Nigeria's Struggle for Democracy and Good Governance: A Festschrift for Oyeleye Oyediran (review)

The book under review arrives during a time of intensified global scrutiny of Nigerian political affairs. Like India, Brazil, China, and Japan, Nigeria is making a bid for its place as global power with a seat on the U.N. Security Council. Nigeria's Struggle for Democracy and Good Governance provides the scholarly analysis that both proponents (the Obasanjo regime) and opponents (the 2005 CIA Report on Nigeria's impending collapse) will use to argue their viewpoints. As the volume's co-editor, Ebere Onwudiwe, points out in the introduction, pessimists will find evidence in the book of the perennial failure of Nigerian politics; optimists, however, will point to the emergent crop of Nigerianist scholars and their analysis of the country's politics as a continuous and complex experiment premised upon dynamic state-society histories and structures.

A festschrift in honor of one of Nigeria's foremost Nigerian political scientists, whose work stands as a testimonial to Nigeria's relevance to democracy and development in Africa, the volume consists of twenty-six essays contributed by an array of academic luminaries, including Richard Sklar, Ebere Onwudiwe, Ayo Obe, Julius Ihonvbere, Larry Diamond, and Rotimi Suberu. There is no single theme tying the disparate chapters together; indeed this is the book's most glaring weakness. Nevertheless, in the second chapter Sklar defines the central tenets of Nigerian politics. He puts the structural features of Nigerian politics in comparative and historical context by presenting the country as the world's fifth largest federation after India, the United States, Brazil, and Russia. Nigeria's federalism, he argues, is the country's most important political innovation, although the population at large had little to do with its creation.

Sklar's discussion of Nigerian federalism is instructive in delineating the normative contours of Nigerian politics and privileging the country's distinctive polyethnic federalist orientation, whereby the federal system, unlike that of the United States (though resembling the system in India and Russia), largely coincides with ethnic and linguistic boundaries. The essay explores the implications of emerging and competing ideological perspectives regarding federalism and sheds light on the country's contemporary tensions, including the country's south-south subnationalism involving a rabid debate about fiscal federalism and oil resource mobilization. In the north the counterpart is the conflict over the implementation of Shari'a constitutions.

I would have liked to see the second part of this book, entitled "Governance," much more intricately incorporated, both conceptually and historically, into the profiling of a "Nigerian politics" begun by Sklar. This section fails to reconcile the theoretical construct of governance with democratic politics and politics broadly speaking, and the chapters on "governance institutions" reflect instead the limitations of the ubiquitous (i.e., Western) governance model in which political institutions are treated as autonomous, abstract, and externally derived political processes ungrounded in the country's complex and dynamic sociopolitical, economic, and cultural conditions. The analytical outcome of such a model is most always failure! However, the extent to which that failure is a symptom of the theoretical model or of the actual political process is a heuristic question, one that is examined, notably, in the numerous works of Oyeleye Oyediran.

Underscoring my point is Emmanuel Ojo's chapter on the role of the military in political transitions, which takes as a given the repressive nature of the military in politics and thus conceptualizes the starting point of Nigerian democratic politics in a skewed and unidimensional way. Autocracy and patrimonialism thereby become the sole conditions from which Nigerian politics emerge. Indeed, Ojo's conclusion—that Nigeria's military political transition can in no way be a catalyst to democratic consolidation—is not surprising. I would suggest, however, that such analyses be rethought to address more balanced and empirical realities of civil-military relations and transitions to democracy in Nigeria in a way achieved by...