State as Illusion? A Commentary on Moral Economies of Corruption

Steven Pierce has written a provocative and compelling account of corruption in Nigeria, a country customarily seen as a sort of limit case of the very worst of African governance failures and an exemplary instance of oil dependency (the so-called resource curse) in which state deficits and dysfunctions ("pathologies") are synonymous with a deep culture of corruption, what Paul Collier cleverly called "the survival of the fattest."¹ Corruption of various forms is deeply normalized—from the ubiquitous 419 scams to everyday petty corruption among Nigeria's notoriously corrupt police and security forces to the grand corruption of the pillaging of state resources and the untrammeled privatization of public office (what Ken Saro-Wiwa famously called "brigandage").² In 2006 Nuhu Ribadu, then head of an unusually assertive Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), claimed that since 1960 the government had stolen over $380 billion at the time he was investigating no fewer than two-thirds of the country's thirtysix governors!). Illicit financial flows (IFFs) from the country between 2005 and 2014 are estimated to have totaled some $182 billion, roughly 15 percent of the total value of Nigeria's trade over the period of 2005 to 2014 ($1.21 trillion). In 2014 alone, illicit financial flows from Nigeria were estimated at $12.5 billion, representing 9 percent of the total trade in that year. The oil sector has historically been seen as a space of unreconstructed abuse. Between 2009 and 2011, Nigeria lost over $10 billion to corruption in a fuel import subsidy scheme. Oil "bunkering" (theft) is now a multibillion-dollar industry and is widely assumed to involve high-ranking military officials, politicians, and state functionaries. Upon taking office, President Muhammadu Buhari referred to "mind-boggling" sums of money stolen from the oil sector by an "oil management mafia" during the previous administration;³ in late 2016 the National Assembly opened an investigation into whether $17 billion in undeclared oil and fuel exports had been diverted and stolen. Corruption has been ever-present in both the popular, political, and scholarly imaginations in Nigeria since Independence (and indeed before, as Pierce shows). The longue durée of corruption-talk is one of the foundations of Moral Economies of Corruption. Of course, these numbers are at once mind-boggling—Diezani Alison-Madueke, who served as minister of petroleum resources under former president Goodluck Jonathan from 2010 to 2015, is alleged to have stolen $90 billion (isn't $1 billion quite enough?)—and also speculative, prone to considerable exaggeration and hyperbole, shape-shifting, and ultimately unknowable (it is, for example, almost impossible to calculate for example the total oil revenues captured by the state between 1960 and 2018, let alone what proportion has been diverted or illegally appropriated). And it is this epistemological and discursive elasticity—the labile nature of corruption in political and popular discourse—that provides Pierce's entry point into a rethinking not only of what work corruption does (and has done over time) in postcolonial Nigeria, but of the form and character of the state (his book is subtitled State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria). He asks, in other words, what corruption points to in terms of our understanding of the long-standing and contentious question of the character of "the African State" (described variously as felonious, suspended, gatekeeper, criminal, predatory, patrimonial, weak, pathological, failed, informalized, rentier, and so on—the list is almost endless).

Pierce's approach to corruption is, in theoretical terms, what one might call poststructural: it is discursive (shaped, as was his earlier book on Kano,⁴ by the work of Michel Foucault) and performative (he draws upon the work of Timothy Mitchell on state effects, and upon the political theory of Wendy Brown and Judith Butler). A Foucauldian lens focuses less on nailing down what corruption is, how it is defined, various parsings of its forms, and the largesse it generates than on the work that claims and accusations of corruption has done (and to what effect) at various political conjunctures. Here, Pierce offers the reader not simply an inventory of time...