Neo-Patrimonialism: The ‘Revenge of Society’

The idea of neo-patrimonialism has its roots in German sociologist Max Weber’s work on different forms of political authority. According to Weber, legal-rational authority describes bureaucratic states where authority was exercised according to rules (sometimes termed rational-bureaucratic). This found its paradigmatic expression in the nineteenth century Prussian state, which was the first to build a civil service based on meritocratic appointments and strict bureaucratic procedures. By contrast, in patrimonial states, authority derived from the personal power of individual leaders and states is run as if they were private households.Footnote ⁴⁸ By the mid-twentieth century, a few post-colonial African states – bar perhaps Haile Selassie’s imperial regime in Ethiopia – were considered true examples of this traditionalist form of rule.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the 1970s, scholars of politics in the Global South added ‘neo’ to describe non-traditional contexts where patrimonialism was intertwined with elements of bureaucratic, rule-bound authority.Footnote ⁵⁰ The resulting concept of neo-patrimonialism was applied first to the Ahidjo dictatorship in Cameroon by Jean-François MédardFootnote ⁵¹ and subsequently to the vast majorityFootnote ⁵² of African states.Footnote ⁵³ Modernisation theory stated that as states became independent and went through a process of political modernisation, the influence of social relations and personal rule should ebb. In ‘neo-patrimonial’ states, this process was thought to have stalled: the bureaucratic elements either only existed in limited ‘pockets’Footnote ⁵⁴ or were merely a façade.Footnote ⁵⁵

By the 1980s, many scholars of politics in Africa were bewildered as their hopes for the new nations were dashed and the state was ‘losing its modernist shine’.Footnote ⁵⁶ The political and economic turmoil in the aftermath of the oil price hikes of 1972 and 1979, combined with the fact that many celebrated independence era leaders had entrenched themselves as increasingly authoritarian rulers for life, led to disillusionment with the key concepts in political analysis on the continent: the state (and its associated formal institutions such as political parties)Footnote ⁵⁷ and class.Footnote ⁵⁸ Neither state-building nor class formation had proceeded in the smooth linear way predicted by modernisation theory and Marxist analysis leaving Africa and African studies in ‘a sorry state of affairs’.Footnote ⁵⁹ At the other end of the ideological spectrum, even neo-classical economists had until the 1970s ‘traditionally held high expectations about the motives behind state policy … [and] assumed a benign and welfare-maximising state’.Footnote ⁶⁰ As development economists were confronted by what they saw as African leaders’ ‘economically irrational policies’,Footnote ⁶¹ a ‘new political economy’ emerged predicated on ‘the negative state’ and ‘negative politics’.Footnote ⁶² Thus, both scholars of African studies and professional economists were left with a ‘profoundly cynical view of the political process’.Footnote ⁶³ They started to theorise the role of an amorphous but powerful ‘African society’ which evaded clear stratification on class lines and helped explain the alternative route that political development in Africa seemed to be taking.

Rather than a state that was autonomous from society, and governed by its own internal rules and logics, the state, to the extent that it ruled at all, ruled through its domination of social networks. In an influential essay in 1986, Jean-Francois Bayart argued that widespread informalisation in African countries was evidence of the ‘revenge of society’ on the state.Footnote ⁶⁴ Whilst Bayart himself was loath to condemn this outright, his analysis concluded that any emancipatory potential was absorbed into an ingrained ‘politics of the belly’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Social forces were seen as undermining efforts to build an effective state,Footnote ⁶⁶ resulting in ‘strong societies and weak states’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thomas M Callaghy used Weberian vocabulary in describing this phenomenon as the ‘patrimonial administrative state’ to describe the state–society struggle.Footnote ⁶⁸ For William Reno, society and the state in Africa were not opposed, but ‘symbiotic’, but the result was still the same: the ‘decay of formal state authority’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Whilst African scholars were more likely to describe the continent’s traditional political systems as ‘infused with democratic values’,Footnote ⁷⁰ a culturalist camp, led by francophone scholars, insisted that African societies were incubators of ‘moral economies of corruption’Footnote ⁷¹ and that politics was inexorably tied to other-worldlyFootnote ⁷² ‘cultural logics’.Footnote ⁷³ Where there was a strong associational life, this was ‘uncivil’,Footnote ⁷⁴ with a predatory state mirrored by a ‘predatory society’.Footnote ⁷⁵ These studies helped interrupt the modernising assumptions of the post-independence scholarship. In seeking to study African politics on its own termsFootnote ⁷⁶ – however inchoate the resulting analysis – they broadened the conceptual vocabulary beyond class and state, to consider how power operates beyond formal institutions. However, it also laid the groundwork for pathologising assumptions about the social dimensions of politics in Africa that have been hard to shake.Footnote ⁷⁷

In the case of Nigeria, this collapse of political and developmental aspirations and the subsequent conceptual concern with the threat of social relations can be seen most clearly in the work of Richard Joseph. In the run up to the long-awaited 1979 elections, Joseph used a piece in the staunchly Marxist Review of African Political Economy to gently chide the major political parties in Nigeria for their ‘welfarism’. He saw the Unity Party of Nigeria’s (UPN) promise of free education and free textbooks as insufficiently ambitious. Within four years, the Nigerian economy was in freefall and the second republic aborted by a military coup. Joseph’s Reference Joseph1987 book Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise And Fall Of The Second Republic argued that rather than class struggle, it is the struggle at the heart of Nigerian politics for ‘prebends’, where public office is captured and exploited for private or sectional gain. Class divisions were irrelevant as ethnic, linguistic and regional divisions impeded the maintenance of even basic liberal democratic practice. A profound sense of disappointment runs through the book.Footnote ⁷⁸

At the same time, as ‘neo-patrimonialism’ and ‘prebendalism’ were being popularised in the academy, a wider literature on clientelism advanced a similar analysis of what was wrong with politics in Africa and the Global South.Footnote ⁷⁹ From the local level, to the presidency, the primary ‘linkage’ between citizens and politicians was argued to be patron–client exchanges.Footnote ⁸⁰ Powerful patrons, emboldened by the capture of state power and resources, would offer clients small-scale material benefits and protection in exchange for political support.Footnote ⁸¹ After initial enthusiasm for the ‘third wave’ of democratisation in the early 1990s, there were warnings that the adoption of multi-party politics would simply entrench patron–client relations in electoral politics.Footnote ⁸²

In the 1990s, there was a resurgence in the use of the term neo-patrimonialism to explain Africa’s lack of development, this time decoupled from the earlier generation of Africanist scholars’ Marxist convictions or lived experiences of the optimism of Independence-era Africa. Where earlier iterations of the neo-patrimonialism scholarship emphasised the social dimension of poor governance, with rulers relying on charisma and personal authority to bamboozle their followers and enrich themselves, the literature on clientelism emphasised the material dimension of politics which operated through certain sorts of social relations.Footnote ⁸³ American political scientists Michael Bratton and Nicolas Van de Walle brought these two strands together using a combination of public choice theorists’ models of rent-seeking bureaucraciesFootnote ⁸⁴ and the idea that African social norms and behaviours had corrupted the state.Footnote ⁸⁵ In neo-patrimonial states, they argued, “the distinction between private and public interests is purposefully blurred”.Footnote ⁸⁶ On this view, the African state was peopled by civil servants whose ‘primordial’ identities (linking them to ethnic or familial constituencies) ‘outweighed’ public loyalties.Footnote ⁸⁷ The rational-bureaucratic Weberian state, common among Western democracies, was, in post-colonial Africa, constantly under threat from social norms and customs in societies where voters naturally submitted to ‘Big Man’ politics.Footnote ⁸⁸ Whilst ‘personal relationships are a factor at the margins of all bureaucratic systems’, Bratton and Van de Walle explained, “in Africa they constitute the foundation and superstructure of political institutions”.Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, such socially embedded political formations were argued to have profound and inescapable economic and developmental consequences.Footnote ⁹⁰ By prioritising social and material considerations ahead of the universalistic principle of public interest, the neo-patrimonial logics of African states meant that they were trapped in ‘permanent crisis’.Footnote ⁹¹

This was not the first time that scholars had highlighted the complicated nature of the public–private divide in Nigeria. In 1976, Peter Ekeh asserted, “the existence of two publics (in modern post-colonial Africa) instead of one public, as in the West”.Footnote ⁹² The ‘civic’ public, he argued, is associated with formal governance structures, whereas the ‘primordial’ public is ‘closely identified with primordial groupings, sentiments and activities’.Footnote ⁹³ Due to the dysfunctional impact of first colonial and then post-colonial ideologies of legitimation, each of the publics is regarded with a very different moral or ethical attitude. Insofar as the spirit of public service existed in post-colonial Nigeria, Ekeh argued that the state is not its primary host. Social norms require office holders in civil institutions to act with ‘honesty and integrity’ in the primordial public, but they face ‘little moral sanction’ for embezzling from the civic public.Footnote ⁹⁴ Though individuals may occasionally use the guise of the primordial public to steal money for their own private or personal interests, Ekeh argues, the mainstay of corruption is driven by the belief that ‘it is legitimate to rob the civic public in order to strengthen the primordial public’.Footnote ⁹⁵

With its emphasis on the weakness of individuals’ commitments to the state as a vehicle of public morality, Ekeh’s theory of the two publics could be seen as a forerunner to theories of neo-patrimonialism; however, there are important differences. For example, whereas Christopher Clapham wrote in 1985 that neo-patrimonialism reflects ‘a normal social form in pre-colonial societies’ in the third world and is ‘accepted as normal behaviour’ in ‘tribal societies’Footnote ⁹⁶ for Ekeh, the underdeveloped nature of the civic public is ‘a unique historical configuration’ which emerged in response to the artificiality of government structures under colonial and then rule.Footnote ⁹⁷ While the shared use of the term primordial evokes a static, timeless set of attachments, in Ekeh’s formulation, the emergence of an alternative ‘public sphere’ notably sidesteps the essentialism which characterised the neo-patrimonialism literature.

Secondly, and more importantly for the thesis presented in this book, Ekeh does not share the neo-patrimonialism literature’s conceptualisation of Nigeria’s governance’s failures in terms of an imbalance in public and private interests; rather, he creates an additional third realm which is still in some sense ‘public’ albeit within more tightly bounded communities. Thus, Ekeh alerts us to the possibility of a genre of politics which sits beyond the radar of received binaries in political science. The ‘third space’ of Ekeh’s framework defies Weberian categories: it is neither absolutely impersonal rational-bureaucratic public authority, yet cannot be subsumed into patrimonial authority conceived as the personal or individual authority of a Big Man’s private household. Moreover, it transcends the public–private binary, whereby as soon as political actors deviate from a recognisably ‘official’ public self, they are assumed to be acting in a personal capacity as their private self.

Finally, Ekeh has typically been understood as concerned with the disjuncture between apathy towards the national community and commitment to one’s ethnic community. Indeed, this is what he means by the problem of ‘tribalism’ in post-independence Nigeria. However, the empirical evidence presented in this book points towards the existence of more social forms of governance which are neither personalistic – in the sense of predicated on one’s individual or immediate familial relations – nor ethnic, but speak to a more general sociality. The notion of governance that is both public and yet includes some social elements, and the further possibility that this may constitute good governance, is central to this book’s analysis (see Chapter 6).

For now, it suffices to note that by the 1990s, the idea of social relations as a liability for governance, via the literature on neo-patrimonialism and related concepts, was well established in African studies and political science. Goran Hyden summarised the perceived nefarious influence of social relations on the African state as follows:

Hyden’s ideas fed into what was to become a landmark report in the Bank’s engagement with the Global South. Sub-Saharan Africa: From Crisis to Sustainable Development, published by the World Bank in 1989, concluded that underlying Africa’s developmental crisis was, in fact, a ‘crisis of governance’.Footnote ⁹⁹

Technocratic Good Governance as Epistocracy

Informed by the likes of Hyden and the neo-patrimonialism school, international development institutions offered a vision of how to get the African state back on track. After the inability of World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies to bring about sustained development in poor countries through radical market reforms,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ the development industry turned its attention to how states in developing countries functioned.Footnote ¹⁰¹ In 1990, the President of the World Bank, Barber Conable, declared better governance to be the primary requirement of economic recovery in Africa:Footnote ¹⁰² with the Bank controlling four-fifths of the $15 billion of international aid to the continent at the time, this announcement had profound implications.Footnote ¹⁰³ A pamphlet titled Governance and Development set the tone of development interventions for the next thirty years: “Good governance”, the World Bank asserted, “is synonymous with sound development management”.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

In its earlier forms, the good governance agenda incorporated calls for democratisation, human rights and the rule of law, which at the time came from both Western governments and African activists,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ in addition to more bureaucratic issues like civil service reform.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ However, by the late 1990s, when the vast majority of African countries had formally adopted multi-party democracies and new constitutions, the calls for democratic elections had largely been met and the technocratic elements remained central. Dominant economic thinking at the World Bank shifted from a market fundamentalist approach, which advocated ‘shock treatment’ and sought to minimise the role of the state in the economy through privatisation and cutting the public sector as advocated in the Berg report,Footnote ¹⁰⁷ to what has come to be known as a neo-liberalism.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The New Institutional Economics emphasised ‘getting the institutions right’Footnote ¹⁰⁹ and gave the state a central role in setting the ‘rules of the game’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, whilst the state had an important role to play, neo-liberals argued that strict discipline was required to reduce opportunities for rent-seeking and overcome the inherent inefficiency of bureaucracies.Footnote ¹¹¹ The New Public Management, already influential in restructuring the public sector in countries like the UK, USA and New Zealand,Footnote ¹¹² emphasised the gains to be made from bringing public sector operations into line with the logic of market-driven private sector management.Footnote ¹¹³ Thus, the Washington Consensus was replaced with what came to be known as the ‘Post-Washington Consensus’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ This change in orientation was seen in the World Bank’s 1997 World Development Report ‘The State in a Changing World’. It declared that the state would not act as the ‘direct provider of growth but as a partner, catalyst, and facilitator’.Footnote ¹¹⁵

Whilst donors paid lip-service to the idea that ‘there is no generic, one-size-fits-all approach to governance’Footnote ¹¹⁶ and defined governance in numerous slightly different ways,Footnote ¹¹⁷ a shared approach was clear. The African Development Bank’s policy on ‘good governance’ from 1999 is indicative of the way the term was boiled down to its core technocratic principles: accountability, transparency, combatting corruption and strengthening African countries’ legal and judicial frameworks,Footnote ¹¹⁸ with concerns for democratisation reduced to ‘stakeholder participation’.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Government would no longer be driven by patron-client dynamics or the whims of neo-patrimonial Big Men but would create an enabling environment for the private sector.

Critics of the good governance agenda argued that this was technocratic and relied on a falsely ‘managerial’ understanding of governance, treating human affairs as if they are susceptible to an administrative ‘fix’.Footnote ¹²⁰ Claude Ake mused that

However, technocracy was the whole point. In the political imagination of the time, African politics was mired in a web of social relations and personal interests that hobbled the state’s ability to act in its citizens’ best interests. For neo-liberals in the World Bank, there was a ‘need to create an insulated system of techno-managerial governance that would protect the market from politics and possessed the authority to redefine society in terms of an ongoing series of highly functional voluntary transactions between rational individuals’.Footnote ¹²² Governing in accordance to technical rules was a way of cutting through social ties and networks of exchange, freeing civil servants and policymakers to make the right decisions as dictated by neo-classical economic expertise. If, as the neo-patrimonialism literature suggested, those in government were driven by ‘primordial’ identities and private interests that ‘outweighed’ their commitment to the public good, then good governance reforms would hold them accountable for adherence to rules and the fulfilment of key performance indicators.

At the level of policy, the discipline of good governance rules would re-orient politicians away from small-scale patronage to clients towards delivering public goods. Government performance would be measured via metrics and in accordance with international best practice standards. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) set up a Governance Assessment Portal which served as an ‘information hub’ allowing users to ‘develop an index to monitor performance of public administration, sectors and services’ and get in contact with ‘international experts’.Footnote ¹²³ In 2004, there were over thirty surveys and indices measuring governance including Transparency International’s Bribe Payer’s Index, the Commitment to Development Index, the Global Accountability report, the World Bank’s Governance Matters indicators, the Price Waterhouse Cooper funded Opacity Index and the Public Integrity Index.Footnote ¹²⁴ Governance became confirmed as the domain of experts. In terms of policy, decisions were delegated to those with economic expertise in autonomous central banks and executive agencies. In a similar vein, the job of holding governments to account increasingly relied on expert assessments and mastery of complex statistical monitoring and evaluation measures.Footnote ¹²⁵

Thus, the twinning of neo-patrimonialism and good governance combined to form an understanding of social relations as a threat to good politics in Africa and elsewhere. Clientelism, Big Man rule and patronage politics exemplified the ways in which the social and material dimensions of governance had subsumed the state. These oversize social and material dimensions had to be ‘disciplined’ through technocratic good governance reformsFootnote ¹²⁶ which would enable government to be driven instead by rules and metrics, returning the epistemic dimension of governance to the fore.

As a technocratic vision of rule, the good governance agenda is part of a long tradition in political thinking that argues for ‘epistocracy’,Footnote ¹²⁷ meaning ‘knowledge-based rule’.Footnote ¹²⁸ Most famously espoused by Plato in his idea of ‘philosopher kings’ in The Republic, epistocracy is ‘the notion that political power ought to be held primarily, or even exclusively, by competent persons’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Over history, epistocracy has taken on different meanings depending on what sort of knowledge is seen as conferring the right to rule: theocracies based on religious knowledge, meritocracies based on systems of examination and testing. All of them emphasise the epistemic – that is, knowledge-based – dimensions of governance. In contemporary society, ‘the most crucial knowledge source is scientific and professional knowledge’, meaning that technocracy – government in accordance with technical knowledge – is the primary expression of epistocratic thinking.Footnote ¹³⁰ Technocratic politics can take a number of forms. Over the years, technocratic dreams have ranged from the ‘white heat of technology’ as a force to overcome traditional hierarchies,Footnote ¹³¹ to a ‘technocratic socialist leviathan’ which will reformulate society to survive climate breakdown.Footnote ¹³²

The technocratic visions behind the good governance agenda are rather more sedate. Both Weber’s Prussian-style rational-bureaucratic authority and the New Public Management bureaucracies of the good governance agenda reflect technocratic principles in privileging the role of meritocratic bureaucracies and expertise in political decision-making, even though the exact type of technical knowledge varies between. Sometimes, these two approaches coincide: for instance, in 1999, Jonathan Rauch and Peter Evans added to the litany of governance indicators with their ranking of thirty-five developing countries on a ‘Weberianess Scale’ (Nigeria ranked at the bottom, with only the Dominican Republic and Kenya judged to be less Weberian).Footnote ¹³³ Thinking about the World Bank’s good governance agenda as both epistocratic and technocratic helps clarify how it conceives of key concepts. Donors defined accountability and transparency as mechanisms for incentivising and enforcing adherence to technical rules and goals. For example, the same African Development Bank good governance policy discussed above breaks accountability down into managerial components: public sector management, public enterprise management and reform, public financial management, corporate governance and civil service reform.Footnote ¹³⁴ As Thandika Mkandawire argued, accountability was reinterpreted as accounting.Footnote ¹³⁵ Whilst epistocratic approaches to governance tend to translate political values into technical ones, in practice, they have to accommodate a balance between democracy and diverse forms of knowledge.Footnote ¹³⁶

Ongoing debates over epistocracy in political theory allude to the contested status of knowledge-based rule. On one hand, ‘even committed democrats worry about the political ignorance, short-sightedness, and irrationality of ordinary citizens’.Footnote ¹³⁷ On the other hand, the idea of philosopher kings, whether neo-classical economists or otherwise, seems doomed as it relies on the ‘false assumption that there is a set of objective moral and scientific truths’.Footnote ¹³⁸ Amidst these abstract debates, we can ask about the political consequences of epistocracy in practice. By making developing countries more hospitable to foreign capital,Footnote ¹³⁹ the good governance agenda shut down key democratic debates. Controversial reforms – mass retrenchment, weakening of democratic oversight, stripping back of social protections – were smuggled in via appeals to universal values of accountability, transparency and efficiency. This had serious effects on democracy in recipient countries.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Conditionality tied the hands of African governments, creating what Thandika Mkandawire called ‘choiceless democracies’,Footnote ¹⁴¹ where people ‘can vote but cannot chose’.Footnote ¹⁴²

Whilst critiques of the good governance agenda have focused on the hierarchies of donor–recipient relationships, the tensions between epistocracy and democracy are not just of concern for those states in the Global South who have adopted the World Bank’s prescriptions, whether out of choice or necessity. Remember: the New Public Management on which the good governance agenda was modelled had burned its way through the public sectors of the UK, New Zealand, Australia and the USA long before it was adopted by development experts. In the heart of the OECD, technocratic governance has been linked to a lack of democratic legitimacy and rising populism. Supra-national institutions, with carefully negotiated yet inscrutable protocols, present a heightened vision of governance as the realm of experts, distant from the people. The European Union has been accused of ‘governing by rules and ruling by numbers’Footnote ¹⁴³ leading to an erosion of public trust. The rise of ‘audit culture’ as a global phenomenon has seen the extension of the logics of financial accountability into more spheres of public and democratic life.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Whilst promoting multi-partyism and free elections, the good governance agenda limited the scope for democratic control over decision-making, especially on economic issues.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ As in many epistocratic accounts of democracy, the role of ordinary people was instrumental rather than intrinsic.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ As hinted at above, the ‘long-route’ to accountability via democracy was side-lined in favour of ‘short-route’ accountability.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ With direct experience of how government was performing, beneficiaries and ‘service-users’ could act as a ‘check’ on government and give up-to-date feedback leading to more efficient outcomes. Democratic citizenship was re-interpreted as ‘participation’, where citizens featured less as voters than as beneficiaries, who made up a patchwork of ‘stakeholders’ alongside NGOs and the private sector.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Thus, the debates in development studies about the World Bank’s good governance agenda turn our attention to wider questions about the tension between technocracy and democracy. The tension in the good governance agenda is perhaps most explicitly dealt with in UNRISD’s ‘Technocratic Policy Making and Democratic Accountability’ research programme, initiated in 2000 by Thandika Mkandawire and overseen by Yusuf Bangura, both of whom were major figures in the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA). This book extends the study of this tension by looking at how the anti-democratic effects of technocracy can be counterbalanced by an aspect of governance that scholars in CODESRIA argue has been downplayed in Western approaches to democracy: the social dimension.Footnote ¹⁴⁹

The Epistemic, Social and Material Dimensions of Governance

For the World Bank and other donors, social relations between the rulers and the ruled were at odds with the technocratic imperative of the good governance agenda. Despite the Bank’s confidence in its epistocratic approach, there were concerns nonetheless that technocratic reforms would be insufficient given the enduring threat of social relations overwhelming the state. Recalling the concern with moral economies of affection,Footnote ¹⁵⁰ the ‘revenge of society’ and neo-patrimonialism from the 1980s and early 1990s, John Martinussen took aim at the ‘narrow focus’ of the 1997 World Development Report’s discussion of corruption. His analysis is worth reproducing at length, not because it was in itself an especially influential article, but because it captures with extraordinary clarity the underlying concerns that motivated a whole generation of scholarship. When it comes to corruption,

The World Bank’s approach to the state ignored that ‘personalistic relationships permeate both the government bureaucracies’. Citing Douglas North’s 1990 work ‘Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic performance’, he lamented how ‘society-generated and very basic social institutions and norms have invaded and captured’ the state in developing countries. He concluded that “what is needed is a more comprehensive analysis of the societal embeddedness of the behaviour of government officials”.Footnote ¹⁵²

This book takes up the challenge of a ‘more comprehensive analysis’ of the ways in which the state and political processes are societally, or as I call it, socially embedded. However, whilst Martinussen locates the sources of corruption ‘outside the state’, I argue that its solutions also lie not in epistocracy but in re-connecting the state to its social context. The ‘long established practices’ which he fears will overload the state with social demands are not simply a channel for the articulation of personalistic, familial or group-based interests (though no doubt sometimes they do, though this is not a peculiarly African problem), rather they represent the potential for constraining power. Socially embedded forms of accountability and transparency sit in stark contrast with their more visible, technocratic alternatives. Ultimately, I argue that the epistemic dimension of good governance, whilst important, has been overstated. The technocratic instinct to disconnect the state from society only heightens the opaque and unaccountable nature of state power. As such, this book connects debates in the discipline of development studies about good governance with wider theoretical questions about the social and epistemic dimensions of democracy.

Whilst my analysis foregrounds the tensions between the social and epistemic dimensions of good governance, much of the work on politics in Nigeria and Africa more generally would argue that both are superseded by material politics. Just as Martinussen explicitly identifies the source of corruption as moral economies, African politics has been widely characterised as ‘politics of the belly’Footnote ¹⁵³ where electoral competition revolves around whose turn it is to ‘eat’.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Indeed, the material dimension of governance is a vital part of the analysis presented in this book: the importance of material politics plays out in a variety of ways, from the obligations of generosity to followers in pre-colonial Ibadan to amala politics in the fourth republic and the importance of bricks and mortar infrastructure in the Lagos model.

Even the more sombre analyses that go beyond the metaphors of the ‘national cake’Footnote ¹⁵⁵ to study clientelism and patronage nonetheless conceptualise voters and politicians as rational actors driven by economic incentives to maximise their material interests. Good governance might be defined as ‘sound development management’, but it is operationalised as the provision of more and better public goods.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In particular, the use of principal-agent models,Footnote ¹⁵⁷ derived from rational actor theory and offering a ‘political economy of good government’, has come to dominate the study of democratic accountability.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ The origins and assumptions of the principal-agent approach mean it has limited scholars’ ability to appreciate the range of forms that real-life political accountability can take (see Chapter 4). These studies have brought formal modelling and quantitative methods into the study of politics in Africa, enabling the testing of theoretical claims in a rigorous way that was previously impossible. However, for the most part, studies of material politics in Africa have shared the above normative assumptions about the value of epistemic versus social dimensions of governance, even when they have clothed such judgements in highly technical and statistical methodologies. Much of the study of distribution in Africa reproduces a binary view of certain sorts of material politics as good and others bad. This is seen in the centrality of the division between public goods and private goods,Footnote ¹⁵⁹ or programmatic versus patrimonial politics.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Both of these conceptual frameworks distinguish between the material goods that voters should want (infrastructure, health and education) and material goods, the distribution of which reflects the effect of dysfunctional social relations on politics (cash, food, gifts).Footnote ¹⁶¹ In this way, much of the study of material politics relies on the same normative distinction between good epistemic governance and bad socially embedded governance. We shall come back to the question of how the good governance paradigm was updated with the renewed application of economics-inspired models, in particular agency theory, in greater detail in Chapter 4. The study of voters’ interests is shaped by an assumption that as experts, we know what is in their best interests.

The case of progressive-led states in southwest Nigeria, presented below, offers a window to study these theoretical questions about epistocracy, and the material and social dimensions of governance empirically. However, the story of the Lagos model in southwest must first be situated in its longer historical context.

The Value of Studying Sub-National Politics

A focus on the southwest and Oyo State reflects a growing interest in sub-national politicsFootnote ²⁰⁹ and means that we can sidestep many of the issues that have come to define the study of politics in Nigeria. Ethnicity is centre stage, in the form of contested Yoruba cultural nationalism, but ethnic conflict is largely absent.Footnote ²¹⁰ Apart from some Hausa and Igbo ‘settler’ communities,Footnote ²¹¹ the state is homogenously Yoruba. So too religious conflict, which looms large in narratives of national life.Footnote ²¹² The region explored in this book has equally vibrant Muslim and Christian groups, with a patchwork of spiritual, political and customary traditions across the six states of the south west zone.Footnote ²¹³ Terrorism, the subject of so many studies of Nigeria’s politicsFootnote ²¹⁴ is mercifully absent, with Boko Haram’s stronghold in the northeast over 1,000 kilometres away. Oil figures only as a distant source of federal funds, which is variously turned on turned off or runs dry.Footnote ²¹⁵ As one of the twenty-seven states in Nigeria that produce neither oil nor gas, Oyo State sits out of the petro-state framings that justifiably dominate analyses of the country’s political economy as a whole.Footnote ²¹⁶ By starting our analysis of legacies of good governance in the electoral contests for the seats on the Native Administrations of the 1950s and focussing on the period post 1999, the terrors of military rule and dictatorship at the federal level are filtered through the lens of a surprising resilience of constitutionalism.Footnote ²¹⁷ In this way, focussing on sub-national politics in southwest allows us to set aside the dominant tropes used to study politics in both Nigeria and Africa more broadly.

Beyond the headline dramas of national politics, Oyo State is by no means provincial. Ibadan has played host to the saints and villains of Nigeria’s political history, including the revered thinker and former leader of the colonial-era Western Region, Obafemi Awolowo,Footnote ²¹⁸ and Lamidi Adedibu, condemned by Human Rights Watch as the worst example of shady ‘godfather’ politics.Footnote ²¹⁹ Yet, politicians draw on the example set by both to build legitimacy for their rule. Since the celebrated but surprisingly controversial transformation of Lagos under Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola, Ibadan has been in the mega-city’s shadow and trying to emulate its glossy success on less than a tenth of the budget. Many of the key insights that this book has to offer on good governance revolve around the controversies over what I call the ‘Lagos model’Footnote ²²⁰ as a blueprint to copy, and how successive politicians have sought to make sense of the paradoxes of the city’s success.

The chapters roughly chart the story of the first four years of the Lagos model in Oyo State: from the election in 2011 of Abiola Ajimobi on a platform of transformation to his struggles to win a second term in 2015, when the contradictions of the model were more viscerally apparent. Ekiti state, to the west of Oyo, provides a comparison, with Governor Kayode Fayemi adopting the Lagos model a year earlier than Oyo and pre-figuring some of its tensions in a shock election result in 2014. These same debates played out across the states of Nigeria’s southwest zone, before being amplified to the national level when the All Progressive’s Congress (APC) won control of the presidency for the first time in 2015, and Buhari came to power off the back of a campaign bankrolled, in part, by Tinubu.

Lagos, Oyo and Ekiti as ‘Home-Grown’ Good Governance States

In terms of the debates around the imposition of the good governance agenda in Africa and the subsequent hierarchical relationships between donors and recipient governments, the states that adopted the Lagos model provide an important case study of deviation from the established narratives. Governors in these southwestern states adopted reforms in keeping with the good governance agenda not because they were forced to by donors upon whom they relied for cash but for their own political and ideological reasons. It is worth reviewing the role of conditionality in the promotion of the good governance agenda to highlight how much of an outlier this makes the Lagos model.

In many cases, the good governance agenda was forced on poor countries, either explicitly via conditionalityFootnote ²²¹ or implicitly, under the new banner of ‘selectivity’,Footnote ²²² as pre-conditions before countries can become eligible for developmental assistance or debt relief.Footnote ²²³ This led to critiques that international financial institutions were imposing the ‘Western’Footnote ²²⁴ or more specifically ‘Western Liberal’Footnote ²²⁵ model of governance on developing countries. Scholars such as Thandika Mkandawire, Adrian Leftwich and Rita Abrahamsen have shown how the good governance paradigm acted as a cover for a series of questionable interventions in the politics and economies of developing countries in order to advance the interests of capital based in the Global North.Footnote ²²⁶ Developing country governments face a double bind: reliant on donors for financial survival, they struggled to reconcile donor demands with the need to satisfy domestic electoral constituencies to win re-election.Footnote ²²⁷ The subsequent enthusiasm for ‘local ownership’, emerging from the 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and Accra Agenda for Action three years later, did little to change the coercive hierarchical dynamics between donors and recipient countries. However, a survey of African governments in 2002 found that this changed little in practice: “what passed for participation and consultation in many parts of Africa was little more than the presentation of a framework document that had already been prepared to a select audience of people.”Footnote ²²⁸

Yet, the emphasis on technocratic governance reform as a Western imposition on the Global South leaves an important gap in our analysis. The first is how it fails to explain the popularity of good governance ideas and their domestication by ruling elites in states not subject to donor pressure. Whilst there are undoubtedly countries who have signed up to good governance reforms under coercive conditions,Footnote ²²⁹ there are others who have taken the lead in becoming, what we can call, ‘home-grown’ good governance states, that is, states where the ruling elites self-consciously and enthusiastically embrace the good governance agenda. Of course, for those international donors who run good governance programmes, home-grown good governance states need no explanation, beyond noting with pleasure that another country’s elites have come round to recognising the benefits of their prescriptions. For everyone else, these cases pose a puzzle.

Many explain the apparent adoption of the good governance agenda by developing countries of their own accord as reflecting shallow lip-service to faddish buzzwords in the hope of securing funding.Footnote ²³⁰ Indeed summarising decades of growing cynicism among Nigerian political scientists, Daniel Agbiboa describes the government’s anti-corruption campaigns as ‘feckless rhetoric’Footnote ²³¹ or perniciously deep brain-washing of elites who are totally subsumed in the reigning paradigm.Footnote ²³² But, this misses the extent to which governing elites exert agency in their adoption of this vision and fails to take account of the role of such elites’ own normative political commitments. For example, reformist politicians in Paraguay have taken the principle of transparency and made it their own, building a coalition of professionals, technocrats and liberal politicians for whom transparency embodies a situated set of political and social aspirations.Footnote ²³³

Suffice to say, Nigeria was the last place donors expected to find local ownership. A 2010 report for the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation warned would-be reformers that “the political will for reform may be lacking and reforms can be met with resistance”.Footnote ²³⁴ Moreover, due to lucrative petroleum sales, Nigeria was historically one of the least aid-dependent countries in Africa.Footnote ²³⁵ In 2004, foreign development aid made up on 0.6 per cent of government spending compared to a mean of 43 per cent in other Sub-Saharan African countries.Footnote ²³⁶ Whilst Obasanjo was keen to win donor support for the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) initiative at the federal level,Footnote ²³⁷ Nigerian state governments were not financially dependent on donor funds in the same way that countries of an equivalent size relied on external budgetary support. Thus, the leverage that donors elsewhere wielded to secure governance reform as the condition of access to loans and grants was absent among Nigerian states.

Thus, by studying the Lagos model, it shines light on political, economic and ideological factors that drove state governors in the southwest to become home-grown good governance states. As expanded on in Chapter 2, leaders mixed donor prescriptions with ideas of good governance inherited from indigenous political traditions, which themselves were developed in conversation with the looming presence of British colonialism a century before. As the outcome of this process of inter-mixing, the Lagos model represents a canny political strategy in response to changing political developments and international opportunities as well as a deeply held long-standing normative commitments,Footnote ²³⁸ albeit updated in a neo-liberal register. Moreover, the politics of competing conceptions of good governance in southwest Nigeria showcases the clash between elite-led epistemic approaches to governance and popular demands for social re-embedding of power.

Studying Governance Politically in Africa

More recently, the study of governance and development in Africa has paid renewed attention to the political dimensions of governance;Footnote ²⁴⁴ in so doing, it has complicated the assumptions of both the good governance and neo-patrimonialism paradigms.

Some scholars have undertaken a conceptual fine-tuning of neo-patrimonialism to enable more fine-grained empirical analysis. Anne Pitcher, Mary Moran and Michael Johnston contrast the common use of the term neopatrimonial to denote corruption and predation, with the Weberian origins of the term as a type of legitimate authorityFootnote ²⁴⁵ with ‘multi-stranded sets of ties and obligations’.Footnote ²⁴⁶ Daniel Bach argues instead that while ‘predatory’ forms of neo-patrimonialism did in some cases pervade the entire state, these had to be disaggregated from ‘capped or regulated’ forms of neo-patrimonialism which may in fact ‘alleviate the imprint of social, ethno-regional and religious identities while promoting loyalty and intra-elite cohesion’.Footnote ²⁴⁷ ‘Neo-patrimonial governance’ has been shown to be compatible with a wide range of developmental and democratic outcomes, such as the democratic middle income state of Botswana.Footnote ²⁴⁸ Beyond the homogenising assumptions of the neo-patrimonialism school, the Africa Power and Politics Programme sought to discover the “forms of governance that work better for development than those prescribed by the current ‘good governance’ orthodoxy”.Footnote ²⁴⁹ Through the empirical study of differences in ‘institutions and outcomes’ in post-colonial Africa, it started from the premise that “institutions function better when they ‘work with the grain’ of the society which hosts them”.Footnote ²⁵⁰

A second and related body of work emphasises the political economy of governance and development. Inspired by the success of countries in East Asia, some argued that good governance was not a pre-requisite for development and that patrimonial relationships between governments and business could under certain conditions contribute to development.Footnote ²⁵¹ David Booth and Frederick Golooba-MutebiFootnote ²⁵² argue that what matters is whether the private interests of ruling elites could be hacked, so to speak, to manage ‘economic rents in a centralised way with a view to enhancing their own and others’ incomes in the long run rather than maximising them in the short run’.Footnote ²⁵³ Drawing on the structural political economy of Mushtaq Khan,Footnote ²⁵⁴ this body of work is less concerned with the corruption per se and instead asks under what conditions the proceeds of corruption (rents) are channelled by elites into productive investments. Atul Kohli argues that Nigeria’s neo-patrimonial state was problematic not because it violated the institutional prescriptions of the good governance, but because it hampered the development of an indigenous capitalist class and thus successful industrialisation.Footnote ²⁵⁵ Alternatively, developmental patrimonialism may exist within business-state relationships, characterised by growth-enhancing rather than growth-retarding rents.Footnote ^256,Footnote ²⁵⁷ These ideas have often been developed in donor-backed consortia and have been widely operationalised by donors in the form of political economy assessments. The British Department for International Development (DFID) championed ‘politically smart, locally led development’Footnote ²⁵⁸ and the World Bank has taken steps to revise its previous anti-political stance and instead sought to ‘think politically’.Footnote ²⁵⁹ In practice, this meant creating tools for practitioners to think strategically about which political actors might act as allies or spoilers for a given policy intervention.

Together, these new insights highlight important conceptual and methodological correctives to the good governance and neo-patrimonialism paradigms and as such inform this book’s methodological and conceptual approach in three ways. First of all, there is extensive variation in the form and quality of governance that exists between and within states: the applicability of any conceptual label is an empirical question and cannot be assumed. Second, patronage politics is compatible with a wide range of democratic and developmental outcomes. Thirdly, states exist within a complex political and economic context: whilst some degree of intentional state-led reform of ‘the rules of the game’ is possible, both governments and donors must respond and adapt to institutional and political constraints. However, whilst the political economy approach is more open-minded about the form that developmental institutional arrangements might take, with scholars supposedly attached only to ‘what works’, scholars nonetheless imported their own normative conception of what constituted a good outcome: whether defined as ‘inclusive development’, structural transformation or economic growth. It tells us little about how different people conceive of good governance as a normative goal. To go further, we need to not only recognise the political nature of governance but develop more inductive and responsive methodological approaches.

Studying Competing Conceptions of Good Governance

One methodological response to the assumed universality of the orthodox conception of good governance has been to turn to the past to uncover forgotten or neglected political traditions and ideas. In Nigeria, this can be seen in the Ibadan School historians in the 1950s who sought to ‘retriev[e] the real histories of political community’Footnote ²⁶⁰ as a way of expanding ‘the usable past’. As Chapter 1 explains, the century-long project of Yoruba cultural nationalism has led a succession of thinkers, poets and statesmen to interrogate the questions of political modernity through a rich indigenous vocabulary.Footnote ²⁶¹ Elsewhere, historians have variously used debates in Tanzanian public discourse to address bigger normative political questions about land, citizenship and belonging,Footnote ²⁶² Hausa terminology to study the historical development of the idea of corruption in the Sahel,Footnote ²⁶³ and the evolution of ideas of wealth and kingship in Asante history to denaturalise contemporary concepts.Footnote ²⁶⁴ For some, the study of Africa’s pre-colonial democratic institutions – the ntungasani palaver or the mbongi and baraza fireplace assembliesFootnote ²⁶⁵ – has formed the basis of political action, with writers like Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba and Kwasi Wiredu calling for a return to tradition.Footnote ²⁶⁶ Drawing on African intellectual as opposed to political traditions, Samir Amin argued for the elaboration of alternative conceptions of key concepts – such as the nation – outside of Western canons.Footnote ²⁶⁷ Abosede Babatunde’s study of Yoruba language conceptions of poverty shows the value of deep linguistic analysis,Footnote ²⁶⁸ also evidenced in JDY Peel’s study of olaju, a Yoruba concept of development to which we will return throughout the book.Footnote ²⁶⁹

Beyond historical and linguistic analysis, the study of good governance as collective social visions has been conducted through an analysis of key texts and individual thinkers: the writings of independence-era leaders like Nnamdi Azikiwe,Footnote ²⁷⁰ AwolowoFootnote ²⁷¹ and Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto,Footnote ²⁷² or the notes of the political scientists and economists who drafted the 1979 constitution as a way of writing a new future for Nigeria.Footnote ²⁷³ In the African context, ‘texts’ has been understood to encompass oral culture as source material: examples include the analysis of Yoruba proverbs as the basis of exploration for attitudes to patronage, health and conflictFootnote ²⁷⁴ and studies of Soundiata Keita’s oath as the basis for political thinking in the thirteenth century Mali Empire.Footnote ²⁷⁵ In the twentieth century, African thinkers, leaders and activists were central to the development of anti-colonial,Footnote ²⁷⁶ nationalist,Footnote ²⁷⁷ Pan-AfricanFootnote ²⁷⁸ and socialistFootnote ²⁷⁹ political thought.

Recently, there has been renewed attention to the empirical study of ideas, ideology and values in contemporary African politics, via qualitative fieldwork. Under the banner of ‘normative politics’Footnote ²⁸⁰ in Africa, scholars have used in-depth qualitative methods to theorise normative political concepts from the bottom up. Daniel Mulugeta draws on fieldwork with Ethiopian agricultural officers to rethink corruption through the Amharic concept of government as mengist.Footnote ²⁸¹ John Harrington, Harriet Deacon and Peter Munyi juxtapose contrasting normative frames for the governance of traditional knowledge in Kenya.Footnote ²⁸² Stephanie Diepeveen draws on ethnographies of debates on Mombasa’s street corners to challenge mainstream thinking on the public sphere.Footnote ²⁸³ This scholarship is united by a desire to foreground the meanings and the imaginaries of participants ‘on the ground’ at the same time as using African experience to speak back to wider theoretical debates. Pushing against the exoticisation of African politics, Dan Paget shows how attention to President Magafuli’s authoritarian rule in Tanzania helps clarify broader ideological categories like the distinction between plebianism and populism,Footnote ²⁸⁴ and liberatory and developmental nationalism.Footnote ²⁸⁵

Couched in the theoretical concerns of politics and development studies, the normative politics agenda shares much with political anthropology, which focuses on offering thick descriptions via an immersion in everyday political life. Whilst maintaining an attention to overarching questions of accountability, democracy and governance, this literature has oriented itself towards the grassroots, getting a ‘worm’s eye view’ of how power is and might be exercised. Adebanwi’s work on ‘the political-economy of everyday life’ exemplifies this approach,Footnote ²⁸⁶ which includes the study of rebellions and farmers,Footnote ²⁸⁷ informal traders,Footnote ²⁸⁸ vigilantes,Footnote ²⁸⁹ okada motorcycle taxi driversFootnote ²⁹⁰ and churchgoers.Footnote ²⁹¹ Traditionally, ethnographic methods have been the preserve of the academic discipline of anthropology (which has its own history of colonial practice and shares much of the responsibility for exoticising Africa in the Western academy).Footnote ²⁹² The development of political anthropology as a sub-discipline has generated valuable insights on how political imaginaries are reproduced in everyday life.Footnote ²⁹³ Indeed, some political anthropologists are pushing at the discipline’s traditionally limited theoretical ambitions – seen as producing non-generalisable ‘emic’ conceptions and thick descriptions.Footnote ²⁹⁴ Anastasia Piliavsky and Judith Scheele argue for a methodology that can offer ‘ethnographically derived political concepts’.Footnote ²⁹⁵ The next section considers how we might integrate such ‘ethnographically derived political concepts’ from the study of political contestation in Nigeria into a discipline that has rarely even acknowledged Africa: political theory.Footnote ²⁹⁶

Political Theory from the Field

Indeed, these methodological experiments arrive at a time of growing disquiet in the field of Western political theory. The increasing abstractness and specialisation of analytical political theory have led scholars to call for political theory to be reinvigorated and better engage with the political reality in which we find ourselves and challenge the status quo.Footnote ²⁹⁷ So-called ideal theory, where refined blueprints for perfectly just worlds are set out in ever more painstaking detail, is under pressure to give way to more ‘fact-sensitive’ ways of doing theory, which provide a stronger basis for guiding action.Footnote ²⁹⁸ Moreover, we must be alert to the ways in which liberal political theory – the dominant approach in the United States and the UK – is entangled with power relations.Footnote ²⁹⁹ Theories of universal justice, rights and freedom developed in parallel to the West’s growing military hegemony over the rest of the world; moreover, in many cases, these liberal values were used to justify violenceFootnote ³⁰⁰ and categorise the world into the enlightened West and the inferior ‘Other’.Footnote ³⁰¹

One way of inverting these power relations has been to expand the methodological basis of political theory. Lisa Herzog and Bernardo Zacka argue that theorising should not start from high theory and academic debates but from ‘the possibility that we, as theorists, may have something to learn from observing how these normative issues are raised, discussed and addressed in the thick of everyday life’.Footnote ³⁰² An ethnographic sensibility, where scholars immerse themselves in the world as it is experienced by others, and with an attitude of open mindedness, offers an exciting methodological approach, which whilst familiar to anthropologists is new to political theorists. Through participant observation, interviews, historical analysis and other ‘field’-based methods, not only can theorists gain new perspectives on existing questions but also such engagement may suggest ‘a set of relevant questions that we might otherwise not have thought to ask’.Footnote ³⁰³ It is no surprise that ethnographic political theory has its roots in feministFootnote ³⁰⁴ and post-colonial theory:Footnote ³⁰⁵ it has been those scholars who did not conform to the norm of an able-bodied white male political theorist ‘realised that understanding institutionalised oppression would have to begin with the perspective of those who are oppressed, rather than with the common sense wisdom of theorists’.Footnote ³⁰⁶

Such methods are not without their challenges and controversies. The connection between the scholar and the context in which they do research is understood in different ways. Some within the push for more ‘realistic’ political theory have assumed that diagnosing the injustices in ‘the world as we find it’Footnote ³⁰⁷ means limiting our focus to ‘our liberal democratic social order’ without clarifying the boundaries of the imagined ‘we’ to whom this order belongs.Footnote ³⁰⁸ By contrast, the growing field of comparative political thought has broadened the scope of theory, and brought alternative, often non-Western contexts, into conversation with more mainstream, Western-centric canonical works.Footnote ³⁰⁹ The risk of thinking of such an enterprise as ‘comparison’ is that it naturalises the supposed foreignness of the non-Western comparator.Footnote ³¹⁰ The power of ethnography is that it can produce ‘problematising descriptions’ that destabilise our received knowledge about people, places and institutions which we thought we knew. As Herzog and Zacka argue, our supposed familiarity with ‘our’ world is tenuous when it comes to social spaces, moral dilemmas and occupational realms with which we are at best loosely connected:Footnote ³¹¹ By expanding the empirical basis of our analysis, and making surprising comparisons,Footnote ³¹² we open up to new perspectives.Footnote ³¹³

Thus, this study sits at the confluence of contemporary developments in both the study of African politics and political theory. As we see a renewed focus on ideas and normativity in Africa, the stuff which elsewhere might come under the rubric of political theory, that same field is making an ethnographic turn towards the methods which have historically been a staple of the field of African politics.Footnote ³¹⁴