Portia Roelofs

Drawing on original fieldwork in Nigeria, Portia Roelofs argues for an innovative re-conceptualisation of good governance. Contributing to debates around technocracy, populism and the survival of democracy amidst conditions of inequality and mistrust, Roelofs offers a new account of what it means for leaders to be accountable and transparent. Centred on the rise of the 'Lagos Model' in the Yoruba south-west, this book places the voices of roadside traders and small-time market leaders alongside those of local government officials, political godfathers and technocrats. In doing so, it theorises 'socially-embedded' good governance. Roelofs demonstrates the value of fieldwork for political theory and the associated possibilities for decolonising the study of politics. Challenging the long-held assumptions of the World Bank and other international institutions that African political systems are pathologically dysfunctional, Roelofs demonstrates that politics in Nigeria has much to teach us about good governance.

https://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/african-government-politics-and-policy/good-governance-nigeria-rethinking-accountability-and-transparency-twenty-first-century?format=HB

In this 2019 reboot of his collection of essays from the 1970s, Gavin Williams traces the lingering the impact of colonialism and international capital on Nigeria’s political economy, the shaky development of an indigenous industrial class and the changing role of the state in national development. However, reading the book, it is not clear what such an analysis is for. Is it intended as a diagnosis? An indictment? Williams leftist commitments are clear, but amid the painstaking analysis one can ask: what is the point of studying politics? In this review article the author unpicks Williams’ at times contradictory answers to this question and argues that the book demonstrates the relevance of mid twentieth-century Nigerian politics to readers today. She poses the question of how we can navigate the possibility and risks of newly volatile twenty-first-century politics, unchained as it is from the liberal orthodoxy of the past 40 years.

Urban renewal is central to ‘world-class’ city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity. The ubiquity of world-class city-making has been taken by urban studies scholars as evidence of African leaders’ converging on a unitary aspirational urban imaginary. This article contends that the concept of world class should instead be understood as a key terrain on which African governments’ distinctive and diverse ideational ambitions are expressed. In Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, vernacular political traditions—in this case Yoruba cultural nationalism centred on the ideas of Obafemi Awolowo—were deployed by the state governor to legitimize urban renewal. Drawing on the Yoruba notion that elitism can be ‘generalized’, the cultivation of globalized urban forms was not only a project of becoming ever more homogenously ‘international’ but a historically grounded aspiration to become ever more essentially Yoruba. Thus, beyond commonalities across the discourses used to legitimize neoliberal urban development—world class, international and global—these universal sounding imaginaries may at the same time express much more particularistic political projects.

It is increasingly recognized in public administration that the relationship between trust and transparency is not straightforward. Recently, right‐wing populists have risen to power, rejecting transparency requirements based on documents while claiming that they “hide nothing.” Clearly, existing scholarly conceptualizations are insufficient for understanding how transparency operates as a value in real‐world political contestation. An analysis of state‐ and national‐level politics in Nigeria reveals that, while always retaining a core informational component, there are multiple competing conceptions of transparency. Popular demands for transparency express a belief that not only should data be made transparent, but also the social networks in which politicians are embedded. “Transparency in people” can clash with more traditional, technocratic transparency practices centered on data. By rethinking who or what should be made transparent—data, things, or people—this article offers fresh theoretical insights on the complex politics of transparency and trust.

This article argues against the long-standing instinct to read African politics in terms of programmatic versus patrimonial politics. Unlike the assumptions of much of the current quantitative literature, there are substantive political struggles that go beyond ‘public goods good, private goods bad’. Scholarly framings serve to obscure the essentially contested nature of what counts as legitimate distribution. This article uses the recent political history of the Lagos Model in southwest Nigeria to show that the idea of patrimonial versus programmatic politics does not stand outside of politics but is in itself a politically constructed distinction. In adopting it a priori as scholars we commit ourselves to seeing the world through the eyes of a specific, often elite, constituency that makes up only part of the rich landscape of normative political contestation in Nigeria. Finally, the example of a large-scale empowerment scheme in Oyo State shows the complexity of politicians’ attempts to render distribution legitimate to different audiences at once.

Amidst a ‘local turn’ in peacebuilding, donors have seized on the idea of ‘localising’ peacebuilding programmes. Donors have sought to include actors who have local knowledge and connections in order to make interventions more context-sensitive. Yet programmes premised on the fractiousness of Muslim-Christian relations, as many in northern Nigeria are, are inevitably absorbed into over-arching narratives of global civilisational encounter. How does the local turn play out in this context of heightened international sensitivities? Drawing on the critical peacebuilding literature, this article analyses the origins of USAID’s push to localise its interfaith peace-building efforts in northern Nigeria, and the ambivalence of categorises like ‘local’ and ‘international’ in its subsequent partnership with the Kaduna-based Interfaith Mediation Centre on the TOLERANCE programme. While the categories of local and international are indeed contested and fluid, there are limits to how far local partners can successfully leverage these ideas in the context of unequal power relations.

Competing discourses are involved in a meta-conflict over the meaning of the Boko Haram uprising in northern Nigeria in July 2009. These discourses are characterised by different conceptions of the state. This study analyses the struggle over the meaning of the uprising, using the theoretical framework of ‘meta-conflict’ set out by Horowitz and Brass, and a discourse analysis methodology based on the work of Foucault, and Lakoff and Johnson. An analysis of media reports in the five weeks following the uprising reveals that embedded within reports on Boko Haram there are four competing conceptions of the state. The Socio-Economic discourse argues for the state as the provider of development, whereas the Political Agency discourse posits the state as the provider of order. The Religious Structural discourse emphasises the state’s secular role in containing expansionist Islam, and the Religious Agency discourse calls on the state to help mainstream Islam maintain control over deviant sects.

In the context of international agendas to transform African states from a state of corruption to good governance, Oyo State’s transformation in 2011 provides an apparent fairy tale case study. For eight years, the state was synonymous with violence and ‘godfatherism’, but Governor Abiola Ajimobi’s election in 2011 brought the promise of transformation, in line with the Lagos Model, based on the highly celebrated example of nearby Lagos State. This thesis draws on six months of in-depth qualitative fieldwork in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State, to show how the Lagos Model in Oyo State leveraged international conceptions of good governance to pursue a political strategy of autonomy from central government, whilst building on long-held progressive political ideas in Yorubaland. However, the Lagos Model faced competition from populist opposition, who drew on the failings of the Lagos Model to meet popular conceptions of good governance. Key themes in popular conceptions of good governance are: progress, legitimate leadership and economic benefits. This thesis analyses the tensions within the Lagos Model’s response to these themes and uses empirical material to reveal how these tensions play out in practice. The ways in which Ajimobi was required to respond to numerous competing conceptions of good governance complicates the initial theoretical framing of a binary between corruption and good governance.