Introducing Nigeria at fifty: the nation in narration

Abstract

Nigeria, Africa's 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 Nigeria's 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.

Keywords:

• Nigeria
• postcoloniality
• state
• citizenship
• federalism
• oil
• corruption
• development
• democracy

Notes

1. See Table 1 for a chronology of Nigerian political regimes from 1 October 1960 to date.

2. Lugard, in typical Empire-speak, had been economical with the truth as Governor-General of Nigeria, claiming that the amalgamation was in the best interest of Nigerians. Thus he iterated on the occasion of the declaration of the constitution of the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria on 1 January 1914 that ‘so far as it lies, I shall not spare myself nor find any work too hard or arduous, if I can thereby advance the true interests of this country and of each individual person in it, whatever his [sic] race or creed, or however humble his [sic] rank’ (Lugard 1914, in Kirk-Greene 1968, 266).

3. The latest figure is 374.

4. Bogged down in controversial ‘culturalist’ arguments, Chabal and Daloz dismiss the ‘fundamentality’ of colonialism, or, what might be called the ‘colonial determinism’, that is popular among many radical scholars and lay commentators in the understanding of postcolonial crises in Africa. They more or less blame Africans exclusively and squarely for their plight, given ‘the significance of continuities in political practice from the pre-to the postcolonial period’ (Chabal and Daloz 1999, 11). This view, of course, grossly underplays the ways in which the colonial imposition radically changed the relations of (re)poduction in Africa by forcing the countries in the continent into global structures of exchange with implications for every sphere of life in the colonies. Ekeh (1975, 1990) and Mamdani (1994), among others, have provided fascinating ethnographic evidence that contests the trivialisation of the fundamental destabilisation caused by colonialism and its continuous effects.

5. One of the many popular jokes about the Nigerian crisis. Other forms substitute Africa for Nigeria.

6. As McGowan and Smith (1978), 180) correctly note, this critical stage of history started with the Spanish ‘discovery’ of the Americas in the 1490s, which ending in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, ‘established the classical state system … .based upon the principles of capitalist production and state-building that may be said to have continued to this day’. The implications for the modern state-system remain particularly relevant to the African (Nigerian) experience, particularly as it reshaped Africa's history forever.

7. Wallerstein (1974) acknowledges that ‘A world-system[‘s] … life is made up of the conflicting forces which hold it together by tension and tear it apart as each group seeks eternally to remold it to its advantage’ (229). He later concede that, in the post-Cold War era, the ‘system’ faces ‘systemic crisis’ (Wallerstein 2006, 81).

8. The literature in response to Fukuyama's extravagant claims is prodigious. See, for instance: Burns (1994). In response, Fukuyama (1995) later claimed, unconvincingly, that the latter ‘confused’ the ‘empirical part’ and the ‘normative part’ of his thesis and ‘their proper relationship’.

9. Kirk-Greene's 1991 famous article is a signal example of the literature on the political leadership and personal rule in Africa which is extended in the literature of neo-patrimonialism and clientelism.

10. Such as substituting the so-called ‘aristocratic class’ in the Hausa-Fulani north with the entire ethno-regional group, ignoring the fact that many Hausa-Fulani people are native to other states in the north of Nigeria, and the fact that what has been described as the ‘pan-Nigeria bazaar of buccaneers’ transcends mono-ethnic lenses.

11. For a critical limitation of this thesis, see Mitchell (2009, 400) who argues that ‘Failing to follow the oil itself, accounts of the oil curse diagnose it as a malady located within only one set of nodes of the networks through which oil flows and is converted into energy, profits and political power – in the decision-making organs of individual producer states’.

12. Mainly because of ‘the detachment of the oil sector from domestic political and economic processes and the non-renewable nature of natural resources’ (Humphreys et al. 2007, 4).