Between elite protectionism and popular resistance: The political economy of Nigeria's fractured state since juridical independence

Abstract

This piece attempts a new reading of the political economy of the Nigerian state within the context of the epoch-making British colonialism, the spin-off effects of structural imperialism and the stranglehold of an increasingly desperate transnational capital. The principal argument is that whilst these structures do not explain everything – to the extent that the Nigerian ruling elite has played a key agential role in the country's underdevelopment – they tend to create the conditions for the largely amoral and anti-people politics and policy of the fractious ruling elite. Programmed to implode by colonialism with all the booby traps of a lopsided federal system and a mono-cultural economy (that a largely venal and rickety oil economy has all but entrenched) and the scenarios of failure constituted by primordial cleavages, the resultant elite protectionism in its multiple manifestations hides the saliency of class struggle. In addition, the artificial postcolonial state – with no cultural resonance on the ground, but representing, with political power, the primary means of class relations and reproduction – has been cynically exploited by the ruling elite and transnational capital. Popular resistance to the current gridlock will succeed only insofar as the dominated classes radicalise the struggle for popular democracy and for the construction of an autochthonous Nigerian state through class struggle.

Keywords:

• postcolonial state
• Nigeria
• elite protectionism
• popular resistance
• political economy
• transnational capital
• ruling elite

Notes

1. Thus, Karl Maier (2000, xx) misses the point when he argues that ‘ethnic and religious prejudices have found fertile ground in Nigeria, where there is neither a national consensus nor a binding ideology’ and that the vote ‘often has little meaning other than the opportunity to promote the champion of one's ethnic group or region’. MKO Abiola's landslide electoral victory (to cite only this example) in the annulled 12 June 1993 national elections (including, notably, in Kano State from where hailed his opponent, Bashir Tofa), is a major rebuttal of the ethnicity paradigm. In this context, it appears sensible to ignore the rather simplistic (and misleading) explanation ascribed to a retired soldier that the Yoruba people did not vote for Obasanjo in 1999 because ‘he was [sic] a retired former general’ (ibid, 295). Further, whereas he rightly concedes that Nigeria is ‘a colonial construct’ (ibid, xxviii) as well as ‘the bastard child of imperialism, its rich mosaic of peoples locked into a nation-state they had no part in designing’ (ibid, 7), Maier (2000, xxvii) sensationally announces the raison d’être of his book, this house has fallen (with the almost apocalyptic sub-title of Midnight in Nigeria) as that of portraying ‘the most intractable crisis points and the ethnic and regional tensions threatening the survival of what is perhaps the largest failed state in the third world’. In light of the interrogation of the British colonial legacy attempted in this piece, it can be argued that since there is not yet a Nigeria house, it could not have fallen! It is, in any case, extremely difficult to see how a colonial construct in toto could simultaneously be independent Africa's ‘show case for democracy’ except, of course, if one buys into the self-serving British colonial historiography of the period. With typical foreboding, Maier (2000, 301) concluded his chronicling of the country's history in a hurry as follows: ‘By early 2000, there appeared to be scant reason for optimism. There were simply too many problems, too much anger, and too little time. Nigeria seemed to be an approaching tropical firestorm and there was nothing the new civilian government, however honorable its intentions, could do to stop it’ (italics mine). And that was barely six months into the post-military Obasanjo government. The point to emphasise here is that the dominant neo-liberal analytical framework in African/ist scholarship, informed as it is by the theoretical understanding of colonialism as an episodic event in African history, misses the structural/epochal/watershed nature of colonialism. Once the latter is edited out of the analysis, what comes to the fore is a wretched populist analysis that ends up demonising the state qua state and praises ordinary Africans’ ‘extraordinary dynamism and ingenuity such that once the heavy hand of the state had been removed there would be scope for genuine developmental progress’ (Chabal 2009, 10).

2. The seeming unbridled and untamed enmeshment of structures, interests and power has resulted in high-level public scandals, bribery and corruption. A most contemporary one is the N27 billion Halliburton bribery scandal in which about 80 Nigerian and foreigners representing the top echelons of the country's political and military establishment and technocrats – including four ex-heads of state, two of their wives, ex-governors and ministers – were indicted in April 2010 by the US law enforcement officials in engaging in a decade-long bribing scheme to secure contracts in Nigeria (Umejei 2010). Further, from the standpoint of our structural/class analysis, it is understandable why, around the same time, the Nigerian senate, in amending the 1999 Constitution, deleted Section 66 (1) (h) which disqualifies a person from standing for election once they had been indicted by a panel of inquiry (The Guardian 2010).