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Abstract
Based on anthropological field work in southeastern Nigeria, this paper explores the public concerns and everyday experience of corruption in a society still living with the legacies of the Biafran secession attempt. The paper shows how the revival of Igbo nationalism and resentment over perceived marginalisation is fuelled by perceptions that the corrupt machinery of the federal government runs against the interests of the Igbo people, and funnels resources away from the southeast as punishment for the failed separatist struggle more than 40 years ago. Hence, complaints about corruption are used to critique the Nigerian state and other regional or ethnic groups, but they also figure in an internally focused critique by Igbos of their own complicity in Nigeria’s endemic corruption.
Notes
1. Guichaoua, “How do Ethnic Militias Perpetuate in Nigeria?”
2. Watts, “Petro-insurgency or Criminal Syndicate?”; and Ejobowah, “Who Owns the Oil?”
3. Adesoji, “Between Maitatsine and Boko Haram.”
4. My preferred titles were The Nigerian Factor (a Nigerian expression to signify corruption) and Corruption and Its Discontents.
5. Smith, A Culture of Corruption.
6. Nye, “Corruption and Political Development,” 419.
7. Ekeh, “Colonialism and the Two Publics in Africa”; Joseph, Democracy and Prebendel Politics; and Olivier de Sardan, “A Moral Economy of Corruption?”
8. Bayart, The State in Africa; Chabal and Daloz, Africa Works; and Blundo and Olivier de Sardan, Everyday Corruption and the State.
9. Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Mbembe, On the Postcolony; Bayart, “Africa in the World.”
10. Joseph, “Democratization under Military Tutelage,” 100, footnote 55.
11. Tamuno, “Patriotism and Statism.”
12. The names of people quoted are pseudonyms to protect their privacy.
13. Herkovits, “One Nigeria.”
14. Nwakanma, “The Igbo.”
15. Harneit-Sievers, Constructions of Belonging.
16. Smith, aids Doesn’t Show its Face.