A Culture of Corruption: everyday deception and popular discontent in Nigeria (review)

Nigeria is famous for corruption, from the fraudulent emails almost everyone on the Internet receives to news stories of fantastic governmental impropriety. Nigerians and foreigners alike perceive corruption as tragically central to the country’s identity. The book under review is therefore of great interest. An ethnography of everyday corruption centred on Igbo-speaking areas of southeastern Nigeria, A Culture of Corruption offers an insightful account of popular perceptions of corruption. It will be of great interest to scholars in the field even while remaining accessible, engaging and free from jargon. Smith’s book is a substantial contribution to scholarship while also providing an introduction to the non-specialist. If the book were available in paperback, it would be perfect for teaching.

High-level governmental corruption is not one of Smith’s central concerns. Instead, A Culture of Corruption focuses on more pervasive forms of deception and malpractice. The opening chapter considers the famous emails (called ‘419’ after the provision of the Nigerian penal code that outlaws confidence schemes), describing the practices of 419 emailers based at internet cafes (some of whom are independent operators and others part of larger criminal organizations) and providing a typology of different genres of email. The second chapter looks at bribery and favouritism in public offices. Here, Smith provides a particularly insightful account of how complicated a project giving a bribe can be; knowing whom to pay requires a detailed knowledge of office politics. He joins this with an empathetic discussion of the pressures officials face to take bribes and to help their friends. All-pervasive corruption has created a self-reinforcing dynamic in which the vast majority of officials are forced to accept bribes, and ordinary people are forced to find official contacts in order to get driving licences, secure school places, and transact most official business. The third chapter looks at similar dynamics in non-governmental organizations, while the fourth looks at the dramatic ways in which corruption, clientage, and ethnicity have affected elections and party politics. The following three chapters then look at popular responses to this context, examining popular rumours about practices such as child sacrifice, the recent emergence of vigilante groups, and attempts to ameliorate these problems through Igbo nationalism and evangelical Christianity.

These portraits of corruption and reactions to it are engaging and insightful. They convey local colour without resorting to exoticization. The narrative is largely anecdotal with the bulk of each chapter devoted to rich case studies, punctuated by Smith’s commentary. This approach makes the book particularly appealing to non-specialists and useful for teaching. It is delightful to read, and it lays out the dynamics of popular corruption in a way that avoids the tendency to label it a specifically Nigerian or African pathology. Writing the book in this way does, however, leave unanswered some questions Smith’s project might productively have addressed.

As Smith notes in his preface, his research is centred on the Igbo east of Nigeria, and thus many aspects of his description can be applied to the whole country only with great caution. At times there is some slippage in the narrative between the ‘east’ and ‘Nigeria’, but the more serious problem is that corruption takes on meaning largely in relation to national-level processes of governance and patron–clientage. Smith notes that ‘corruption’ is also a category of local knowledge, designating everything from flamboyant national corruption down to everyday practices of local deception. This is true elsewhere in the federation. Examining the relationship of the national to the local would have been useful: Smith’s work is potentially of great comparative interest, and such an account would have underlined his book’s broader applicability. It might also have allowed one to appreciate how the contemporary culture of (eastern Nigerian) corruption came into being. Such an account would make it easier to read Smith alongside books like Richard...