Abstract
The convening of an international conference in Lagos, Nigeria, in September 2011 to reassess the conceptual framework, prebendalism—formulated three decades earlier—reflected deep anguish over the misuse of public resources, the failure to establish a stable democracy, widening poverty despite renewed economic growth, and unremitting physical insecurity. With the support of Dr. Kayode Fayemi, governor of Nigeria’s Ekiti State, two US-based Nigerian scholars, Dr. Wale Adebanwi and Dr. Ebenezer Obadare, organized the conference and this edited volume. It is appropriate that this project is Nigerian in conception and direction since the theory of prebendal politics was nurtured within Nigeria during an earlier attempt to establish a sustainable democracy.
My country faces one of the most trying periods in our 52-year history: terrorist attacks; calls for splitting the country along ethnic lines, insecurity, inhumanity and alarming decay in our medical and education systems. It is now the children’s turn to follow in our parents’ footsteps, to take on the challenges of our time.
Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani1
We Africans we must do something about this nonsense
Fela Anikulapo Kutiz
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Notes
“Reform in the Name of the Father,” New York Times June 17, 2012. Ms. Nwaubani is the author of the novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, 2009).
From his song “Authority Stealing.” This is also the title of Wale Adebanwi’s book, Authority Stealing: Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria (Carolina Academic Press, 2012).
“State and Class in Africa,” Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, Vol. 21, No. 3 (November 1983). This collection was also published as a book: Nelson Kasfir, ed., State and Class in Africa (Frank Cass and Company, 1984). My essay was reissued in other publications, such as
Peter Anyang’ Nyong’o, ed., Estado y Sociedad en el Africa actual (El Colégio de Mexico, 1989), and
Peter Lewis, ed., Africa: Dilemmas of Deroelopment and Change (Westview Press, 1998).
Ken Post and Michael Vickers, Structure and Conflict in Nigeria, 1960–1965 (Heineman Educational, 1973). It is pertinent that chapter 5 on “Clientelism and Prebendal Politics” in my book is preceded by the chapter on “Politics in a Multi-ethnic Society.” Also pertinent is the analysis and extensive information in
Larry Diamond, Class, Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria: The Failure of the First Republic (Syracuse University Press, 1988).
For substantial information on how these practices are sustained by Nigerians, while decrying them, see Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton University Press, 2008). The extraordinary scale of predation, and its embeddedness in prebendalist attitudes and behaviors, is conveyed in Wale Adebanwi’s Authority Stealing.
Published in Herbert Kitschelt and Steven I. Wilkinson, Patrons, Clients and Policies: Patterns of Democratic Accountability and Political Competition (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 50–67. I briefly referred in Democracy and Prebendal Politics to the difference between a patronage and a prebendal system, 66–67. Van de Walle has fully explored that distinction.
Anna Persson, Bo Rothstein, Jan Teorell, “Why Anti-Corruption Reforms Fail-System Corruption as a Collective Action Problem,” The Quality of Government Institute (University of Gothenburg, Sweden, 2012, 16. For similar commentaries in Nigeria, see Daniel Jordan Smith, A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria (Princeton University Press, 2008).
See Richard Joseph, “Smart Partnerships for African Development: A New Strategic Framework,” Special Report, United States Institute of Peace, May 15, 2002.
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© 2013 Wale Adebanwi and Ebenezer Obadare
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Joseph, R. (2013). Epilogue. In: Adebanwi, W., Obadare, E. (eds) Democracy and Prebendalism in Nigeria. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280770_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137280770_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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