The projects of the studies

In the first chapter of Tar and Bala’s book, the authors argue that violence has overwhelmed the capacity of the state to rise up to its reason for existence across the subdivisions of the country. They particularly highlight the spatial predominance of insecurity in rural settings. While terrorism creates human catastrophe in the northeast of Nigeria, farmer-herder violence challenges peace across the country, but mostly in the north-central area. Also, they point at youth restiveness in the Niger Delta and banditry characterized by the seizure of mining spaces, mass kidnapping of persons and schoolchildren for ransom, commonly reported in the northwestern part of the country. Governmental responses in all cases are both weak and inadequate and generally swamped by corruption as one of the symptoms of a fragile state that undermines its authority. Lacking trust in the government’s capacity and commitment to citizen protection, the citizens resort to the privatization and communalization of security (Tar and Bala, Reference Tar, Bala, Usman and Bashir2023). Chapter Two by Saliba James historicizes the origin of cattle rustling in Nigeria and shows its cultural roots among the Fulani as a test of bravery. The Fulani historically uses the proceeds of cattle-rustling to restock depleting herds (33). This cultural practice underwent a mutation during colonialism from a cultural ethnic practice to a violent criminal enterprise. Cattle-rustling gained viciousness with the rise of terrorism, farmer-herder violence, and banditry (33). Further, James traces banditry to the nineteenth-century conflicts of the Yoruba, which were mostly booty wars involving robbery, kidnapping, and other forms of violence.

The third chapter looks at the legal/policy approach in managing the farmer-herder violence using the enactment of the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law of 2017 in Nigeria’s Benue State for its analysis. The law seeks to prevent destruction of crops, prevent clashes between the farmers and herders, prevent environmental degradation and pollution caused by open grazing, and create a conducive environment for large-scale farming. However, it is accused of reintroducing the indigene-settler binaries that undermine citizenship in that part of Nigeria. Benue State government’s response demonstrates the mutual suspicion between the predominantly Tiv and Idoma populations that lay historical claim to indigeneship and the migrant Fulani. According to Peter Yikwab, Babatunde Moses, and Temitope Oriola, who coauthored the third chapter, the local indigenous groups are suspicious of Fulani land-grabbing purportedly tied to Islamic Jihad (58). The chapter also reveals the highly politicized nature of the conflicts linked to a perception that there is a strong Fulani influence in the way Nigeria’s Federal government responds to conflicts concerning the Fulani.

In looking at the impacts of cattle-rustling and banditry on fragility in the country and the importance of peacebuilding as a healing practice, Chris Kwaja and Ephraim Emah propose peacebuilding in Chapter Four based on “a coordinated set of goals that are common, acceptable and understood by both elites and local actors” (70). Such alignment of class interest is considered essential for harmonizing formal and local responses in a joint peace architecture.

Taiye Adewuyi and Cyril Ezeamaka explore the nexus of ecological disasters, climate change and rural violence in Chapter Five, focusing on the connections between ecological disaster, climate change and rural violence. The authors argue that ecological disasters, such as desertification, flooding, overgrazing, and deforestation, are the proximate causes of rural violence in spite of the greater visibility of resource conflict commonly expressed in farmer-herder violence and communal clashes.

In Chapter Six, Haruna Dlakwa study farmer-herder violence from a resource conflict approach and narrates how simple disputes about ownership and right of access to water and land resources morphed into complex multidimensional conflicts involving religious, ethnic, class elements and even involved non-Nigerian herders.

In the seventh chapter, Sharkdam Wapmuk take on kidnapping for ransom, cattle-rustling, and armed banditry, which are symptoms of security crises that help to sustain an “underground economy laced with blood and cash” (138). The author pins their triggers on state failure, evidenced by the persisting ineffectiveness of solutions to the lack of comprehensive security strategy.

The same theme of rural armed banditry and cattle rustling is examined from the perspective of their socioeconomic impacts in Chapter Eight by Mubarak Mashi. He identifies the displacement and forced migration of rural farmers, disruption of local markets, and sources of income, trauma, and food insecurity as consequences of sustained rural violence. In Chapter Nine, the spatial scope of the book, which had unduly focused on the north of Nigeria, appear to accidentally remember the Niger Delta region, which is the only southern Nigeria case covered in a book with an important subject of rural violence. Indeed, it is as though rural violence is exclusively experienced in northern Nigeria, for which reason the work should have been titled “Rural Violence in Northern Nigeria.”

In the Niger Delta case, Anthony Rufus and Jude Cododia analyze the relationship between militants who purport to agitate against the deprivations from the exploitative actors in the Nigerian petro-business and the rural communities of the Niger Delta region, which form the operational base of the militants. Ironically, rather than truly focusing on activism against petro-business actors, most of the militant groups unleash terror on the rural communities through robbery and collateral damages from violent factional rivalries among the militants. These acts instill the fear of insecurity on rural residents. In principle, the basis of the militant agitation is anger against the distributive inequity of the state, but the militants’ activities are counterproductive due to their narrow interest and mode of operation.

Chapter Ten by Nufaisah Ahmed engages the subject of state, governance, and crisis of security in relation to rural violence. The various strategies of different regimes for responding to rural violence include the use of soldiers to quell rural violence by the Obasanjo regime, the failed attempt to reform the Land Use Law by the late Yar Adua regime, and an amnesty and reintegration programme for ex-militants who surrender their weapons. Presidents Goodluck Jonathan and Mohammadu Buhari actively used the kinetic approach, and in Buhari’s case, he also proposed the controversial construction of cattle colonies for the Fulani herders to curb agrarian violence but was strongly resisted.

A further take on state responses is the institutional approach in the penultimate chapter by Freedom Onuoha, Joachim Okafor, and Anthony Okafor. They identify such responses to include the banning of mining activities in Zamfara State, peace accords with bandits, amnesty for repented bandits by states in the northwest geographical zone, and trans-border security cooperation among those states in the zone on the one hand, and between them and the Maradi region of Niger Republic on the other hand. Communities also initiated local-level responses in the form of setting up vigilante groups and community-level dialogues. The outcomes have been relative peace, with evident markers of potential recurrence.

In the closing twelfth chapter, Tar and Bala synthesize the contributions, summarize the key findings of the contributors and evaluate the overall state response as being generally reactive in character. Reactive governance demonstrates weak state capacity and limited penetrative authority of the state and gives credence to the idea of limited or total absence of the state in rural locations, which a different article by Okoli, Aina, and Onuoha (Reference Okoli, Aina and Onuoha2024) designates as un(der)governed spaces. So, we can again locate the fragility of a poorly governed state as the core theme in the overall piece. I will further elucidate this theme after the discussion of the books by Erhardt et al. and Driscoll.

On the same subject of suboptimal security governance, which symptomizes deficits in authority of the state as the sole monopolist of legitimate violence in the country, the edited collection by David Erhardt et al. presents varied angles on how (in)security bears on and is responded to by traditional institutions in Nigeria. The book explores how cultural institutions in the state play core roles that either moderate or escalate insecurity. Beginning with analysis of the quality and capacity of official state apparatuses in responding to multifaceted security threats, the editors of the book begin the introductory first chapter with the premise that the Nigerian state lacks the capacity to penetrate and regulate conditions that support order. The weakness of security institutions of the state leaves the citizens with the “do it yourself alternative” (3). Citizen self-help options include the use of private guards and vigilantes in policing their communities. At the center of this alternative are the traditional authorities. These institutions are said to have legitimacy, rooted in the cultures of the communities and acceptable to the people, though the authors reckon with some deviations from this good standing of traditional rulers. The editors also note the emasculation of the traditional authority system by the modern state as was introduced by colonialism and their subsequent lack of constitutional powers in contemporary times. Despite their lack of legal jurisdiction, the embeddedness of the traditional authorities in the communities disposes them to seek the best security outcomes for their people, as several chapters in the book indicate.

Sani Umar starts Part One of the book, which is also its second chapter, by applying a historical perspective in assessing the capacity of the traditional institutions in maintaining security and peace in the light of evolving security challenges. Arguing that traditional institutions in the past had the capacity to maintain local security, law, and order when they controlled the local machinery of government under their jurisdiction, he considers the postcolonial reform of the local government system an emasculation of the traditional authorities. However, as the capacity of the state to manage complexly evolving insecurity shrinks, the self-help option becomes attractive. Within the self-help solution framework, which includes vigilantism, traditional rulers play major roles, especially in recruitment of its operatives (46). Eghosa Osaghae’s Chapter Three examines traditional authority in the Edo traditional system and situates the role of the traditional ruler, which includes security, in the context of a theocentric justice system. The Edo traditional theocentric justice system relies on unorthodox approaches like royal curses and oaths for curbing crime. This method had been applied twice in the past fifteen years in Nigeria’s Edo State, but with no empirically verifiable effects on new waves of crime such as illegal migration, human trafficking, cultism, menace of Fulani herdsmen, kidnapping and land conflicts. The only gendered study in the collection is Funmilayo Agbaje’s Chapter Four on female traditional institutions and their contributions to conflict management in Nigeria’s Ekiti State. Highlighting the female palace institutions, female socioeconomic institutions, traditional, religious, and family institutions and their demonstrated potency and successes in conflict management, she argues for the mainstreaming of women in conflict management. Reemphasizing the helplessness of the Nigerian state amidst rising insecurity, David Alao, whose Chapter Five also focuses on the country’s southwest, argues that there is a diminishing relevance of traditional rulers in the region beginning with the colonial pacification that disbanded the pre-colonial traditional armies (114). Not only were the traditional authorities weakened, their powers now derived from the succeeding political authority, which has the powers to appoint and depose traditional rulers. In the interaction of these two authorities, traditional authorities continue to play the last resort for rescuing order when the political state edges close to chaos.

The same effort to fill in for state security institutions that have fallen short of their responsibility is shown in Chapter Six by Ahmed Garba as the reason for the traditional authority’s roles in conflict, security, and peacebuilding in Katagun and Misau Emirate councils in Bauchi State. The two emirates support local security governance by coordinating with state security institutions, providing intelligence on potential threats, taking part in local security programs, and collaborating with state actors, civil society actors, and sociocultural organizations to advance peace education, social cohesion, and economic development (138). Indeed, Katagun has elaborate offices and leaders dealing with different areas that bear on security, like farmland, farmer-herder issues, forests, and even a security advisory committee (138). These roles exist in the two emirates in spite of a lack of constitutional powers by the traditional rulers and limited administrative subvention from the state.

The second part of the book starts in Chapter Seven with Murtala Rufai’s analyses of the response of traditional authorities to Muslim youth extremism around the Nigerian side of the Nigeria-Niger Republic in Sokoto State. The author uses the case of a newly identified terrorist group called Lakurawa to illustrate how traditional authorities stepped in to remedy the state’s lack of capacity in providing security. The author accounts for their modest origin as a religious group that started around 2017 on the invitation of traditional rulers for the purpose of protecting the communities against intermittent banditry from Zamfara State. After successful protection of the area against the Zamfara bandits, Lakurawa expanded their numbers by recruitment and started violent implementation of their extremist brand of Islam, imposing zakat and punishing offenders (165). The well-intended but counterproductive act of “importing terror” by local traditional rulers in an un(der)governed area demonstrates a capacity deficit, which is a core marker of state fragility.

Shola Omotola examines the northcentral state of Nasarawa and how traditional institutions manage farmer-herder conflicts in Chapter Eight. Their approaches include informal community policing, use of peace and security committees and community-level advocacy for peaceful coexistence, integration of known herders into host communities, and prevention of unknown herders from settling into the same community for easy tracking of pastoralists activities. Finally, the communities also invite state security institutions for prompt intervention. While reckoning with the contributions of traditional authority, the author observes that “herders are still grazing on peoples farms” (180). The persistence of the destructive grazing and consequent tensions are attributable to declining state capacity and as the author suggests, a crisis of legitimacy of the Nigerian state in the community (185).

In the next contribution by Oludayo Tade in Chapter Nine, the link between the traditional authority and the state-organized Amotekun vigilante formation across the southwestern states is examined. The author once more emphasizes state failure in protection as the central reason for the expansion of vigilantism and suggest that the first set of stakeholders that deployed hunters and other traditional forces for security as state capacity increasingly declined were the traditional rulers. Following the formation of the Amotekun, the traditional rulers are represented in its governing board. They are also responsible for signing attestations for their subjects who apply for engagement in the vigilante. Besides, they constitute important sources in intelligence gathering. Nonetheless, some of them play the counterproductive role of nurturing thuggery (203). In another study of the southwestern zone, Ayodele Shittu explores the peacebuilding and political mobilization value of the traditional institutions in Lagos State in Chapter Ten. However, he also notes that such mobilizations are sometimes ethnically driven and pernicious.

The only study of Nigeria’s southeast in the collection is Chapter Eleven by Freedom Onuoha and Chukwemeka Enyiazu and they focus on the politicization of the appointment of traditional rulers in southeast communities and the challenges of conflict management. Concentrating their study on Umuahia, the administrative capital of Abia State, the two researchers locate the central place of the state governor in the appointment of traditional rulers and creation of autonomous communities. The researchers’ comparative examination of Abia communities shows that political authorities are sometimes manipulative in their choice of appointees to traditional rulership and often cause tensions in communities. Most importantly, traditional rulers are major actors in the establishment of vigilantes in the communities, an act which further signposts capacity gaps of the state.

The editors’ synthesis of contributions in the book draws out the critical lessons of the chapters, like the distance between citizens and the state, which paves the way for the pertinent contributions of the traditional institutions to security matters in the states. Secondly, the editors also note variations in the extent to which different subnational governments involve the traditional authorities in governance. The core lesson is on how different roles that traditional authorities have developed in security governance make different demands on their state governments.

Barry Driscoll diverges from the pervasive focus on security but, like the two edited volumes on Nigeria, dwells on the framing of power and state capacity at the local level of governance. In the case of Ghana, Driscoll explores this experience using the character of political parties and how their small group interests manifest in local administration, or what he calls the local state in Ghana. The author identifies demand for favors coming from local party supporters as the greatest source of pressure to local state actors. Dependence of the local government leadership on party actors is considered to be a function of weak state institutions. Such politics or practice guarantees the rewarding of persons who campaigned and voted for the ruling party because they are deemed to deserve priority in value allocation. The first chapter in the book explains why some districts became competitive by drawing on historical analysis of cocoa migration in pre-independence and early postindependence Ghana and the alignment of ethno-regional groups with the various parties at the time. By the 1970s, the ethno-regional groups affiliated with new party traditions distinct from the pre-independence and early postindependence era. Thus, early migration and politics are the background factors that conditioned the origin of competitiveness and continue to manifest in their contemporary political behavior, as evident in district-level party politics. Chapter Two explains why some district chiefs fear party activists by demonstrating how the activists are the power brokers whose roles determine the electoral victory of their parties and the appointment of the district chief executives. Since the party and district chief executives owe the power they exercise to the activists, the obligation to reward them results in a massive patronage politics that submits the local state to the local powerful forces. Chapter Three explains why and how some party activists get patronage. The party activists demand patronages like entitlements because they often agitate if the patronages are not given. In fact, the patronage is an unofficially approved practice that even those in power are powerless to reject because their continuity in elected offices depends on the subsistence of such benefactions. Basically, the activists feel that they got the men of power into offices and deserve reciprocity. The forms of the patronage include personal goods of the activists, like “getting a government job, getting out of trouble with the police, or getting a development project for one’s community” (89).

Chapter Four offers an elaboration of methodology where the author explains the critical indicators that he analyzes with his mixed methods approach, especially the meanings that the patronages make to those involved in the circle. A bag of rice, for instance, means something different to the beneficiaries who see it as an intervention to their need, contrary to a researcher who sees clientelist patronage. Chapter Five provides the author’s explanation of why patronages and state capacity can coexist in spite of conventional knowledge that finds them irreconcilable. In Ghana’s case, the notion that patronage breeds incapacity is considered inapplicable. As the author shows, the country does not lack bureaucratic capacity because the senior workers at the districts are quite competent and willing to perform their tasks professionally but are hampered by political interference. The possession of requisite skill is called internal capacity and is not in short supply in Ghana. Curiously, those who engage in patronage politics in competitive districts also need competent administrators to fulfill the administrative needs of the area. The external capacity, which refers to the capacity to extract resources, is sorely lacking in Ghana because of political acts of the “big men” in power.

Chapter Six presents clientelism and patronage politics in comparative perspective. Dividing clientelism into two parts, the author suggests that one is patronage, which is rewards to party workers, and the other is vote buying or turnout buying, which is rewards to voters. Ghana reports one of the lowest levels of individual vote-buying across twenty-nine sub-Saharan African countries but has a widespread patronage system, which has a major consequence on the state’s extractive capacity. But clientelism, whether in the form of patronage to party cadres or purchase of turnout, are corrupt practices with implications for the quality of governance.

The convergences on governance and fragility

The three core referents of fragility—authority, capacity, and legitimacy of the state—were differently expressed by Eghosa Osaghae as “weak, ineffective and unstable political institutions … inability to exercise effective jurisdiction over its territory … legitimacy crises occasioned by problematic national cohesion, pervasive corruption …” (Reference Osaghae, Cornwall and Eade2010, 283). To different degrees, Nigeria’s and Ghana’s respective political spaces reflect these referents as expressed in the three books under review. Ghana maintains a relative safe distance from fragility, strictly speaking. Indeed, Andy McKay and Eric Thorbecke (Reference McKay and Thorbeck2019) noted that Ghana is among the six African countries that are not considered as fragile states. It has consistently stood far from states that are deep in the indicators of fragility (see Fund for Peace 2024). In comparison, Nigeria is among the top bad performers in fragility ranking due to the consistent decline of security. But based on Driscoll’s book, Ghana is weak on state legitimacy and public service, which is patronage driven. The portrayal of corruption and its implied consequences could be gleaned from the description of public officials as “fat” because of their primitive accumulation and indifference to genuine citizen needs. Such a qualification underpins weak political trust of the citizens in the system and the overall impression of the citizens about the fitness of the political authority, which ultimately points to legitimacy deficit.

Curiously, Driscoll contests that patronage relationship between party actors and local public officials does not weaken the state because the drive to provide patronage prompts politicians to build stronger bureaucracies. Ghana’s experience seems to align with a finding on the agency role of local elites in tax collection in Democratic Republic of Congo, which increased tax collection by 53 percent despite bribe-taking by the elites (Balan, Bergeron, Tuorek, and Weigel Reference Balan, Bergeron, Tourek and Weigel2022). However, such capacity is of a questionable nature because it is only sustained as long as there is a guarantee of the unethical gains that derive from it. The power of the party activists in Ghana prompts citizens’ perception of state officials as dishonest and “fat” (see Driscoll Reference Driscoll2023, 4). The pronounced importance of party actors is indeed a marker of gradual loss of power by the state.

The three books interestingly locate a common interest in how the organization of the state and governance manifest at the local levels. The Nigerian rural area is characterized by disconnection from adequate administrative coverage in terms of infrastructure, security, and social support. Value allocation in Ghana’s local state is shown to be conditioned by clientelist party politics. These markers of the local settings portray a distance between the state and citizen outside the patronage network. Such distance can be both literal and metaphoric in the sense that physical institutions of governance are unknown in several local settings. The work on contemporary rural violence by Tar and Bala also reinforces the notion of the absence of the state in rural locations. Several contributions in the book show how criminal violence took advantage of such absence to develop and thrive. These crimes include farmer-herder violence, terrorism, banditry, and cattle-rustling.

Traditional authorities show local-level relevance in organizing community welfare and public good. In spite of a lack of constitutional power, they contribute to organizing security at the local level and become prominent in this regard where the state lacks total presence or is too weak to guarantee citizen protection. So, the two books by Tar and Bala and Erhardt et al. invariably expose the inability of the state to extend and embed authority across its local jurisdictions. Tar and Bala expose this gap, as they occur in different forms of conflicts, while Erhardt et al. project the efforts of traditional authorities at closing the gap either as a unilateral cultural alternative for problem-solving or as partners with the state in fighting insecurity. Centrally, therefore, the books tend to project the Nigerian state as either totally absent or insufficiently present to assert its sovereign will or authority in the rural spaces.

Driscoll is not deeply concerned with the penetration of authority for state sovereign power in Ghana as in the other books. Rather, the theme of capacity stands out in his work. In his classification of capacity as internal or external, he assigns bureaucratic competence to Ghanaian local civil service and therefore sees that the state could not be said to lack capacity. However, he agrees that there is a lack of external capacity, which is the capacity to extract relevant resources like taxes. But this capacity deficit is simply because they are not provided the resources to perform these tasks due to political expediency calculations of politicians. While Driscoll is unwilling to dismiss the experience, commitment to merit and educational qualifications of the local bureaucrats in thinking about capacity, he reckons that clientelist politics incentivize patronage over public good provision. Hence, what the author defends as capacity is actually potential capacity that does not exist.

The lack of protective capacity is more evident in the Nigerian case, as several contributions to the two edited collections on Nigeria observe that the measures against terrorism, banditry, and farmer-herder violence are not mitigating the violence in Nigeria. So, the state is in obvious decay with increasing loss of capacity in fulfilling its social contract obligation of security of lives and properties of citizens (see Aina Reference Aina2024). A state in progressive decay is unlikely to have legitimacy. Garba’s finding in Erhardt et al.’s collection shows a common popular preference for traditional institutions on dispute resolution (138). Again, in Driscoll’s piece, public officials from the local government who collect taxes make promises that they do not fulfill and even fail to provide important municipal services (3). These imply negativity about the legitimacy of the state.

Overall, Ghana is yet to be fully fragile, yet its distant markers are emerging gradually around the politics of the weakening of state institutions by party politics. Nigeria has advanced more towards fragility with more copious markers of decline of state authority, capacity, and legitimacy. Answering the why question about the above trends returns us to the general problem of governance and the state of the state in Africa. More broadly, political rule still bears a need to understand the social contract.