Political Order and Political Decay (36 page)

Politics is the general route to riches in Nigeria; very little income has been earned through entrepreneurship and genuine value creation. Transparency International ranked it 143 out of 183 countries in terms of perceived corruption.
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The stories of corruption-driven incompetence are legendary. In the mid-1970s, for example, the military regime of Yakubu Gowon announced the purchase of sixteen million metric tons of concrete to build a series of military facilities and other ambitious infrastructure projects, quadrupling imports from the previous year. Ships full of concrete poured into Lagos harbor but could not unload for as long as a year because they were not actually needed; much of the concrete was ordered so that government officials could collect demurrage fees. The concrete hardened in the ships' holds, and many of them had to be scuttled in place, clogging the harbor for years to come.
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Corruption at a high level filters down and affects all segments of Nigerian society. The only thing many Westerners know about Nigeria is that it is the source of e-mail scams offering bogus windfalls. This is a variety of what in Nigeria are known as 419 frauds, named after a section of the Nigerian penal code. Reflecting Nigeria's weak protection of property rights, middle-class Nigerians often paint large signs on their houses stating that they are not for sale. The reason for this is that they could go away on a vacation and return to find their house occupied by a stranger who had stolen the legal title from them.
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In a country with so much poverty and corruption, it is not surprising that there is also a lot of violence. This is particularly true in the Niger River Delta, where Western oil companies have been operating since the 1950s. The failure of resources to flow down to the region's mostly Ijaw and Ogoni population is especially notable here; the delta is one of the poorest parts of Nigeria. Nearly 1.5 million tons of oil have been spilled into the delta over the past fifty years, polluting the waterways and killing off the fisheries by which the population traditionally lived. This has spawned an insurgency that regularly targets the oil industry as well as numerous gangs sponsored by local ogas who live off of robbery and extortion. The federal government in Abuja has tried to appease this anger by sending substantial resources to the South. Much of this money, however, ends up in the pockets of local politicians.
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More recently, there has been a string of deadly attacks in the North by Boko Haram, a radical Islamist group linked to al-Qaeda, that have targeted government facilities, Christian churches, and the UN compound in the capital, and in 2014 captured more than two hundred schoolgirls. Boko Haram's violent tactics can in no way be justified by northern Nigeria's poverty, but it and other dissident groups find the country's corrupt government an easy target for their activities due to its extraordinarily weak legitimacy. That government's response to these attacks has been, in turn, slow and feckless.

DICTATORSHIP AND DEMOCRACY

Many outside observers of Nigeria's political institutions focus on the presence or absence of democracy there, and the way that democratic institutions interact with the country's complex ethnic and religious makeup. When Nigeria was granted independence from Britain in 1960, it was bequeathed a democratic constitution that provided for regular elections. There was also continuity in the legal institutions that had been set up under the colonial government, down to the wig-wearing judges in Nigeria's British-style courts. But democracy did not last long: after a violent and contested election in 1964 that led to a breakdown of order throughout the country, the civilian government was overthrown by the military in 1966. The military was itself split between Igbos from the East and northern Muslims; after a countercoup, the Igbos declared an independent state of Biafra and a civil war ensued, resulting in between one and three million deaths. It was finally resolved through the military defeat of the breakaway state amid widespread starvation there.
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The military remained in power in Nigeria during the oil boom years and gave way to an elected government in 1979 under the title of the Second Republic. Another chaotic and contested election in 1983 led the military to take over again. The country was led by a series of generals until new democratic elections were held in 1999, when a former strongman, Olusegun Obasanjo, became president. While Nigeria has been an electoral democracy since then, the quality of its democratic institutions is not strong: the 2007 election that brought Umaru Musa Yar'Adua into office was marked by substantial fraud and violence, and was described by former U.S. ambassador John Campbell as an “election-like event.”
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The presence or absence of formal democracy has made very little difference either to Nigeria's rate of economic growth or to the quality of government. The performance of the economy is linked almost exclusively to global commodity prices, given the country's heavy energy-export dependence. Thus the country's economy grew under military rulers in the 1970s, shrank under both civilian and military rulers during the oil price collapse of the 1980s and early 1990s, and then rose again in the 2000s under civilian governments as prices increased. Neither poverty rates, health outcomes, levels of corruption, nor income distribution have shown much correlation to the type of regime.

This then poses the interesting question: Why hasn't democracy made a significant difference? Shouldn't opening up a political system to the free flow of information and democratic contestation lead ordinary people to vote for candidates who are more honest or who provide public goods for everyone rather than just their supporters? If democracy means rule by the people, the question that contemporary Nigeria forces on us is, Why don't people get angrier and try to take charge of the situation, as they did in the United States or Britain during the nineteenth century?
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The answer that scholars such as Richard Joseph have given is that politics in Nigeria is what he labels “prebendal,” involving a fatal mixture of rent seeking, clientelism, and ethnicity. Because of oil, the state has ready access to a steady flow of resource rents, which the elites have shared among themselves. While all poor people—the 70 percent of the population below the poverty line—in theory have a common interest in ending corruption and redistributing those resources more fairly, they are divided into more than 250 ethnic and religious communities that do not want to work with one another. Their ties are instead vertical, to clientelistic networks controlled by the elites, who dole out just enough patronage and subsidies to mobilize support at the next election. The system is stable because members of the elite rent-seeking coalition realize that using violence to grab a larger share of the total pie will hurt everyone's interests, including their own. The typical response to violence like the armed attacks in the delta is a combination of repression and increased subsidies to buy off discontent.
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This is why the impact of democracy on corruption and government performance in Nigeria has been so limited and disappointing. There is no question that democracy is an improvement over military governments: there is a free and lively press that often exposes corruption scandals and criticizes poor performance on the part of politicians and bureaucrats. In the 2000s, the government of President Obasanjo set up an Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), whose first chairman, Nuhu Ribadu, succeeded in prosecuting some officials. But the simple availability of information about corruption tends not to produce genuine accountability because the politically active part of the population are members of clientelistic networks. Elections are hotly, violently, and often fraudulently contested because there is so much at stake in terms of access to state resources. The leaders who organize these networks have no interest in seeing anticorruption measures go too far; Ribadu was dismissed and the EFCC neutralized as soon as it looked like it was becoming independent of its political masters. In 2014, Lamido Sanusi, Nigeria's central bank governor, was dismissed after noting that as much as $20 billion had gone missing from the national oil company. Ethnically and religiously based clientelism displaces any broader political mobilization around issues of ideology or public policy.

In a clientelistic political system, it is rational for voters to respond to individual rewards offered by politicians in return for their votes. As a large literature on African clientelism has shown, ethnicity becomes a convenient signaling device and commitment mechanism between patrons and clients that guarantees that voters will support a candidate and that candidates will deliver on targeted goods and services after the election.
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INSTITUTIONAL ROOTS OF POVERTY

Nigeria is in no way typical of Africa. Its economic and social performance over the decades has lagged behind the continent as a whole, and only during the resource boom of the 2000s has it begun to catch up. It is, nonetheless, the continent's largest country by population, and, by recently revised estimates, the region's largest economy. Its problems are only a more extreme form of a phenomenon common not just in other parts of sub-Saharan Africa but in underdeveloped countries around the world.

The roots of Nigeria's development problem are institutional; indeed, it is hard to find a better example of weak institutions and bad government trapping a nation in poverty. Of the three categories of basic political institutions—state, rule of law, and accountability—lack of democracy is not the core of the country's problems. However poor the quality of Nigeria's democratic institutions, substantial political competition, debate, and opportunities for the exercise of accountability have existed since the end of military rule in 1999.

Nigeria's real institutional deficits lie in the first two categories: lack of a strong, modern, and capable state; and absence of a rule of law that provides property rights, citizen security, and transparency in transactions. These two deficits are related. Rather than having a modern state that can provide necessary public goods like roads, ports, schools, and public health on an impersonal basis, the Nigerian government's main activity is predatory or, in Joseph's term, prebendal: it is engaged in the extraction of rents and their distribution to other members of the political elite. This leads to the routine violation of the rule of law, as in the story of Robert, where public officials force a job-creating businessman out of the country in their pursuit of bribes.

The Nigerian state is weak not only in technical capacity and its ability to enforce laws impersonally and transparently. It is also weak in a moral sense: it has a deficit of legitimacy. There is little loyalty to a nation called Nigeria that supersedes ties to one's region, ethnic group, or religious community. The country's complex electoral laws require that a president be elected not just by a plurality of votes in a national election, but that he or she receive a certain number of votes in different regions of the country. This clever rule effectively makes it difficult for a candidate representing one region or ethnic group to dominate the system as a whole. But it does not guarantee that Nigerians will feel a common sense of national identity, or that they will trust the president and other national leaders to treat their group fairly. Stability in recent years has been maintained by an informal elite pact that provides for, among other things, alternating rule between a northern Muslim and a southern Christian.

Why is it that the Nigerian state and rule of law ended up being so extraordinarily weak? And if strong political institutions are critical for economic development, where do they come from? One answer that has been put forward by a variety of observers is the physical conditions of climate and geography.

 

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GEOGRAPHY

Montesquieu's theories about the origins of institutions, and the effects of climate and geography thereupon, and their modern counterparts; how economists have revived these debates in recent years; where geography has had a clear effect on the nature of institutions; a framework for understanding the three regions to be discussed

Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, there has been a huge divergence between levels of wealth in the developing and developed worlds. In the year 1500, differences in levels of per capita wealth among Europe, pre-Columbian America, China, and the Middle East would not have been all that great, but in the past two hundred years a certain part of the world has pulled ahead economically in a dramatic way. This “great divergence” is illustrated in
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Since at least the time of Adam Smith, one of the chief preoccupations of economists has been to explain why Europe and the West more broadly succeeded in pulling ahead of other parts of the world. Not only was the West the first region to industrialize; it has succeeded in maintaining its lead over most other parts of the world for the last two hundred years. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did parts of East Asia—Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore—begin to catch up and close the gap. In the twenty-first century, there was another set of so-called emerging market countries labeled the BRICS—Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—that seemed poised to join the rich countries' club. Even if this eventually happens, however, it is a puzzle as to why it took so long.

The difference in economic outcomes corresponds to a difference in political institutions. There is a strong correlation between the richest countries, in per capita terms, and those that have the strongest institutions: countries with effective, relatively uncorrupt states; enforceable, transparent legal rules; and open access to legal and political institutions. As the case of Nigeria suggests, there is a linkage between economic and political outcomes. If a country is ruled by an elite whose primary objective is to appropriate public resources, if property rights aren't respected, if the country can't set coherent policies or educate its own people, then even the possession of valuable natural resources like oil is not going to lead to sustained economic growth. The existence of formal democratic institutions is not sufficient to guarantee good outcomes; state and rule of law are important parts of the mix.