Development and Diffusionism

Looking Beyond Neopatrimonialism in Nigeria, 1962–1985

J. Dibua

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137286659
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: African Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book deconstructs the neopatrimonial paradigm that has dominated analysis of Nigerian and African development. It shows that by denying agency to Nigerian societies and devaluing indigenous culture and local realities, Eurocentric diffusionism played a significant role in the failure of development planning.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION: NEOPATRIMONIALISM, EUROCENTRIC DIFFUSIONISM, AND DEVELOPMENT PLANNING

The discourse on Nigeria’s development trajectory has largely focused on the role of the state in the development process. The developmentalists of the 1960s and 1970s emphasized the critical role of state-directed development. On the other hand, with the neoliberal ascendancy from the 1980s, neoliberals criticized state-directed development while emphasizing market-led development. The respective viewpoints coincide with the ascendant theoretical and ideological perspectives on development among the International Financial Institutions (IFIs), Western donor and development agencies, and Western social scientists (in this case, Africanist social scientists), who exercise dominant influence over the development discourse on Africa. In spite of the different and seemingly contradictory perspectives on the part of developmentalists and neoliberals over the role the state should play in the economic development process in developing countries, the state nevertheless occupied an important position in their respective analyses.

In explaining the failure of economic development policies in Nigeria and other African countries, most developmentalist scholars share a similar position with neoliberal scholars by emphasizing factors internal to African countries as the primary culprits. Their argument was “the main obstacles impeding development were internal, not external.”¹ While blaming internal factors, the theoretical and philosophical shortcomings of the perspectives underlining the development strategies were not really questioned. Rather, factors such as the poor implementation of purportedly sound development policies, weak and extremely incompetent bureaucracy, so-called irrationalities in traditional and modern African societies, and most importantly, corruption, were emphasized. These factors have been largely analyzed from neo-Weberian perspectives, with neopatrimonialism occupying an ascendant position.

The neo-Weberian perspectives that have been used to explain the failure of development policies in Africa include clientelism, bigmanism, godfatherism, personalism, sultanism, prebendalism, economy of moral affection, predation, patrimonialism, and neopatrimonialism. An important preoccupation among some of these scholars is the churning out of appellatives supposedly couched in the form of new or more refined theories that each theorist claimed more adequately captured Africa’s development malaise. As a result, there has been a tendency to privilege theory over empirical analysis and the specificity of different African and other Third World countries. This tendency has been reinforced by a desire on the part of some Western Africanists to satisfy the demand for policy-relevant analysis by the donor agencies that fund their research. As noted by Aaron deGrassi, there is “the tendency in American political science to construct dichotomies between general theorizations and detailed empirical case studies (most often with a privileging of the former), as well as attempts by some researchers to produce simplified policy-relevant messages for the donor institutions that fund their work.”²

In spite of the claim by some of the scholars that their particular neo-Weberian viewpoints have unique differences from the other theories— therefore making their own theories more suitable for analyzing the African situation—the respective perspectives share remarkable similarities. They all emphasize the existence of large-scale corruption, elaborate patron-client networks, personalization of the state and its resources, and ineffective bureaucracy, all of which they claim adversely affected the development project. These features are portrayed as products of large-scale irrationalities in Nigerian and other African societies. To be sure, these factors were, to varying degrees, present in Nigeria as was the case in other countries, including advanced industrialized and newly industrializing countries. Indeed, corruption has remained a bane in Nigeria. The aim of this book is not to minimize the impact of corruption and other internal factors on Nigeria’s development. However, it is important to note that the neopatrimonial and related neo-Weberian arguments, which have become the mantra that is uniformly applied to virtually every African country, fail to correctly comprehend the historical process, dynamism, complexity, and specificity of the Nigerian situation.

The neo-Weberian analyses are highly reductionist and ahistorical; they over-simplify and over-generalize the Nigerian situation. They are often devoid of elaborate, concrete empirical analysis and do not adequately capture the autonomous, indigenous forces at play within the Nigerian society. Tom Forrest notes that the neo-Weberian analyses focused too much on the personalization of the state, the use of state intervention for unproductive accumulation, and the characterization of political competition as focused solely on access to state resources while failing to recognize the social and political spaces that are autonomous of the state, as well as forms of political conflict that are not focused on the struggle for material benefits and access to state power.³ Furthermore, by laying the blame of the development malaise on internal factors, these analyses exculpate the fundamental roles external agencies and actors played in promoting and fostering the development crisis. Thus, as a form of analysis, the neo-Weberian perspectives at best only tell part of the story. They tend to downplay the adverse impact of the colonial experience in Africa. The devastating impact of the colonial experience can be more clearly appreciated when the African experience is compared to the colonial experience of some of the East Asian countries (the so-called Asian Tigers), which are normally presented as the perfect examples of how the absence of neopatrimonialism fostered state-directed rapid industrialization in the Third World. However, while Japan’s colonial rule in South Korea resulted in the emergence of a “cohesive-capitalist” developmental state, British colonialism in Nigeria created “a highly distorted state” that was incapable of promoting development.⁴

Perhaps more important is the fact that the neo-Weberian perspectives fail to capture the acute philosophical and theoretical shortcomings of the development paradigms adopted in Nigeria and other African countries in the late colonial and postcolonial periods. These paradigms, which are products of the IFIs, Western development and donor agencies, and Western scholars, were anchored on the modernization theory. Through a process of Eurocentric diffusionism, modernization aimed at transplanting Western institutions into non-Western societies. Central to the Eurocentric diffusionist model was the denigration of Nigerian culture and practices as backward and irrational, therefore constituting a hindrance to the country’s development. This provided the raison d’etre for the marginalization of Nigeria’s culture and experiences in the country’s development process. As a result, this diffusionist model promoted projects that were out of tune with the Nigerian socio-cultural realities, lacked the necessary indigenous base for success, and, therefore, were doomed to failure right from their inception. Furthermore, these economic development strategies promoted the extraversion of Nigeria’s economy, thereby facilitating its peripheral location in the international economic system. The resultant neocolonial dependence fostered conditions that promoted the development crisis.

This book argues that the neopatrimonial paradigm does not adequately explain the factors responsible for Nigeria’s development crisis. The paradigm’s attribution of the reasons for the failure of development planning solely to internal factors, its privileging of theory over empiricism, and the attendant reductionism and over-generalizations, make its analysis inadequate. The explanation for the failure of the development project goes beyond neopatrimonialism. In fact, even if the factors associated with neopatrimonialism were absent or severely curtailed, planning would still not have promoted any meaningful development as long as the exercise was embedded in the Eurocentric diffusionist model. It is, therefore, germane to examine the failure of development planning in Nigeria from a more comprehensive and encompassing perspective. A significant culprit is the Eurocentric diffusionism promoted by the dominant development paradigms. As noted by Goran Hyden, Africa’s development crisis “cannot be blamed simply on factors such as corruption and inefficiency because . . . African countries have been forced to progress on terms foreign to their own material and social realities.”⁵ The diffusionist perspective, which formed an integral part of the dominant Western epistemological notion of Africa, right from the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade, is based on the entrenched notion of “savage,” “barbaric,” “backward,” and “irrational” African societies. As a result, African societies were deemed incapable of developing internal institutions that would support the promotion of development. The development project was therefore perceived in the form of transplanting Western institutions into Nigeria. Thus, development planning strategies denigrated and discountenanced Nigeria’s social and cultural realities while fostering a development process that was out of tune with the country’s socio-cultural realities. This diffusionist development strategy adversely affected development planning.

It is significant to point out that neopatrimonialism and associated constructs, as well as Eurocentric diffusionism, were influenced by the Weberian paradigm, an indication of the influence of Max Weber on Western social sciences. Nevertheless, these constructs, in certain significant respects, represented a misreading of Max Weber.⁶ Although, in a recent work, Hinnerk Bruhns acknowledged the fact that the proposition that African states are generally neopatrimonial “may pose serious difficulties from the vantage of the Weberian conceptualization of types of domination,” he maintained that “the usefulness of the concept in analyzing the mechanisms and functioning of the post-colonial African state must not be underestimated.”⁷ Indeed, the ways in which neopatrimonialism and similar constructs were employed made them become instruments for serving Western hegemonic and imperial interests in Africa.

THE MANTRA OF NEOPATRIMONIALISM

As already noted, a major preoccupation of many Western social science Africanists has been the periodic churning out of various adjectival appellatives purportedly inspired by Max Weber’s work. These terminologies, which proliferated from the early 1980s and are situated within extreme forms of cynical and derogatory analyses of African societies, have fostered Afro-pessimism. Thandika Mkandawire has pointed out that the lexicographic epithets are not products of “the exigencies of new discoveries that demand new representations.” In fact, the words and phrases largely mean the same thing. Thus, it would appear as if the search for new terminology is driven more by “academic hubris that fuels the quest for originality if not in conceptualization at least in labeling.”⁸ Nevertheless, central to these Weberian-inspired analyses is the concept of clientelism. All the terminologies discuss the existence of various forms of clientelist practices, which they claim adversely affected the development of African countries.

Clientelism has been defined as “a relationship of exchange between unequals,” under “which a superior [or patron] provides security for an inferior [or client], and the client in turn provides support for the patron.” In essence, this patron-client relationship involves dyadic exchanges of benefits from the patron in return for the client’s support and assistance.⁹ It has been pointed out that although “the patron-client bond is a moral one, it is based on a personal or private morality of obligations between individuals, which is necessarily at variance with a public morality based on the goals which an organization is intended to achieve or the internal virtues which it is intended to exhibit.” As a result, “clientelism acquires, in many contexts, its characteristic aura of illegitimacy or corruption.”¹⁰ Most Euro-American Africanists argue that although clientelism exists in both advanced capitalist and Third World countries, the phenomenon in Africa is different because it is suffused with corruption.¹¹ For instance, Nicolas van de Walle states that clientelism in Africa entails a variety of practices that involve the giving and receiving of favors, mainly on the basis of corruption. He claims “clientelism can be associated with corruption simply because the former relies on privileged access to public resources and some kind of conflict of interest.”¹²

Indeed, the literature on clientelism in Africa emphasizes the fraudulent use of state resources by political elites to engage in various forms of clientelist practices that bestow favor, benefits, and privileges to specific groups of people and individuals while consolidating their own material and political aggrandizements. As a result, it is claimed that political clientelism promoted large-scale privatization of state resources, nepotism, ethnicity, corruption, and fraud.¹³ Michael Bratton and Nicolas van de Walle described the linkage between clientelism and neopatrimonialism as “systematic clientelism.” They claim that under this phenomenon, the award of personal favors by neopatrimonial strongmen within the state “typically took the form of public sector jobs” while the distribution of public resources within society were through licenses, contracts, and projects.¹⁴

It is important to note that although some Africanist scholars acknowledge the existence of clientelism in Western societies, they tend to ignore, or at best, downplay the obvious cases of corruption associated with the practice. For instance, Bratton and van de Walle stated that although the use of public resources to benefit a coterie of loyalists was present in all types of political regimes, “African neopatrimonial regimes were distinctive in the extent to which systematic clientelism was generalized.”¹⁵ Indeed, clientelism in Western societies is primarily portrayed as a form of patronage in representative democracy in which politicians exchange posts and favors for electoral support. According to Christopher Clapham, this “clientelism of representation is created by the vote: a deliberate mechanism which places a critical resource in the hands of ordinary citizens by giving control over the state to the group of politicians who can gain the greatest amount of popular support.”¹⁶ Van de Walle recently refined his distinction between the nature of clientelism in Africa and in the West. He characterized what exists in Africa as “elite clientelism,” which “is limited to a narrow political elite” and involves “the strategic political allocation of public offices to key elites, granting personal access over state resources.” On the other hand, what exists in the West is “mass clientelism, which relies on the practice of using state resources to provide jobs and services for mass political clienteles, and usually involves party organizations and electoral politics.” In line with the modernist linear evolutionary model that characterizes Eurocentric diffusionist analysis, he stated that African countries will evolve from elite clientelism to mass clientelism when they acquire the features of mass redistribution of jobs and services, and mature political institutions that characterize the mature democracies of the West.¹⁷ However, in an incisive article, Marie-France Toinet and Ian Glenn trenchantly documented the relationship between clientelism and corruption in the United States. They stated that clientelism in the United States “has developed from a single exchange or chain of exchanges of vote or bloc of votes for favours or posts, to a more substantial exchange of funds and favours between politician and donor.”¹⁸

Prebendalism has become a fairly important label, which some Africanists have linked to clientelism and neopatrimonialism in analyzing African politics, economy, and society. Richard Joseph first applied this terminology to the analysis of Nigerian politics, noting that “clientelism and prebendalism are two of the fundamental principles of political organization and behavior in Nigeria.” He stated that the two features, which are complementary and mutually reinforcing, help explain the patron-client phenomenon of “godfatherism” in Nigeria, involving an individual seeking “the support and protection of an oga or a ‘godfather,’ while trying to acquire the basic social and material goods—loans, scholarships,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Maps
• 1. Introduction: Neopatrimonialism, Eurocentric Diffusionism, and Development Planning
• 2. Theoretical and Conceptual Foundations of Development Planning
• 3. Colonial Planning and the Foundations of Eurocentric Diffusionism
• 4. Postcolonial Planning and the Dialectics of Neopatrimonialism
• 5. Planning and Agricultural Development in Bendel State
• 6. Planning and Industrial Development in Bendel State
• 7. Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index