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INTRODUCTION

Te messages are amiliar to almost anyone with an e-mail account. During the

early 2000s they became an international punch line. Ofen purporting to come

rom the relative o a Nigerian government offi cial, they requested the recipi-

ent’s help to transer vast sums o money out o the country. In return or this as-

sistance, the recipient would receive a signicant percentage o the unds being

transerred. Usually unsaid was that the money had been acquired corruptly

and that the sender needed help in avoiding the attention o law enorcement.Tis high-tech update to the old Spanish Prisoner scam ofen appeared over the

name o Maryam Abacha, widow o General Sani Abacha, who was Nigeria’s

military head o state rom 1993 until his death in 1998. General Abacha had

gained notoriety or the brutality o his regime and or personal corruption.

As Nigeria moved to civilian government afer his death, various estimates

emerged o how much he and his amily had taken out o the country—U.S.

$2 billion, $3 billion, $8 billion, $9 billion. Te Nigerian government sought

international cooperation in 1999 to trace embezzled money, and in response

Switzerland roze nearly $700 million in Abacha amily assets. Te ensuing

drama garnered immense press coverage, as the government repeatedly de-

tained Mrs. Abacha and members o her amily, and as talks between govern-

ment lawyers, amily members, international banks, and oreign governments

resulted in considerable sums repatriated. Te negotiations were raught—the

newspaper Tempo reported Mrs. Abacha was “snobbish and uncooperative”

with government negotiators—but Mrs. Abacha became something o an in-

ternational celebrity, amous as mistress o a misappropriated ortune.

And thus the e-mails. Mrs. Abacha might not have been such a compel-

ling signatory i her husband’s regime had not already been known or human


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2 Introduction

rights abuses. Most amously, the execution o the Ogoni activist Ken Saro-

Wiwa brought the government to global attention. Te story epitomized not

just the regime’s brutality but its corruption. Saro-Wiwa was known or his

work in the Niger Delta, where the Ogoni people lived. Tey and other delta

peoples had suffered the most rom Nigeria’s oil industry, losing great quanti-ties o armland to oil production and even more to the environmental degra-

dation that went along with it. Worse, rom their point o view, the revenues

rom oil were diverted elsewhere, to other regions o Nigeria and to the pock-

ets o its rulers. Both inside Nigeria and internationally, General Abacha be-

came synonymous with repression. As he became amous he was also equated

with the political corruption or which Nigeria was already well known. Te

e-mails in Mrs. Abacha’s name thus had various eatures to attract those with

casual knowledge o recent Nigerian history: many had heard o vast sums sto-len, many associated her name with that thef, and many had heard o her legal

troubles. Other touches o verisimilitude may have passed many by: thus, the

e-mails requently had a return address that mentioned Gidado Road in Kano’s

elite Nassarawa neighborhood, where the Abachas amously own a house. But

o course the e-mails did not come rom Mrs. Abacha, and their recipients

were not seriously intended to launder money. Anyone who replied was drawn

into an extended correspondence, asked to send money to cover some o the

expenses o regaining control o the abled money, or even asked to come toNigeria. Tere the target might be robbed, or subjected to elaborate dramas

designed to extort large sums. In the rst years o this century when this par-

ticular genre o e-mail was at its height o popularity, the senders were easily

ound. One could go into almost any Internet ca é in Nigeria and see the e-mails

being written. When one sat down at a computer and woke the screen, i one

didn’t nd porn it was ofen these e-mails. Tere has since been a crackdown,

and now in Internet ca és each computer usually has a printed warning sign

inorming users they will be ejected rom the ca é i they write such e-mails

or view obscene material. More recently, the advance-ee raud e-mails tend

to come rom other countries. Te condence games emerging rom Nige-

ria’s Internet ca és are somewhat different—nancial scams are more likely to

propose private business dealings than money laundering, and many schemes

have to do with Internet dating or identity thef. But although the specics

have changed, the object is the same, to convince the recipient to pay large

sums o money in the hopes o eventual reward.

Te genre o the Abacha e-mails became established long beore the general

came to power. Te technology that brought it into being was the ax machine

rather than the Internet. Nonetheless, a relatively anonymous medium o com-


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Introduction 3

munication was not the only precondition or this condence scheme. Te

scam depended on Nigeria’s reputation or vast corruption. Mrs. Abacha was a

compelling gure because o the Abachas’ international notoriety, but in truth

she only served as the embodiment or a well-entrenched stereotype. By the

time ax machines were beginning to spool out stories o sequestered bankaccounts and potential enrichment, the world had been hearing o orid Nige-

rian corruption or more than a decade. From the beginning o the oil boom

in 1970, the Nigerian government notoriously spent vast sums o money, much

o which was squandered and much o which was stolen. Both dynamics at-

tracted lengthy international press coverage. Te civilian rulers o the Second

Republic (1979–83) received additional bad publicity when, in the afermath

o the oil glut and onset o the international debt crisis, the government was

orced to admit that billions o dollars o government money had simply dis-appeared. Faxes and e-mails inviting their recipients to participate in looting

Nigeria depended on the country’s eruption into international discourse as a

reservoir o corruption.

Te e-mails in particular have also helped to conrm that reputation. In-

deed, the e-mails have brought the Nigerian term “419” into international use.

It invokes the section o the Nigerian criminal code outlawing condence

schemes. Tat section reads:

Any person who by any alse pretense, and with intent to deraud, ob-

tains rom any other person anything capable o being stolen, or induces

any other person to deliver to any person anything capable o being sto-

len, is guilty o a elony, and is liable to imprisonment or three years. I

the thing is o the value o one thousand naira or upwards, he is liable to

imprisonment or seven years. It is immaterial that the thing is obtained

or its delivery is induced through the medium o a contract induced by

the alse pretense. Te offender cannot be arrested without warrant un-less ound committing the offence.

Provisions o this kind were a eature o penal codes dating back to the begin-

ning o the colonial period. Tey attempted to regulate a major headache or

the new government. ermed generically “personation,” the earliest versions

involved people who dressed up in army uniorms or represented themselves

as interpreters or British colonial offi cers and extorted money on the basis o

their assumed positions. Te colonial regime considered personation to be a

particular threat to the legitimacy o the new British government and treated

it severely. Attempting to install a political order that was culturally alien, the

British had every reason to ear criminals who appeared to be state actors. From


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4 Introduction

the start the state reacted with particular erocity to Nigerians who threatened

the legitimacy o the new political order. Criminals engaged in personation

and properly installed offi cials who misused their offi ce were singled out or

physical chastisement. Te spectacle o public ogging was used to demon-

strate the regime’s disavowal o those who would use the symbols o state au-thority or private and dubious ends.

A semantic slippage rom personation to the misuse o political offi ce maps

onto what might otherwise seem to be an idiosyncratic usage within Nigerian

English: both condence schemes and political corruption are reerred to with

the word “corruption.” Naturally, most i not all Nigerian English speakers are

well aware o international usages and o the nature o political corruption;

nonetheless, Nigerian usages are somewhat broader. I anything, in Nigerian

popular culture deception o individuals or personal enrichment is more mor-ally dubious than the simple act o stealing money rom the state or o exerting

inuence on behal o those with whom one has personal ties. Indeed, these

latter might, under certain circumstances, strike many as understandable or

even laudable. As Daniel Jordan Smith suggests: “When Nigerians talk about

corruption, they reer not only to the abuse o state offi ces or some kind o pri-

vate gain but also to a whole range o social behaviors in which various orms

o morally questionable deception enable the achievement o wealth, power,

or prestige as well as much more mundane ambitions. Nigerian notions o cor-ruption encompass everything rom government bribery and graf, rigged

elections, and raudulent business deals, to the diabolical abuse o occult pow-

ers, medical quackery, cheating in school, and even deceiving a lover.” Such

conceptual breadth is key to understanding the phenomenon overall—even

and especially in the sense o abusing public offi ce. Te relatively wide scope

o Nigerian usages masks some o what is specic to the place. It also encodes

the long history o “corruption” both as a set o activities o Nigerian offi cials

and as an international discourse or describing offi cial malpractice, wherever

it might be ound. aking the term “corruption” as transparent and straightor-

ward implies that it has a universal set o meanings, but its vernacular applica-

tion in Nigeria maps onto a distinctive local moral eld. Tis book will argue

Nigeria is not somehow exceptional or pathological in that. Te semantic vari-

ability o “corruption” in Nigeria suggests something more interesting, which

is that the use o the term lies at the center o how moral questions about the

distribution o public goods are negotiated. In Nigeria, as anywhere else, talk-

ing about corruption is a way o talking about moral ills. What is distinctive

in Nigeria is the specic history o how such public ills intersect with public

evaluations o the state. More than that, the broader reerences in some Nige-


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Introduction 5

rian uses o “corruption” also points to long-term developments in how the

term has unctioned internationally.

Te subject o this book is not 419 e-mails, nor is it a muckraking descrip-

tion o corruption in Nigeria. Rather, it is a history o corruption as a cultural

category. It describes how corruption has taken on the orms it has, and it ar-gues that the prousion o Nigerian corruption is partly explained by its cultural

complexity. One reason Nigerian corruption is now omnipresent and orid is

because “corruption” is a label bringing together a host o practices and moral

imperatives. Te challenge is that the label is used locally, but it applies to prac-

tices that transcend region, local moral communities, and traditions o moral

discourse. Following how corruption has unctioned in Nigeria historically re-

quires ocusing on something other than Nigeria’s international reputation or

corruption, or the reality o corrupt practices that pervade nearly every aspecto public lie. Nonetheless the cultural imbrication o “corruption” ultimately

provides insight into these two phenomena. Tis book’s primary project is to

trace historically the orms o political culture that have led to present-day

Nigeria, plagued by corruption and notorious or it. Its point o departure is

the contention that it is not entirely clear what “corruption” means. Te history

o Nigerian corruption reveals that “corruption” takes on a variety o mean-

ings and reers to various phenomena. Corruption’s meanings are multiaceted

and polyvalent. At the most undamental level, this book examines the polyvalence o “corruption.” It traces how corruption discourse has changed across

the past century. It considers the complexity o “corruption” as a conceptual

category, and it attempts to map that complexity onto the history o corrup-

tion in Nigeria both as a set o concrete practices and as a clutch o ideas. Ni-

gerians and international commentators decry the country’s corruption, and

rightly so. Tis book does not question the suffering corruption causes, nor

the governmental dysunction the label “corruption” indicates. Tese are real.

Te problems are urgent. But they have also changed across time, paralleling

transormations in the political system and the economy. More than that, the

vocabulary and traditions o discourse available or describing and evaluat-

ing these phenomena have also changed over time. Te question asked here is

o the political and cultural work done by people’s calling such a complex o

activities “corruption.” Tat history is signicant in its own right. Coming to

terms with it is a necessary condition or dealing with the problem o corrup-

tion as it is generally understood.

Te starting point o this project came while I collected oral histories about

local government across the twentieth century. I noticed certain people did

not tend to describe instances o bribe seeking, extortion, and embezzlement


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6 Introduction

on the part o government offi cials as “corruption.” Rather, many people con-

sistently described such behavior as “oppression,” acts that were wrong but

that were nonetheless a common quality o people in government. Oppres-

sion is something to be expected rom government offi cials, which is why it

makes sense to avoid them as much as possible. Tis descriptive habit wasmost common among people who spoke only Hausa (rather than having sub-

stantial uency in English as well), who did not have much Western educa-

tion, and who were not strongly oriented toward Western culture. It is worth

taking their ormulation seriously, and not to dismiss it simply as a case o

ignorance o the law or o appropriate governmental practice. Viewing certain

offi cial practices as being “oppression” rather than “corruption” is perectly ro-

bust on its own terms. It enables moral evaluations o particular individuals.

It is also part o a more complex whole, since the practices some would call“oppression” are also discussed by people who inhabit other conceptual uni-

verses. Both paradigms o malpractice-as-oppression and an international tech-

nocratic paradigm o malpractice-as-corruption should be taken as important

ways o thinking about the morality o Nigerian political practice. Similarly,

the ormulation o “corruption” in Nigerian English in terms rather broader

than those in American English should be taken equally seriously. Insisting

on the polyvalence and the conceptual complexity o the label “corruption” is

a way o starting to examine how particular social practices (stealing moneyrom the government, or example) become conjoined with specic modes o

describing them. Te orms corruption has taken—and the manner in which

it has become both all-pervasive and notorious—are encoded within the very

complexity o corruption as a semantic complex. Observers variously evaluate

“corrupt” practices and thereore make different moral claims on the offi cials in

question. A multiplicity o interpretations helps to perpetuate the entire system.

I will propose that part o the reason Nigerian corruption has taken on its cur-

rent orms stems rom its polyvalence, the manner in which social practice is

inected by translation between languages and rames o reerence, by which

it reracts through different and almost incommensurable social institutions.

But I have gotten ahead o mysel. So ar, my invocation o “international

technocratic paradigms o corruption” has been somewhat loose, even while

I have insisted on the specicity o Nigerian usages. Tis is partly because

technocratic usages are themselves elusive. Consider one inuential ormu-

lation: ransparency International (), the well-known nongovernmental

organization, denes “corruption” as “the abuse o entrusted power or private

gain.” Te denition is useul in that it signals its own intellectual history even

as it displaces almost all denitional bite onto other key terms. I’s denition is


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Introduction 7

admirably open-ended, and it applies to all o the phenomena the organization

wants to deal with. But unless one already has a good sense o what it means by

every adjective and noun in the phrase, the denition is elusive. Te key terms

are “entrusted,” “power,” and “private” (“abuse” and “gain” are also challenging,

or that matter). Below I will discuss these issues in more detail, but here itis worth noting that such technocratic denitions rest on particular under-

standings o what the state is and how its unctionaries should discharge their

duties. For technocratic commentators, corruption implies a deviation rom

the principles governing offi cials’ behavior, and it also depends on a distinc-

tion between public and private: “corruption” labels not just divergence rom

offi cial codes o conduct but divergence out o private interest. echnocratic

paradigms are very different rom those indexed by deception or oppression.

So this is my point o departure: some Nigerian paradigms o corruptionare different rom international norms, but together these three paradigms

cover what one might term “corruption” in Nigeria. Where does that get us?

How does one study corruption, especially i the conceptual universes avail-

able to describe it are divergent and sometimes incompatible? Is it possible to

write a history o corruption i the word itsel continually changes in mean-

ing? Te diffi culties are yet more challenging. For while phenomena termed

“corruption” constitute a discrete, albeit open-ended set o material practices

(dressing up in army uniorms, gouging extra taxes rom peasants, wiring gov-ernment money to private Swiss bank accounts, sending deceptive e-mails),

only some are “corrupt” in ’s sense. Te various ways o thinking about cor-

ruption demonstrate that it is also a complicated array o discourses available

or describing those practices. Instead o evaluating material practices as right

or wrong, regular or irregular, one must consider descriptions o corruption to

be a set o discourses that evaluate the moral qualities o concrete events. “Cor-

ruption” in this sense is a moral terrain on which debate is conducted. I’s

denition is one strand in this much more complex discursive eld, as are

notions o corruption as oppression or deception. Related to but distinct rom

this ormulation o corruption as a moral discourse is the act that corrup-

tion is a set o legal doctrines under which particular events or practices can

be adjudicated. Corruption is a legal category. And here, ’s denition maps

onto ormal laws airly well, even i there are complexities in how those laws

work in practice. Tese three registers o corruption—material practice, moral

discourse, legal category—are sometimes parallel. Tey sometimes intersect.

Tey sometimes are wholly independent.

I one wants to understand Nigerian corruption, thereore, one must under-

stand that the label “corruption” is not a rigid designator. Te term’s meaning is


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8 Introduction

not transparent. It reers to a variety o phenomena. Its meaning is contextu-

ally dependent, but more importantly its social utility stems in part rom its

protean qualities. Corruption’s three registers—material, discursive, legal—are

not three alternatives, each in its own domain the only possible meaning o

“corruption.” Rather, their complicated interdependence has structured thechanging orms corruption has taken in modern Nigeria. Tis is a challenge to

discuss, because it requires using the word “corruption” in a variety o ways,

sometimes in scare quotes and sometimes not. For this reason, it is useul to

borrow Jean-Pierre Olivier de Sardan’s term “corruption-complex,” although

my use o it here is very different rom his. In this book I use it to designate the

totality o phenomena encompassed by the term “corruption”: practices that

might be labeled “corrupt,” the three registers in which “corrupt” practices sub-

sist, and the various culturally embedded rames o reerence through whichthis complex o practice and naming can be understood. A key contention

o this book, then, is that the amboyance o the Nigerian corruption-complex

emerges directly rom the ways in which its heterogeneous components have

developed across the course o modern Nigerian history. As a matter o heu-

ristic con venience, I shall use “corruption” with quotation marks in order to

emphasize its status as a label. At times I shall also use the word uninected,

simply as a matter o narrative con venience.

A corollary to my ormulating the problem in this way is the corruption-complex’s cultural embeddedness and historical contingency. But those speci-

cities pose their own challenges. o the extent that the corruption-complex

is embedded in vernacular culture (which itsel has changed across time, and

continues to do so), the task o writing a history o how the complex emerged

and was transormed is hideously complicated by Nigeria’s cultural complex-

ity. Contemporary Nigeria is a ederation o thirty-six states; within those

states live peoples speaking an estimated 250 languages. Each language might

be considered to correspond to its own cultural vernacular, potentially with

its own distinct manner o conceptualizing corruption. Some language groups

may have more: a society such as that o Hausaphone northern Nigeria is ex-

tremely diverse, and has long been stratied by class, occupation, and geogra-

phy. Moreover, the meanings o ethno-linguistic categories are uid, and their

boundaries porous. Teir social implications have changed across time, and

indeed even considering them to be distinct groups in many ways is a legacy

o the colonial period. Reiying ethnicity is thus a mistake, and yet it has been

a matter o lie and death or many across Nigerian history. Ethnic groups are

imagined communities in Benedict Anderson’s terms, subject to change over

time and subject to manipulation by individuals. It is sometimes possible to


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Introduction 9

identiy with different groups at different moments. Despite their complex-

ity, contingency, and uidity, ethnonyms and linguistic groupings can serve as

rough proxies or the contexts within which cultural understandings o phe-

nomena like corruption take place. As such, every group potentially contains

the history o a particular strand o Nigerian understandings o corruption.Perhaps some o these are more signicant than others: the three largest ethnic

groups (the Hausa, the Yoruba, and the Igbo) make up approximately 60 per-

cent o Nigeria’s population, and they have played a disproportionate role in

Nigeria’s history o ethnic politics. Even so, the history o Nigerian cultures

is not reducible to those o the big three. racking the history o the cultural

embeddedness o the Nigerian corruption-complex, thereore, is impossible

in a straightorward narrative. A denitive history o the corruption-complex

would need to attend to a myriad o vernacular histories, with all the nuancesuch would entail; that project is too complex or one volume to attempt at all.

Yet the vernacular component o “corruption” is central to how corruption has

developed across Nigerian history. In the interest o making a rst approxima-

tion, thereore, this book will ollow one o those strands, rom the Muslim

Hausa emirates o northern Nigeria as they have become incorporated into

Nigeria as a whole. Tis is a very partial picture o the Nigerian corruption-

complex but nonetheless is an important one. Muslim Hausa culture has been

politically central to Nigeria rom the start o internal sel-rule onward. Byollowing this strand o the corruption-complex, this book develops an ap-

proximation o what the history would look like or Nigeria as a whole, even

though such an account would be almost innitely more complex. It is thus an

essay on how to go about the study o Nigerian corruption more than a history

o the entire phenomenon.

Theorizing Corruption

It is all very well to insist that corruption can be understood only in cultural

context and that contexts vary, but the ormulation ducks a key problem. Te

entire discussion so ar has implicitly relied on what I have been terming a

technocratic denition o corruption. It has taken or granted that “corruption”

(however dened) applies to a coherent, discrete reerent directly describ-

ing what is going on when an offi cial engages in “corruption.” But does it? At

times I have displaced this problem by calling activities that would t under

such a rubric “malpractice.” But that is not entirely satisactory. What eatures

are common to practices that are described in technocratic terms as “Nigerian

corruption” or “government malpractice”? What makes them distinctive or


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10 Introduction

worthy o inquiry? What does “Nigerian corruption” have to do with political

malpractice in other polities across human history, and to what extent can we

equate different intellectual and moral systems or evaluating such malprac-

tice? Is it appropriate, or even possible, to discuss Nigerian corruption as a

discrete thing? A bureaucratic logic valorized distinctive codes o conduct oroffi cials working within it; that logic came to Nigeria in tandem with a tradi-

tion o describing particular orms o misconduct as “corruption.” But this was

not static, a constant characteristic o British or western European culture. Te

import o bureaucratic norms to Nigeria took place in the late nineteenth and

early twentieth centuries, at a time when the concept o corruption was in ux

within Europe itsel.

Western Europe by that time possessed a long history o using “corrup-

tion” and its cognates in other European languages metaphorically. In its basicsense, “corruption” denotes an apolitical, literal spoilage and rottenness. Any

biological entity degenerates over time; bodies corrupt afer they die. Such us-

ages can be extended to describe governmental and public processes as meta-

phorically spoiled and rotten. A tradition dating rom Aristotle and stretching

to Machiavelli and beyond saw corruption as the diminution o virtue in the

polity, a alling away o the citizenry rom the principles o good behavior that

had inormed them in earlier times. Tis use o the word “corrupt” was a po-

litical critique, or at least suggested principles or structuring a well-run state.Nonetheless, “corruption” in this sense did not have all the nuances it now

has, nor was the metaphor necessarily employed to denote all occasions o

government malpractice that might now be termed “corruption.” Processes o

degeneration were not universally correlated with sin, accepting bribes, im-

proper reliance on patronage, and so orth, nor was all condemnation o such

practices necessarily understood through biological metaphors. Nonetheless,

a powerul tradition had emerged o using such metaphors in this political

sense.

Across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, political usages acquired

new nuances through novel political struggles. In keeping with earlier uses,

“corruption” could designate a state o political affairs suffering rom some

species degeneracy, implying that society had been healthier in earlier periods

beore things went wrong. Physiocratic writing, or example, posited wealth as

emerging rom agricultural surpluses and economic problems as caused by the

parasitism o merchants and artisans, whose activities degraded earlier states

o prosperity. Similarly, Adam Smith and other political economists tried to

understand how trade could be maintained to increase national wealth, avoid-

ing distortions that had previously come to plague it. Such traditions o eco-


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Introduction 11

nomic thought maintained continuity with earlier thinking about a degenera-

tion o virtue: contemporary economic woes stemmed rom an earlier system’s

spoilage. A novelty, however, had emerged in that such thinkers were not seek-

ing a return to an earlier state o virtue but rather hoped or a different and im-

proved uture. Even as this occurred, however, practical politics and patternso political and economic change pushed “corruption” in new and unexpected

directions.

In the United Kingdom, the struggle against “rotten boroughs”—parliamentary

constituencies that had declined radically in population and thereore had

small electorates and were under the control o a local patron—helped to align

ideas about political reorm with a specic critique o patronage, which was

then designated as “corruption.” Reorms in hiring practices or the civil ser vice,

clergy, and military commissions, and in university admissions and appoint-ments, similarly deployed “corruption” to criticize existing states o affairs. In

the United States, movements to pay public offi cials with salaries rather than

ees and bounties and to combat patronage-based political machines adopted

“corruption” as a powerul way o describing what was wrong with the system

as it stood. Both o these were instances in which projects o political in-

novation were dressed up as a return to regimes o morality that had previ-

ously prevailed. Because their novelty was also inarguable, such innovations

helped to change the meaning o “political corruption” itsel, somewhat di-using the temporal trajectories the trope o rotting had implied. Nonetheless,

it was especially the progressive movement in the United States at the turn o

the last century that resulted in a new and detailed attention to what “corrup-

tion” might mean and how it might be ameliorated, and to the ways in which

systems o patronage were incorporated into systems o government.

A distinctive critique o corruption in empire inused “corruption” with yet

more complexity. Imperial expansion across the eighteenth century led to a

series o scandals. For example, offi cials o the British East India Company

plundered India and then used their riches to buy honor and inuence at home.

Atrocities were committed against Indians. Almost worse, critics argued, Brit-

ish offi cials were conducting themselves in a manner that accorded more with

“uncivilized” Indian mores than with the benecence o rulers rom a civilized

Christian power. Not only that, men who had enriched themselves in such un-

acceptable ways were requently rom relatively humble backgrounds, but they

were able to use their questionable wealth to climb the class ladder at home.

Imperial administration debauched European offi cials and ultimately threat-

ened to corrupt the mother country. At the same time, the heat o the tropics

and the allure o the various sexual delights available ar rom home threatened


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12 Introduction

to debauch the European men and women who went there, creating a carnal

corruption. In imperial contexts, the language o corruption did not posit an

earlier state o wholeness then spoiled by a process o corruption. Instead, the

“advanced” mother country was endangered by the inuence o its “primitive”

possessions. An imperial dialectic o scandal and attempted reorm combinedwith an ambivalence about the dangers o ruling colonies to push “corruption”

in new and unexpected directions. Corruption was no longer simply politi-

cal degeneracy; it was beginning to imply a persistent primitivism, a lack o

modernity, a state o not having achieved (or o having lost) key bureaucratic

and procedural innovations in government. By the early twentieth century,

Western states were still ar rom having eliminated all practices that could be

called “corrupt,” quite the contrary. However, an idiom or describing a par-

ticular genre o undesirable political orms was well established. “Corruption”was available as a term o critique. It pointed in many temporal directions at

once, even as its means and application continued to shif.

Tis process had relatively little purchase in Nigeria at the time o coloni-

zation, though many instances o annexation were justied by the claim that

indigenous rulers had degenerated and become corrupt. For the most part,

however, the critique was applied to governmental processes that depended on

an organization model brought to Nigeria only through colonial rule. Euro-

American reormers had to this extent triumphed: by roughly 1900 “corruption”denoted a ailure to live by the mores o a particular kind o bureaucracy. Tis

usage valorized a bureaucratic code o conduct; it also naturalized distinctions

between public and private and delegitimated political motivations on the

basis o “private” interests. In the late nineteenth century, this distinction was

still under negotiation and was more complicated in practice than in theory.

Nonetheless, at the start o the twentieth century when Northern Nigeria was

colonized, the technocratic paradigm o corruption was still relatively close to

its vernacular sense. Te way it unctioned as a political critique did not de-

pend on a terribly elaborate theorization o the state or its history.

Te antimonies o effi cient bureaucracy and corruption were not the end

o the story. “Corruption” continued to shif its meaning across the twentieth

century, particularly as social scientists began to consider the problem in the

years afer World War II. Attention to corruption came as countries across

Asia and Arica attained independence rom colonial rule. Scholars accord-

ingly attempted to plot a course toward modernity and political stability or

these “new nations.” Te general rubric or this school o thought was modern-

ization theory, which posited a universal sequence o political and economic

development through which “precapitalist” systems o production like peasant


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Introduction 13

agriculture gave way to industrial capitalism. Te urgency o modernization

theory stemmed rom the ambitions o the emergent “Tird World” and the

ear o communist revolutions; the ambition was to achieve capitalism and de-

mocracy aster and with less social upheaval than the process had occasioned

in the West. Frustrating the desires o citizens o new states might make social-ism more attractive to them. Corruption was a potential pitall in the path

to modernity. In this intellectual context, “corruption”—that is, offi cials not

perorming their duties properly but abiding by private interests—was a tech-

nical problem. Inormed by a need to provide technical advice to the rulers o

newly independent countries, scholars in this new approach avoided simple

exhortations to progress but instead attempted to provide guidance about how

progressive change might be accomplished. Moral proscription and political

critique were insuffi cient as technical advice. An early attempt in this vein wasa book entitled Corruption in Developing Countries, which acknowledged that

corruption caused enormous problems but also argued that condemning

it tout court was oversimple and unproductive. Te authors proposed to ad-

dress the “scarlet thread” o corrupt practices that plagued newly independent

nations. Tey posited that the solution was to examine how corruption had

been overcome in the West. Tis created a certain analytical problem, the au-

thors admitted, because comparison and a “moralizing approach” might miss

local systems o understanding, which were key to local practice. Indigenousculture needed to be taken into account, since only careul attention to cor-

ruption’s social utilities would enable planners to address it effectively. In this

view corruption was neither an object o political critique nor a deormation

o earlier, purer states o affairs. Rather, it was characteristic o a particular mo-

ment o social evolution, which all societies would ace at one point or another.

It had a social utility, and its many drawbacks might be ameliorated through a

proper understanding o other societies’ experiences.

An emphasis on local systems o knowledge and an acknowledgment that

corruption could achieve important ends touched off a new literature consid-

ering corruption less as a moral problem than as a shortcoming in political

systems, and as the consequence o relatively straightorward and recent his-

torical causes. A critical corollary was that corruption was the product o a

certain stage o development. It was a sign o primitivism but or precisely that

reason could be overcome through political development. One point o depar-

ture was a proposal by a ormer British political offi cer in Arica that corruption

was the consequence o a clash between precolonial modes o political culture

and new orms o the state that required a different mode o political comport-

ment. Others emphasized Ronald Wraith and Edgar Simpkins’s rejection


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14 Introduction

o moral condemnation, urging examination o such practices’ historical or

structural causes, rooted in local contexts. Joseph Nye brought together these

strands in an inuential essay positing that there had been two primary ap-

proaches to the study o corruption, which he termed moralist and revisionist.

He proposed retaining the insights o each approach by subjecting corruptpractices to cost-benet analysis, as a way o determining the conditions under

which corruption should be considered to be a barrier to political and eco-

nomic development. Nye’s article was important in its identication o two

approaches to thinking about corruption, in its explicit reliance on modern-

ization theory as a ramework, and in its import into concepts o corruption a

version o Weberian sociology then current among modernization theorists.

Nye’s denition o corruption bore a strong resemblance to earlier attempts,

but its nuances were innovative: “behavior which deviates rom the ormalduties o a public role because o private-regarding . . . pecuniary or status

gains; or violates rules against the exercise o certain types o private-regarding

inuence.” Nye’s elaborate vocabulary imported a theoretical apparatus that

today remains encoded as unarticulated assumptions when “corruption” is

used in a technocratic sense. Even though modernization theory lost explicit

purchase afer many decades’ unrelenting criticism, the use o technocratic

paradigms o corruption invokes this rather more raried conceptual system.

Te corruption literature borrowed rom modernization theory a historicalargument suggesting corruption was ultimately the product o a conrontation

between traditional and modern political culture. More recent uses o tech-

nocratic denitions also involve this conjectural and (as I shall argue in this

book) rather problematic history. Nye is important in this regard because his

denition most clearly signals the underlying assumptions o the paradigm.

Using technocratic terminology not only suggests the critic is a disinter-

ested technocrat; it also presupposes an entire developmentalist history o the

problems under discussion. Te scholarly redenition o corruption made a

reormist critical vocabulary into an entire past, present, and uture: “tradi-

tion” gives way to a problematic present, which may be redeemed in a mod-

ernized uture. Describing political corruption thus systematizes and theorizes

an analytic object or the purpose o justiying technical interventions in the

evolution o capitalist modernity. Te irony is that this intellectual apparatus

was grafed onto a discursive tradition that emerged rom idiosyncratic politi-

cal struggles in countries whose histories have little to do with diffi culties in

countries like Nigeria today. Instead o remaining an objective description o a

universal process o human development (much less an abstract set o neutral

paradigms), “corruption” evolved as a way o critiquing political practices in


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Introduction 15

eighteenth- and nineteenth-century polities, mostly in Europe. Moderniza-

tion theorists and other sociological commentators in the 1960s and 1970s may

have relied on a somewhat teleological view o how states develop or should

develop, but the long-term legacy o their paradigms does not lie in that con-

jectural uture history. Rather, their redenition o “corruption” helped to cre-ate a novel “political unconscious,” which moved rom individual instances

in which corruption was identied to an implicit and inarticulate conviction

that corruption had a consistent set o causes and at least potentially a consis-

tent set o solutions. For this reason it has had proound political and cultural

consequences.

Social Science and Corruption in Practice

While the category o corruption was acquiring new weight, incisive eld stud-

ies such as those o M. G. Smith and Simon Ottenberg developed a detailed

picture o how political elites emerged as intermediaries between domestic

economies and the international market as a consequence o political struc-

tures that came about during the colonial period. Smith’s study o colonial Zaria,

or example, ocused on long-term patterns o oppressive conduct on the part

o Zaria’s aristocracy. Smith identied a long-term increase in what he termed

“the use o public offi ce or authority or private advantage and gain” ever sincea reormist jihad at the beginning o the nineteenth century. During the twen-

tieth century, colonial rule brought greater centralization o government and

a larger role or it in managing economic lie, both o which greatly increased

corruption’s incidence. More immediately inuenced by neo-Weberian ap-

proaches, Ottenberg viewed corruption in local government as being the conse-

quence o a set o structures organized around modern bureaucratic principles.

Tese were staffed by people whose political culture dictated more personalistic

and reciprocal modes o decision making. Te clientelist nature o their po-

litical support and the centrality o the state in providing opportunities or

enrichment combined to make diversion o state resources to private ends easy

and inevitable.

In the years ollowing this pioneering work, the literature on corruption

ourished, to such an extent that it is diffi cult to represent its entirety. None-

theless, the period rom the 1970s onward was not simply a halcyon time or

secondary literature on corruption; it was also when Nigeria became almost

synonymous with the term. o the extent that scholarly literatures have

inormed technocratic vernaculars, some overview o the ormer is useul.

Roughly, one can perceive three major approaches to writings in the traditions


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16 Introduction

arising rom the conjunctures o the 1960s. Te tradition that has had great-

est inuence on technocratic approaches to corruption since the heyday o

modernization theory emerged rom economics. Many o these scholars ol-

low Susan Rose-Ackerman in treating corruption as “an illegal or unauthor-

ized transer o money or an in-kind substitute” or which the “ ‘bribee’ mustnecessarily be in a position o power, created either by market imperections or

an institutional position which grants him discretionary authority.” Corrup-

tion is conceptualized as a particular orm o rent seeking—attempting to gain

economic benet by acquiring access to already-existing wealth rather than

creating new—potentially constrained by an appropriately designed system o

incentives. Te trick is to prevent anticorruption mechanisms rom imposing

greater economic costs than does corruption itsel. For development plan-

ners this is extremely useul in that it provides a package o potential xes tospecic orms o corruption. Rose-Ackerman hersel suggests a battery o poli-

cies that might, in different combinations, lower the incidence o corruption

in many societies.

Despite this obvious utility, microeconomic approaches provide little in-

sight into why particular states o affairs obtain in the real world, tending to

take institutional arrangements as instantiations o policy choices arrived at

by decision makers afer weighing them against alternatives. Tis may cre-

ate a robust predictive model, but it does not accord very well with the pro-cesses through which these arrangements came about. On one hand, such

approaches are well suited to reorm, or at least to the design o policies ad-

dressing the need or reorm. Accordingly, such approaches greatly inuence

policy—within governments, the donor and business communities, and civil

society groups like ransparency International. On the other hand, like their

modernization theory predecessors, they tend to naturalize the current state o

affairs as a moment in a developmental sequence or to imagine a solution that

could simply be willed into being.

A tradition emerged in political science somewhat at odds with this em-

phasis. Such scholars emphasized the patterning o political relationships.

As the initial celebration o Arican independence gave way to more sober

and critical assessments o Arican states’ thorny problems during the 1970s

and 1980s, scholars like Colin Leys and Sayre Schatz argued or the impor-

tance o political elites in maintaining Arican states’ dependent position in

the world economy as a consequence o the elites’ drive to maintain access to

lucrative opportunities diverting state resources toward themselves and their

amilies. Te sociologist Peter Ekeh made a very inuential suggestion that

postcolonial Arica was characterized by the coexistence o two distinct public


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Introduction 17

spheres, one o primordial cultural ties whose moral claims were similar to the

intimate ones o the private sphere, and a second o civic involvement equiva-

lent to the Western public sphere but which was perceived as undamentally

amoral. Aricans, Ekeh argued, experienced the claims o the primordial pub-

lic sphere as exerting great moral orce but perceived the civic public sphereas simply a realm to be exploited. ogether the emphasis on the peculiar

incentives dependent economies created or political elites and culturalist ac-

counts o how such elites perceived their sociopolitical responsibilities enabled

the emergence o an important literature on politics in countries like Nigeria.

Such approaches ascribed corruption and political instability to the per-

sistence o patrimonial ties within modern state structures, ofen under the

rubric o patrimonalism or neo-patrimonialism. One o the most inuential

studies o Nigerian politics emerged rom this tradition. Richard Joseph’s De-mocracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria looks systematically at how the poli-

tics o patronage (and specically the ethnicized distribution o state offi ces)

both constituted and atally undermined the course o politics in Nigeria’s

Second Republic (1979–83). One o Joseph’s key insights was that constitu-

tional structures did not just exacerbate ethnic cleavages. Rather, the two had

a mutually constitutive relationship. Patron-client ties were the sine qua non

o Nigerian politics. Constitutional structures and patterns o politics deter-

mined how patronage could be exercised. Patronage largely ollowed ethnicboundaries, and since the state distributed most economic opportunities, po-

litical competition was inevitably a struggle over resources more than policy.

Communal sentiments became a primary idiom or this competition. More

recently, William Reno made analogous arguments about the ways in which

the politics o clientelism (or, in a later book, warlordism) have inected the

practice o politics and as a consequence have created corruption almost as a

by-product.

Tis literature has corresponded to much wider discussions on the Ari-

can state which locate many o its dysunctions in the inadequacies o institu-

tions put in place during the colonial period. Local administration became

the responsibility o offi cials granted resources inadequate or their political

needs, or or their need or public consumption as understood in local politi-

cal culture. Instead o acting as guardians o the public interest, Arican elites

have accordingly pursued the interests o their home regions, o their amilies

and patronage networks, and (quite requently) o cities over rural areas. One

inuential strand o thought was that the Arican state was weak, lacking

the mechanisms o enorcement and control usually thought to charac-

terize the modern state and maintaining its existence largely because o an


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18 Introduction

international system that presupposed all territories are governed by a state,

thus propping up institutions that had little popular legitimacy or effi cacy.

More than approaches rom economics, this approach answers critical ques-

tions about why Arican states ace the dilemmas they do. But i the conclusions

scholars taking this approach draw do not always offer obvious packages oreormist solutions, they nonetheless suggest how corruption might be over-

come. Scholars who emphatically reject the supposition that Arican political

problems emerge rom a ailure to develop nonetheless ofen rely on an im-

plicit model o (European) states rom which Arican ones deviate. Even where

Arican states might be celebrated as hybrid, as having distinctive orms o

politics, European orms remain as an ideological point o comparison, a norm,

or an unmarked category—a great irony, since “corruption” emerged as a po-

litical critique rather than as a supposed developmental stage. reating it asdesignating something coherent and real, which states might be plagued by

or not, naturalized an ideological portrait o the noncorrupt state as a Euro pean

state, when the conceptual category had emerged as an implicit complaint thus

did not exist in the real world. Political case studies ofen lose track o the

local systems o meaning through which “corrupt” practices emerge and rom

which they take on a large portion o their social signicance.

Such questions, however, are at the center o an ethnographic literature on

corruption that has emerged relatively recently. Much o this work moves awayrom neo-Weberian assumptions about the nature o state institutions or the

signicance o a clash between patrimonial and bureaucratic political logics.

Rather, ethnographers have taken an actor-centered approach, considering

how individual people understand the situation o corruption within which

they nd themselves. In their research on Ghana, or example, Brenda Chaln

and Jennier Hasty describe how “corrupt” practices are understood in cultural

context. Chaln’s ne-grained examination o the Ghanaian customs ser vice

demonstrates how customs agents and other state offi cials constitute “the state”

in a particular location while being dependent on local political and economic

relationships enabling them to exercise their authority and to extract “corrupt”

revenue or themselves. Hasty’s eldwork working as a journalist in southern

Ghana enabled a uniquely insightul account o how both “corrupt” practices

and political condemnation o corruption depend on undamentally similar

expressions o desire or access to resources not available to particular actors.

Daniel Jordan Smith on southeastern Nigeria, Janet MacGaffey on Congo/

Zaire, and Olivier de Sardan and Giorgio Blundo’s comparative project on

Benin, Niger, and Senegal have all provided particularly noteworthy ethno-

graphic studies o corruption. Also important is the inuence o the anthro-


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Introduction 19

pological literature on gif giving and prestation. Following Marcel Mauss’s

seminal account o the gif as a total social act, the organizing principle o ex-

change and thereby o social lie in pre-market societies, anthropologists have

debated the relationship between “pure” gifs and ones that demand recipro-

cation, and how this relates to other patterns o obligation and hierarchy inhuman societies. Smith in particular provides a wonderully detailed portrait

o the emergent nature o “corrupt” transactions in particular locales, as a basic

logic o prestation is enacted under the demands o bureaucratic authority, an

intersection o reciprocity and what Christopher Fuller and Veronique Benei

have termed the “everyday state.” O particular note is recent work by Akhil

Gupta, who has developed an important ethnography o corrupt state prac-

tice in India. He demonstrates the centrality o corrupt and irregular practice

in the relationship between ordinary people and the rontline offi cials o theIndian state, and most importantly shows that narratives o corruption are a

primary way in which the state itsel is discursively constructed through talk

o corruption.

Such approaches provide a crucial addition to a literature that has tended to

see “corruption” as one phenomenon that variously maniests itsel around the

globe, or that represents a particular developmental conjuncture. Tis strength

can also be something o a weakness, since it leaves somewhat shadowy the

question o how one might pay attention to the local meanings o a globalphenomenon, or o the relationship between such socially situated practices

and the state structures they emanate rom and inuence. As Rose-Ackerman

notes, “Ethnographic research tends to concentrate on cultural and social

expectations to explain the prevalence o personalistic ties and quid pro quo

transactions” to the exclusion o looking at the dynamics o “grand” corrup-

tion, its systematic qualities, or the central role played by the state.” Te dan-

ger o taking an actor-centered approach to corruption is that doing so tends

to de-emphasize its consequences or what is specic to it. In one sense, this

criticism is simply a amiliar condemnation o anthropological relativism—

which in airness is not a position any serious scholar espouses. But that begs

the question o how to deal with it analytically. Is “corruption” simply a series o

amily resemblances, or is there something more proound linking corruptions

together? One useul approach has been taken by historians, who have tended

to look at particular contexts and at how the phenomena deemed “corrupt”

operated and changed over time.

Along those lines, one o the most inuential bodies o literature about the

Arican state considers eatures that might be termed “corruption” and empha-

sizes how the specic histories o Arican states have produced a somewhat


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20 Introduction

unusual state orm. Authors like Jean-François Bayart, Mahmood Mamdani,

Achille Mbembe, and Jeffrey Herbst have all insisted on examining the longue

dur é e trajectories o Arican states, locating contemporary dysunction in

long-term patterns o politics, political accommodation, population structure,

culture, and geography.

Such authors’ appeals to history ofen work better asbroad-brush characterizations than as detailed descriptions o any particular

case. Even accounts that insist on the unlovely legacies o jamming together

Arican political traditions and European political institutions and that decline

to valorize European practices as advanced or intrinsically better can end up

implicitly importing European models by positing them as actually existing in

Europe or elsewhere. Whether or not one supposes a European model o the

state is that with which “normal” states should accord, such approaches tend

to reiy European states as according with aspirational accounts rather thanhard acts. Te ideological gure o the bureaucratic state, which emerged in

projects o political reorm crosscutting intellectual traditions describing and

enabling reormers’ ambitions, becomes taken as an objective description o

“normal” states rather than a charter myth some states invoke or a model to

which they aspire. “Corruption,” in short, is diffi cult to deal with because it is

epistemically shify: it creates urgent social problems, but its meaning is uid

and subject to change over time. It is a moral discourse as much as it is an

objective reality.

How to Do Things with Corruption

Corruption is real. We know that, but that is not because corrupt acts occur

and we know they are “corrupt.” Corruption is now a global concern because

corrupt acts occur and are labeled “corrupt.” Tese acts o labeling are polyva-

lent, varying rom time to time, place to place, and even situation to situation,

even as they invoke a particular intellectual tradition that is not identical to all

traditions or critiquing government malpractice. Changes in the entailments

o “corruption” help to produce both the persistence o particular orms o po-

litical maleasance and the perpetuation o a hierarchy o states and political

orms. Across the past century invocations o “corruption” in global arenas

have moved beyond reormist discourses about degenerate political orms. In-

creasingly they have invoked an implicit schema o political and social devel-

opment. At the same time, other, ofentimes more local discourses about the

rightness and wrongness o state actions have also acted to inorm discussions

o “corruption.” In this process, such discourses perormed political work, but

that work has changed over time. Tis book is thus a history o the practical


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Introduction 21

polyvalence o corruption discourse, and it is a history o the political work

“corruption” has done in Nigeria.

Formulating the problematic in this way emphasizes corruption’s quality as

what might be termed “a political perormative.” Tat term is taken rom J. L.

Austin’s notion o perormative speech acts.

Austin noted there are thingspeople say that have effects in the world simply by being uttered—the cele-

brant o a wedding saying, “I declare you husband and wie,” or example. It is

not always straightorward to distinguish what separates perormative speech

acts rom other speech acts, but the notion o speech that does things simply

through being uttered is ruitul, particularly when discussing politics. Even

more useul is a distinction Austin makes between what he terms illocution-

ary speech acts and perlocutionary speech acts; the ormer are speech acts ac-

complished purely through being uttered, the latter acts accomplished becausethe words are spoken. I I am a judge passing a sentence, it is an illocutionary

act or me to say, “I sentence you to be hanged.” My uttering the words ac-

complishes the act o sentencing. My words also have perlocutionary orce

in that they will result in the deendant’s death by hanging; the sentencing is

illocutionary, the hanging perlocutionary. In this instance, the discursive as-

pects o the corruption-complex unction as a political perormative, and the

challenge or political analysis is to sort out what happens in the gap between

the illocutionary and the perlocutionary, somewhere between “I say the townclerk stole money” and his removal rom offi ce in disgrace. People talk about

corruption in order to achieve specic political ends, which are accomplished

in and through the act o labeling. At least when discussing the trajectories

o the Nigerian corruption-complex, the material practices o corruption be-

come imaginable and thereore possible because o well-established discourses

about corruption. I corruption is central to Nigerian politics and talk about

corruption is as well, it ollows that corruption itsel depends on the discourses

critiquing it. For this reason, corruption cannot be “solved” until we appreciate

its status as a political artice and political perormative.

Te cultural history o “corruption” is thus the history o a complex semiotic

trajectory. Even in the context o the domestic politics o Western countries,

“corruption” has been deployed to shifing political ends. An academic shif

to neo-Weberian paradigms in the 1960s helped to bring in an implication o

primitivism, which international technocratic parlance continues to employ i

sometimes covertly through the idiom o development. As the perormative

work o “corruption” shifed internationally, Nigerians appropriated the term or

their own ends; some accorded with international norms, and some did not.

At the same time, vernacular modes o describing government maleasance


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22 Introduction

intersected and coordinated with technocratic language. Te result was a multi-

stranded public discourse articulating moral claims within the larger ideological

project o the state.

Such a ormulation raises as many questions as it answers. o shif atten-

tion rom corruption conceptualized as objective practices to the amal-gam o material practices, discourses, and legal regulation I have termed the

corruption-complex is to emphasize moral systems, the political vernaculars

that collectively constitute people’s understanding o corruption in the world.

As I shall argue at length in part I o this book, the moral systems through

which government offi cials have been evaluated can sometimes dictate prac-

tices that are also possible to understand as “corrupt.” Tis ambiguity and com-

plexity is an integral aspect o the Nigerian corruption-complex and how it

has changed over time. But ollowing such patterns o change is challenging,both methodologically and theoretically. One useul approach to such issues

is the literature on moral economy, which will be discussed at length in chap-

ter 4. While there is considerable diversity in different authors’ ormulations o

moral economy, the commonality is that they ocus on how groups o people

evaluate particular orms o conduct: the mechanisms or setting the price

o bread, or example, or the conduct o scientic research. Instead o asking

whether an action or procedure is moral, the study o moral economy looks at

how such questions are negotiated socially. Te question is not whether I per-sonally think the price o bread is air but whether the broader public within

which I am included does, how those collective evaluations are negotiated, and

how they then inuence community action.

Moral discourses about offi cial conduct exist everywhere. In Nigeria they

long predate the colonial period, which means they also long predate the or-

mation o a single, countrywide public sphere. A plethora o Nigerian dis-

courses on corruption is thus partly the consequence o the many languages

and cultures rom which Nigerians come and within which they continue to

live. Te story o how hundreds o different normative systems came together

to create the multiple political perormatives constituting today’s responses to

corruption is too complex—and too evanescent—to be written as one history.

Te ollowing chapters attempt something simpler. Part I ollows the consoli-

dation o the corruption-complex in Hausaphone northern Nigeria across the

colonial period. It then takes the story into the postcolonial period, even as

Hausa political culture became intertwined with other modes o politics. Te

result is less a denitive history o the Nigerian corruption-complex than an

extended essay about what enabled it. Part II consists o two thematic essays,

each exploring a topic o critical importance to the study o the corruption-


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complex in Nigeria: chapter 4 looks at moral economy and chapter 5 at the

ideological contours o the state. Te arguments in these chapters are not in-

tended to be denitive but instead to suggest some ways my approach to the

study o corruption may be used elsewhere in Nigeria and beyond. Another

way o looking at it is that part I provides the empirical material that supportsconclusions presented in part II. Tis structure suggests several strategies or

reading the book. Part I may be o more interest to those looking or the spe-

cics o Nigerian society. Te chapters in part II and the conclusion may be o

greater comparative and theoretical interest. Although the argument is cumu-

lative, the chapters can largely be read separately.

Tis book attempts to go beyond the view that corruption is a discrete

problem that could be solved by suffi cient effort—by providing offi cials with

appropriate incentives or by somehow creating a “modern” political culture.Viewing corruption as the persistence o patron-clientage or patrimonialism

in the bureaucratic state creates an uninspiring policy prescription: corruption

can be combated by suffi cient sincerity. While there might be a certain utility in

such an approach, that utility does not lie in actually ending corrupt practices.

Te adoption o a historical, nonteleological view suggests something more

interesting: it demysties ideas about the state and potentially deromanticizes

Western state ormation. Corruption discourse is a way o articulating moral

claims and o imagining alternative utures. For all the real and urgent pathol-ogies the word “corruption” designates, a careul attention to the corruption-

complex’s historical, cultural, and conceptual career may ultimately point less

toward bureaucratic regularity than toward democratic accountability.

Moral Economies of Corruption by Steven Pierce

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