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AEGIS European Conference on African Studies
11 - 14 July 2007
African Studies Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands
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“Fair Play Even among Robbers”: Popular Responses to Obasanjo’s Anti-Corruption Crusade in Nigeria
| Panel |
63. Nigeria under Obasanjo
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| Paper ID | 197 |
| Author(s) |
Smith, Daniel Jordan
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| Paper |
No paper submitted
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| Abstract | Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country and its biggest oil-producer, has a worldwide reputation for corruption in an era when corruption has emerged as a dominant explanation for the failures of democracy and development in poor countries around the globe. President Olusegun Obasanjo has placed fighting corruption at the forefront of his two-term democratic administration. With the creation of the Independent Corruption Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), the establishment of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), and several high-profile indictments of corrupt officials, Obasanjo’s administration has perhaps gone farther than any previous Nigerian government in combating corruption. Yet corruption remains endemic in Nigerian political and economic life; ordinary citizens see corruption as so common in their society that they call it “the Nigerian factor.” Many Nigerians believe that Obasanjo’s anti-corruption crusade is a sham. They assert that notoriously corrupt civilians and former military rulers remain untouched and immune from prosecution. Further, it is widely perceived that anti-corruption efforts have been politically targeted. People commonly suggest that accusations of corruption and government actions against particular individuals are wielded selectively against the president’s political opponents. In addition, the public assumes that Obasanjo and his cronies are enriching themselves like past Nigerian rulers and elites. A military culture of impunity, many Nigerians argue, continues to dictate the relationship between state and society.
This paper takes an ethnographic approach to analyzing the Obasanjo administration’s anti-corruption efforts, focusing on ordinary Nigerians’ understandings of and popular responses to corruption, and on their interpretations of government measures to combat it. Based on long-term fieldwork in southeastern Nigeria, from the Babangida military regime to the present, the paper traces continuities and changes in corruption, in anti-corruption programs and rhetoric, and in popular responses to both. Rather than attempting to document, compare or verify levels of corruption in past military and current democratic regimes, I focus on the ways that average Nigerians perceive and interpret the apparent similarities and differences between military and democratic governments. I show that the return to democracy has unleashed massive expressions of discontent about corruption, illustrated in prominent contemporary phenomena in southeastern Nigeria such as urban vigilantism, resurgent Igbo nationalism, and the burgeoning popularity of Pentecostal Christianity. But I argue that even though many, if not most, Nigerians are cynical about President Obasanjo’s anti-corruption crusade, these efforts -- even if they are not, in fact, entirely sincere -- have changed political culture in Nigeria. While Obasanjo’s anti-corruption program appears to be failing in the sense that it seems to have fueled further discontent about corruption in his government, popular expectations about the state, democracy and development are being transformed in ways that future governments will ignore at their peril.
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