Welcome to another episode of Ideas Untrapped podcast.
In this episode, I spoke to Portia Roelofs who is a Lecturer in Politics at the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, and also a research associate at the African Studies Centre in Oxford. She is the author of a fantastic book titled Good Governance in Nigeria; Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century.
Portia critiques the "good governance" agenda, arguing it's a continuation of structural adjustment programs from the '80s and '90s, which focused on market-driven development, privatization, and state withdrawal. She asserts these reforms didn't consider the social and political realities in African countries, leading to significant challenges, including a narrowed policy scope and "choiceless democracies."
Portia proposes a more socially embedded approach to governance, emphasizing the need for government officials to be accessible and accountable in more culturally resonant ways, beyond just transparency and efficiency. She suggests practical steps like politicians residing in their constituencies and being directly reachable. The conversation also explores the tension between technocratic and populist approaches in Nigerian politics, highlighting the importance of addressing immediate social needs alongside long-term developmental goals.
Despite the critique of current governance models, the conversation acknowledges the complexity of governance in Nigeria and the need for nuanced solutions that consider both the efficiency of the civil service and the broader economic and social goals of the state. The discussion concludes by reflecting on the need for a more comprehensive discussion on the role and aims of the state in Nigeria, beyond just improving civil service efficiency.
Transcript
Tobi;
I'll start with where you started your book. I should say I enjoyed your book very much.
Portia;
Thank you.
Tobi;
It's very interesting, and I really connected with it as a Nigerian. So, what you described as the good governance agenda and its challenges, its failures, and way it has come short in the context of Africa and Nigeria, in this case, is where I’ll like us to really start. So just give me a brief rundown of that, because what you call the good governance agenda or the technocratic World Bank-type description of what good governance is, is still the popular and, I should say, acceptable form of discourse in the popular mind about how we think governance should be. So, just give me a brief rundown of your critique of that.
Portia;
Okay, sure. So, I think to understand a good governance agenda you really have to understand what it was a response to and, kind of, the immediately preceding history. So in the 1980s and the 1990s, you have the structural adjustment programs which are promoted by the World Bank and the IMF and adopted by many, many countries both in Africa and in the global south. And these are programs that take aim at the kind of bloated state and too much state intervention in the economy. And they say the economy needs to be structurally changed to allow market forces to drive development. So you see a kind of consistent pattern of privatization, liberalization, devaluation, removal of capital controls. And that was driven by a strongly ideological belief that the market is the best allocator of resources and the best driver of development.
And Nigeria, in 1986, under Babangida adopted something that was basically the structural adjustment programs, albeit not quite in name. And then by the kind of 1990s, the early 1990s, the late 1980s, people were starting to realize, actually, these structural adjustment programs don't work. They don't achieve what we wanted them to achieve. In many places, they had absolutely disastrous results. And a lot of the critique of that is coming from places like CODESRIA (Council for the Development of Social Science in Africa). So African scholars, from a more heterodox perspective saying: you can't rely on the market to just fix all of Africa's problems. And actually, in doing so, you did things like eliminating much of the middle class, these are hitting a lot of people who were otherwise in the professions. So there are lots of controversy over the structural adjustment, and it's seen as being a very ideological project.
And then in response to this, within the World Bank, there was thinking about, okay, maybe the problem isn't necessarily at the level of the policies, it's at the level of how does government itself operate. And so you see this move - you've got reports from the early 90s like governance and development, this move towards saying, okay, we need to reform how government operates. And this is actually applicable to all governments. All governments should be accountable. All governments should be transparent. All governments should be made more efficient. And if we do this by focusing on how government itself operates, then that's a better route to development. It's kind of like way of answering some of the critiques of structural adjustment.
However, many people say that the good governance agenda was really just a continuation of much of the structural adjustment policies. That the core ideas that you need to withdraw state intervention in many, many areas of the economy, privatize, liberalize, adopt private sector methods of operating and import them into the public sector, kind of lived on. So there's as much continuity as there is rupture. And so in practice, a lot of what the good governance agenda was doing was things like public finance reform or civil service reform and that kind of lives on. But I should also say that the word good governance has been used to cover many, many different things. And so people aren't always talking about the same thing when they use the term.
For example, in the early 90s, you have this, like, third wave of democratization. And in some ways, the good governance agenda was a bit interwoven with this. It was seen as multiparty democracy, elections. So there are definitely different debates to be had. But the one I guess I'm interested in is this one that says good governance is accountability, transparency, and the public-private divide. And the interesting thing there is it really promotes this idea of good government is technocracy. And so that means the people who are making decisions really should be the people with technical knowledge. That's often like public finance experts or economists. And the interesting thing is that that immediately sets up a bit of a tension, not necessarily with politics, which I know we've touched upon already, but with democracy.
Because if you've basically got, like, philosopher kings, wearing suits, with their degrees, then what's the role for the people? What's the role for mass participation? So the Thandika Mkandawire's critique of this was he said that you create choiceless democracies. So at a time when African countries were often opening up to democratic governance, in 1999, in Nigeria, for example, it also came at the same time that the kind of menu of policy options that it was acceptable to pursue and that were permissible within this kind of good governance framework and aid conditionality and increasing controls from the IMF and the World Trade Organization was really narrowing.
So finally people have the vote, but what can they vote for? Actually, quite a narrow set of kind of pro-market policies that pursue development in quite a narrow way as defined by international institutions. So that's kind of what I see as being some of the central tensions of the good governance agenda. And in the book, I kind of explore how does this play out at the level of state government in Oyo State, for example, or how is this playing out in debates in Lagos State government’s new agencies or whatever. So, yeah, I'm really standing on the shoulders of other people like Yusuf Bangura, and other Nigerian political scientists, people who were critiquing the good governance agenda as it was developing in the 90s.
Tobi;
We'll get into your field work in Oyo States, and I'm curious what the Lagos model really is, and I know a lot of people in the audience are curious as well. But I want you to help me contextualize the good governance argument better. So I think where I share your sentiments, especially around the Structural Adjustment Program and other donor driven programs of the like is that they are very antidemocratic, they are not even accountable in the sense that they define accountability to be. And I think we share similar sentiments in that regard.
So let me take one very popular example that sort of intersects with the discourse around governance, which is that in Nigeria we've been talking about corruption for decades, right? There are always stories in the news of bureaucrats, civil servants and even politicians misappropriating public funds, you know, and the way the good governance narrative sort of feeds into that is that if you then have a process of rules that holds people accountable, it then becomes difficult to misappropriate public funds. Funds that should be invested in social programs or infrastructure that then find their way into people's accounts via very clever and, in some cases, not so clever means.
But what we have seen is that despite all the talk of instituting all these frameworks and rules, we haven't really solved the corruption problem. It never really goes away. Even under a President Like Buhari who was strongly seen as clean and incorruptible, there were still massive news reports of corruption under him. So help me use corruption to contextualize the failure, I would say, of the good governance agenda. And what's the alternative to that? How can we better understand the concept of good governance?
Portia;
Yeah, so this is such an important thing to talk about. And actually, when I first came to studying southwest Nigeria, I thought that my project was going to be about corruption, because I thought, why not? I'm coming to Nigeria, that's a constant critique Nigerians have of their own country. And what I found was, first of all, trying to research corruption, the interviews were often quite boring. Because it's almost like there's this script. You ask people about corruption in Nigeria and they have a lot to say about it, but it often covers kind of very, very similar sort of themes. I kind of got used to hearing the same things over and over again. And I found this interesting of, like, if this feels like there's a very, very standard kind of script, maybe more conceptually, what I realized was that something happens when we talk about corruption - and when we focus on critiquing corruption as a kind of, like, dominant aspect of Nigerian politics - is it creates a false illusion of consensus.
Because if we spend all of our time talking about what's wrong, it gives this impression that we agree about what corruption is, thus we must agree about what the opposite of corruption is. As if we all want the same thing. If only we could get rid of corruption, then we could do X, Y, or Z. And actually, X, Y and Z are quite different options. And that's why we have democracy. That's why we have political debate and contestation. Because actually, people's visions of what the state should do and what society should look like are not all the same.
So I decided that it would actually be much more interesting to look at what are the positive visions that people have of what they think government should be doing if it weren't corrupt. So that's kind of why I wanted to start finding out, okay, what are people's kind of visions of good governance? Also on that, I found that there were some interesting instances where we think that corruption and good governance are the opposite of each other, and yet there were things that people were doing where some people thought, oh, that's an epitome of corruption, and other people would think, no, Hooray, this is the epitome of good governance.
And I think by understanding those more ambiguous, more puzzling, more tricksy cases, we learn much more about the underlying values of what good governance could mean. And I think this comes out maybe most clearly in the study of transparency, for example. So one of the things that governments have kind of position themselves as succeeding in this good governance agenda, one of the things that they did was tend to put more documents and budgets and statistics and data online. And this is seen as an unambiguously good thing. It makes them more transparent. There are lots of NGOs and civil society organizations in Nigeria like BudgIT that are pushing for this, and it's broadly seen as like a measure of transparency.
And yet at the same time, there's also a kind of popular suspicion among people about what this data and these budgets and these documents hide as much as reveal. Or the idea that, well, you know, if you're educated enough to put together these very complex accounting documents, maybe you're also smart enough to kind of use them to cover your tracks or to bamboozle people. And so in the chapter of the book where I talk about transparency, I give a couple of examples. And first of all, is this kind of Nigerian idiomatic idea of speaking grammar. That you're using very fine, beautiful, elevated language, but that doesn't mean, oh, you're upright and trustworthy. It means you're kind of obfuscating. And that actually it'd be more truthful if you spoke in a more accessible register.
But also there's a debate from before the 2015 Oyo state election that was on the radio, where one of their other candidates is talking about Ajimobi, and Ajimobi says, oh, you know, we built this bridge, and you can't say it's corrupt because we spent this much, this much, this much. Look at the budget. And his opponent says, oh, my brother is very good at giving statistics. And there's a glint in his eye or a smirk on his face, and the implication is like, you know, statistics is not everything. So I think it's really important to probe into that suspicion of these traditional good governance methods, because otherwise we don't understand why something that we think should work and be a solution isn't necessarily working. And it also helps us understand why when you have governors who are really performing kind of good governance in these standard ways that we expect, they're not always reelected and they're not always locally popular. And I think the standard account or the standard kind of interpretation of this by academics and commentators is, well, when you fight corruption, corruption fights back. And there's this idea that Nigerian voters are incorrigible. They're just totally committed to just taking rice and chicken from people and giving them their vote, and just that they're so kind of entrenched in these patrimonial ways of thinking that even when they're offered something better, they don't take it.
And I think I'm a little bit skeptical or hesitant about embracing that narrative in an uncomplicated way, because I think actually voters are often doing something much more sophisticated. They're looking at what politicians are doing, and they're comparing them to more popular or more kind of broad based ideas of what accountability and transparency should mean. So we shouldn't see it as a war between accountability and corruption, but we should see it as a conflict between different ideas of what accountability might mean. And that would require us to take Nigerian voters much more seriously.
Tobi;
That's interesting. There’s also… if we look at even the last election, which the issue of vote buying was really a big issue around the elections and it was even one of the reasons why the central bank engaged in the really expensive and economically destructive currency change policy. And I've never really agreed also with that narrative of voters being stupid and they are selling their votes and basically selling their future for stipends. And I think it's condescending and it gives people less credit about their ability to make choices about their lives. So which then brings me to… I think it takes me back a little bit to early in the book where you talked about the sort of progressive era in Southwest politics. One of the things I love about the book is the concept of olaju - enlightenment - which you used really well, where you had this political movement that grew out of olaju, the enlightened participation in governance. And, of course, how Awolowo was a key figure in that and how there was so much focus on technocratic governance. And the trouble it eventually ran into with voters and some of the local political dynamics. So, walk me through the… I should say I don't want to use the word failure or the challenges of technocratic conception of what governance should look like. Sort of walk me through that.
Portia;
Sure. Yeah. So, I'm so glad that part of the book resonated with you because it was a really interesting part to kind of research and think through. So with this concept of olaju, which is this Yoruba word and apologies, I can't do tonal pronunciations, but this is drawing on the work of people like Wale Adebanwi or J.D.Y. Peel and Olufemi Vaughan, who've looked at this historical thinking about the evolution of Yoruba ideas of what it means to be a good leader. And even if we look in precolonial times, there's this idea that the leader should be the point where power and knowledge meet and that a good leader is someone who has maybe a type of knowledge that other people don't have. So we see, up to 150 years ago, this idea of leaders and enlightenment being overlapping. And then this takes on certain forms in the establishment of the colonial bureaucracy.
You know, in precolonial Ibadan, to be powerful, you had to be a really good warlord. You had to be a powerful head of household and show virtue in war. And then the bureaucracy comes, and actually, you need to start to be able to read and write and to be able to kind of participate in these kind of Westernized forms of bureaucratic control as well. So this is detailed really beautifully in the work of historian Ruth Watson as well. So you have this evolution of what does that enlightened knowledge that leaders need look like? And then you have Chief Obafemi Awolowo, who's very influential in Yoruba politics. He's not from Ibadan, but he's called the Sage. And he takes on this figure of being, like, leader of the Yoruba, whatever that might mean, and he's seen as being a perfect fulfillment of Olaju and this idea of enlightened leadership. And he sets up the party - Action Group, which is a progressive party that starts first under colonialism and then leads into the First Republic, and later also founds the UPN - Unity Party of Nigeria, which carries forward similar ideas, which many of your listeners will be familiar with.
So I characterize this in the book as being a form of government that not necessarily is technocratic, but maybe it falls under a wider umbrella that I call epistocratic. And so we take the word like epistemology means a study of knowledge. So epistocratic is the rule by people who have the knowledge. And it can include technical knowledge, but can include other thoughts as well, kind of. And so this kind of Yoruba progressive movement that I should say is also linked into certain ideas of Yoruba cultural nationalism that maybe I can't really touch upon in this discussion, but are important to it as well, the formation of the Yoruba ethnic identity, cultural practices, linguistic practices, et cetera, et cetera.
But the problem with focusing on a kind of epistocratic approach to governance is often it means that you neglect other elements of governance that are equally important. And so the one I kind of emphasize in the book is the social dimension. I think there's also the material. And I think when we study African politics, we're often obsessed with the material. Like, what are people doing? What are they giving people? Are they giving public goods or private goods? So I try to set that to one side and then kind of bring it in a bit later. So this kind of progressive form of governance inspired by Awolowo has a certain position in terms of the social relations it posits between leaders and followers, which is one of elitism. And you see a really, really interesting use of the idea of elites and what's a relationship between elites and masses. And you have this idea that, okay, well, if the elites are the people who have enlightened knowledge, they've been exposed, they've been abroad, they have Western education, then their job is, first of all, to set the direction of society, because the masses don't have their abstract knowledge, they're not enlightened, they don't necessarily know where we should be going. But also that it's the job of the elites to make the masses more like the elites. And that means you don't necessarily need to listen to what the masses are saying. It has certain antidemocratic threads running through it because you're basically saying that the masses don't know what they want.
And so in the book, I link this to something that Governor Ajimobi says in one of his speeches, where he says, a good leader takes people where they want to go, a great leader takes people where they need to go. Actually, if you're enlightened leader, you don't necessarily need to be accountable to what the people want or what the people are saying that they want to happen. You need to be accountable to serving their best interests. And so you often get this kind of idea, what I call the Lagos model, the Tinubu project, followed up by Fashola and extended into the southwest of wait and see what we can do in four years. And then at the end of the four years, look at what we've done, have we performed? And if so, that means everything that we did during that four years was worth it. So you often had this idea also of accountability to performance, but also the legitimacy and the necessity of sacrifice. And in some of my other work, I look at this in the context of urban renewal, which in Ibadan and Lagos basically entailed the demolition and destruction of thousands, if not tens or hundreds of thousands of small scale shops, for example. So people losing their livelihood where they'd been based for decades, potentially.
And what was really interesting in places like Ibadan, under Ajimobi, was Ajimobi wasn't downplaying the cost of demolition. He wasn't saying, no, no, it's fine. He wasn't ignoring it. He wasn't trying to silence people when they complained about it. So very pro-Ajimobi newspapers were recording people saying, you know, my life is a disaster now, I can't make money. And he was saying, yes, but it's a sacrifice. So this very explicit acknowledgment of you need to trust what we're doing. And he uses the image of sometimes when you're a parent, you have to make the kid take the bitter medicine because the parent knows what's best. So this is all a very long way of saying, why is it that this kind of progressive project runs into trouble? And I think it's because it neglects the kind of appropriate social relations that say that the constituents want to be connected to their followers, they want to be taken seriously, they want to be listened to. Whereas if you kind of position yourself in this progressive mindset, you don't necessarily need to listen to voters that much. Because they're not the people who have the answers. So I think often you've seen, running parallel to this kind of Yoruba progressive line, an equally deeply rooted and equally historically established, more kind of populist conservative line in Yoruba politics. Which is embodied by people like Adedibu, Adelabu, these kind of figures who like, if you go to the streets of Ibadan, people are still singing songs about them. They still remember them now in 2023. And they're seen as being the people who care for the people. They're sensitive to their needs. And often this has been performed in ways that are very, very material.
So, in Oyo State we talk about amala politics. Amala is a staple food, it's like a swallow that you have in Oyo State. And people like Lamidi Adedibu would literally have people gathering outside of his house and he'd feed them amala and gbegiri. And again, there are lots of dominant conceptions of politics in Africa that say this is just standard patrimonialism. This is just standard getting people to support you politically by catering to their most base needs. But I think it's not only the kind of material exchange, but it's also the symbolic and the ideas of sociality that this conveys, which is you're hungry, so I'm going to take that seriously. I care for you. I care for the everyday people. Yeah, I think that's why it runs into trouble. And whenever the progressives have become kind of too elite, too enlightened, too like haughty, there's always been this alternative line waiting to step into the vacuum when they're not able to kind of meet popular demands for both epistemic and social rule.
Tobi;
So in a contested kind of way, as you posited in the book, isn't this also like a kind of political entrepreneurship? So it's kind of like two rival products going to the market and see who can persuade the consumer.
Portia;
Yeah, absolutely.
Tobi;
How much of that was going on at the time time, as opposed to maybe like a failure of technocracy. And you're absolutely right about the progressive era in Southwestern politics, by the way. I recall that I've seen copies of Bola Ige's letters to students every term during their resumption. So there was this idea of, you know, we won't really run a progressive, elitist government. And I also think that some of their goals were not necessarily bad. Even some of their policy positions or proposition or programs and agendas are also quite populist as well, like universal education, universal health care and things like that. So I wonder how much of the failure we saw was due to political entrepreneurship and just the savviness of their political rivals being able to look at the people, look at their complaints and find a way to sort of appeal to that.
Now, it may not be in the Patrimonial Condescending way, but we see you, we look at you, we know what you feel and this is where these people are messing up and we are offering something better. Because when I look at the outcomes of, should I say, these two rival conception of government, even in cases where the amala politics, to put it that way, was able to weaponize people’s discontent to sort of kick out the progressives, the rivals generally often do not do better. Right? You often find people at the end of it almost complaining about the same thing. This person's out of touch or we got him there, but now… so just walk me through that. How much of it is the failure of the progressive project per se, as opposed to just the contested nature of politics?
Portia;
Yeah. Yeah. So I think that's a really great point, and I love your characterization of, like, can we think of these two things as different products which are being offered to the electorate? And so I should issue the caveat that the story I'm telling of Yoruba politics is a stylized narrative. And I do believe that there are these two kind of like ideological threads that we can trace, which is somewhat contested in the history of studying Nigerian politics where people say there's no ideology. But to make that point, you have to erase some of the details and the complexity. So if any historians of Yoruba politics read the book, I'm sure they'll have many points where they're like, oh, but it's more complicated. So, you know, Adedibu, he started his political career in the Action Group, so I'm taking him as the embodiment of the kind of opposition to Awolowo. But he actually has very strong links as well to these guys. And also, everyone in Ibadan knows each other. So there's definitely more kind of complexity there. But I think it's still a useful way of thinking about how politics has evolved.
And I also wanted to…you know, you're saying these progressives, they've done some good things as well. And I really want to emphasize that many of the achievements that have put the Southwest Zone in the position it's in today of having often the highest socioeconomic indicators, highest levels of education, high levels of human capital, whatever, they were achieved because of the kind of four pillars of the Action Group and the kind of transformative decade under Awolowo. And that's kind of part of my academic motivation is it's easy to critique the bad guys. It's much more interesting to critique the good guys. And for many people, they quite rightly feel that Awolowo is the best president that Nigeria never had, that he's the best offering that Nigeria had. But I think we find out most from then saying, okay, but still, what's missing? Even from the people who we wish that they could have done more. That has relevance when you're thinking about the Lagos model, because the Lagos model was really, really popular with donors. So organizations like USAID, the EU, what was formerly DFID, the British Department for International Development. I quote some things in the book where development professionals are looking at Lagos, and they're like, there are reforms that we've been trying to push in Nigeria for 20 years at the federal level, and we've had no success. And here's a state government which is taking on these reforms and driving them of their own accord.
So not necessarily saying, oh, everything they did was a failure or their approach is totally wrong, but saying where we have these examples that many people think are the best offerings Nigerian politics from the last 30 years, we still need to be aware of where do they fall short? And why might they fail to command popular legitimacy in the ways we might expect? And then finally, in terms of thinking about political entrepreneurship. So when I talk in the book as a whole, I kind of conclude that what we need to be thinking about is socially embedded good governance. Which is defined by more socially embedded conceptions of accountability, accessibility, transparency in people, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying that this approach is something that the populists are doing. And I talk about a number of quite unsavory figures, people like Ayo Fayose in Ekiti State, and I'm definitely not saying, oh, let's copy them, or they've got the solutions. But what I think we see is that there are kind of a number of underlying either reference points or demands that voters as a whole tend to have.
They tend to want some attention to the epistemic dimensions of government. Like, you definitely don't want a leader who's not enlightened, but that's not enough on its own. And there's some demand to have appropriate social relations with leaders or leaders who perform the appropriate social relations and kind of has socially embedded forms of governance. But again, that on its own is not enough. Yeah, you need a government that can deliver, whether that's long term infrastructure or immediate economic benefits.
One of the figures I talk about in Oyo State is Lam Adesina. A very highly regarded public intellectual, you know, he was a teacher, he was a really smart man. But it's not just enough to do that kind of enlightenment side of it. He wasn't able to deliver that kind of material element of government quickly enough in response to those demands immediately after the return to democracy in 1999. So I'm kind of saying there's like a triangle at the heart of what good governance means. And if you neglect any of those points, then other people will step in. And these, like, political entrepreneurs, as you say, will see an opportunity and say, actually, we can step in and offer some of what you're neglecting to offer. And what I would say is that it's Populists who have a natural affinity with the social element of government. So they're often the people where we see the most exaggerated, almost like pantomime versions of accessibility and socially embedded good government, because it's often something that they kind of have an instinct for, but that doesn't mean that what they're doing is actually being accessible or actually having appropriate social relations. Often they're kind of like…
Tobi;
Performative…
Portia;
Yeah, it's like a kind of very exaggerated performance. So, yeah, I hope that kind of contextualizes a little bit how I see these two lines of politics, and it's a stylization, but I still think it's useful.
Tobi;
We've been talking about certain things in the course of the conversation that we haven't really clearly defined yet. So, tell me what and I know a number of my audience would be very interested in this, especially given the current political climate. So what is the Lagos model? Because we know the current president more or less ran on his record in Lagos. Record of performance in Lagos. He is generally seen as the man who built Lagos, but this isn't about him personally. So just what is the Lagos model as conceptualized in the book and your choice of Oyo State as the sort of case study to look at that. Why?
Portia;
Yeah, so the Lagos model is a term that I coined, but I also think it describes something that a lot of people are talking about, but maybe in other kind of terms. And so at its most basic, it's the form of governance that Tinubu initially develops and then extends under the Fashola leadership from 1999 2015 in Lagos state. So it's kind of what he's doing. And then this is replicated in other southwestern states from 2011 onwards. Okay, so what is the content of the Lagos model? Well, we've talked a lot about its historical, ideological antecedents, so it draws a little bit on this, like Awolowo progressivism. That's definitely part of the picture. But Tinubu's position within that history is a little bit ambiguous. He's definitely not the clearest example of a descendant of Awolowo, politically.
Tobi;
Yeah, his Awoism is contestable.
Portia;
Yes. He's also informed by what was happening in the southwest in the 1990s under Abacha. We have the leadership of General Babangida in the 80s and early 90s. We says he's going to open up to democracy. We then have the June twelveth election with MKO Abiola, who's a Yoruba Muslim businessman. But basically you have the prodemocracy movement that uses this June 12 election that was annulled. And we have the arrival of General Sani Abacha, who becomes the most despicable, violent, despotic dictator Nigeria has ever seen. And under Sani Abacha, you have various kind of slightly younger politicians organizing as part of the prodemocracy movement and NADECO, and that's where we see the rise of some figures like Tinubu, Dr. Kayode Fayemi, who also goes on to be governor of Ekiti State. So you have these variety of influences and then what we see in Lagos is a kind of package of policies and reforms and approaches that comes to characterize the Lagos model more specifically.
So I would say that it is a model of development that involves a very strong state, but the state using its power to drive private sector driven development, or to kind of facilitate private sector driven development. So common policies that make up this model are the expansion of the tax net with the intention of driving internally generated revenue. Interestingly, this kind of serves a variety of ends. So, as you talked about at the very beginning, this was partly a way of enabling Lagos State to have financial autonomy from the centre in a country where many states were just relying on the statutory allocation of oil revenues from the Federal Government, which was very patchy and erratic.
In the case of Lagos State, which was often knocking heads with the Federal Government at the time, you often see like a digitization of tax records, a professionalization of the tax department, in this case Lagos Inland Revenue Service. This tends to come along with civil service reforms. So one of the things that Tinubu did, and that often is then created in other states, is the creation of kind of executive agencies or new forms of trans-urban governance. So in Lagos you see things like LASTMA, LAWMA, Kick against Indiscipline, so a real changing of the structure of urban governance. And then we also see the embrace of certain kind of private sector driven initiatives or ways of bringing the private sector into development, especially in the promotion of public private partnerships. In Lagos state that often took the form of things like the Lagos State Security Trust Fund, which is a collaboration between state and the private sector.
And behind this is this wider justification that you need to bring in investors and that the state needs to bring in investors by controlling and changing public space, which is why urban renewal and the improvement of transport infrastructure in big cities is so important to this model. So you see a lot of discussion, especially in the work I did in Ibadan, on people in Ibadan need to learn to see their city through the eyes of investors. They need to learn to see their city through the eyes of people who are coming anew. And they need to realize how dirty and old and backwards and African the city looks. And we need to make it look more new and modern and international, and otherwise we won't have the investment we need to kind of grow our economy and grow our internally generated revenue. There are some critiques I can talk about with this, but maybe I'll leave it there. I'm aware you also asked, why look at Oyo state for this?
Tobi;
Exactly. Because Oyo state kind of like…
Portia;
It's not Lagos.
Tobi;
Not that. I find that interesting choice because I can see why it makes sense. It sort of clearly demonstrates the way you sort of built your narrative in the book and, I mean, with the Fourth Republic and Lam Adeshina coming to office, who is as Awoist as they come, as progressive as he is and who also possess the sort of technocratic mindset and the challenges he then had in governance. And then you had someone like Ladoja coming into government and his own struggles also with the Adedibu brand of politics and the challenges he experienced before he was impeached and then brought back in the government. And we then saw the rapaciousness of Alao Akala…
Portia;
Yeah, ATM.
Tobi;
Yeah. And how the other model of governance can run away and then culminating into Ajimobi finally getting into government and to sort of bring back the professionalism and the technocracy. So the choice of Ibadan and Oyo State clearly comes alive in the book and the story you were trying to tell.
Portia;
So maybe in the interest of transparency I should set out both my academic justification, but also my practical justification. I mean, in a lot of ways, Oyo State is like the heartland of Yoruba land. It's kind of like the psychic heartland. Ibadan itself claims to be often the seat of the Yoruba, even though that's contested. So there are various reasons why it kind of makes sense to talk about Oyo State in terms of its resonance in the Yoruba imagination. Also, what I wanted to do, I wanted to look at the Lagos model without Tinubu. Because in our discussion, we've often been conflating them. But I think it was really useful to go somewhere and say, okay, how can we study this package of policies, reforms and kind of practices and ideas without necessarily always talking about the man himself?
And what we also lack is we lack the money and the economic base of Lagos. And so at the time I was studying it, Ibadan's state budget was about 10% that of Lagos. And so you're looking at often the contradictions and the tensions within the Lagos model become a lot sharper in somewhere like Oyo State because they don't have the money just to buy people off. And so where we saw in Lagos the ability to do things, for example, achieve security by demobilizing the area boys, but by also incorporating them into new forms of state patronage, which is what LASTMA, LAWMA, Kick Against Indiscipline, a lot of the waste management staff…
Tobi;
Yeah, yeah.
Portia;
You know, it created a lot of new jobs. Then it was kind of possible to say to people, this is a sacrifice, but there's going to be a reward to the sacrifice. Whereas in Oyo they were much more constrained. And also at the time I was there in 2015, they'd been suffering from very, very low oil revenues, which had led to plummeting budgets in states across the country. So across the country, civil servants hadn't been paid for a very long time. And suddenly the priorities of how you spend the scarce funds that you had became a lot more highly charged. So I think that also enabled the kind of ideology behind this to come out much more clearly, because people are having to really say, what are your priorities in politics?
Whereas, as you say, Ajimobi's predecessor, Akala of the PDP, was known as being the most profligate, the most venal. There were times when Obasanjo had be called in to try and make up with some of the local traditional leaders because Akala had offended them, because he was just so kind of difficult to tame. So there are a variety of reasons why it's worth studying the Lagos model in Oyo State. And also, it gives a nice kind of story of transformation.
Before Ajimobi came to power, there was this idea that you go to Ibadan and you have to sleep with one eye open because the insecurity was really terrible.
Tobi;
Yeah.
Portia;
And Ajimobi is able to do very similar to what Tinubu did in terms of Operation Burst, which is its security operation and the demobilization also of the NURTW, which is for listeners who aren't familiar with it, it's the National Union of Road Transport Workers. So the people who control the buses and the motor parks, and under Lamidi Adedibu had been the kind of foot soldiers of street violence and the source of a lot of that kind of insecurity. So those are the kind of analytical or academic reasons, but I also have to be transparent. So, one, Ibadan is a lovely place to stay.
Tobi;
Okay.
Portia;
And there are really great research networks there. So you have the University of Ibadan, and I had a lot of support from the Political Science department there, so I really have to appreciate that. I also had support from the French Research Institute in Ibadan, which is called IFRA, they were able to host me. They're the center of a lot of academic organizing. You have organizations like NISER (Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research), so there are various reasons it makes sense to be an academic researcher hosted and based in Ibadan. And so I think sometimes as researchers, we have to be a little bit honest about [how] we also have to try and have an easy life. So that was kind of part of the picture as well.
Tobi;
I mean now, extending the Lagos model, like you said, which I sort of agree with [is] Tinubu looms too large in discussions about governance in Lagos and he has been out of power for a long time, as a matter of fact. Now, looking at the Lagos model and how it extended to other parts of the country, in this case in Oyo State, which was your primary focus in the book, and also you touched upon Ekiti State. Now, how did it play out? And what were the… I know you talked about the constraints, resources…what were the other tensions you found in this extension of the Lagos model of governance, which is a very strong state that is then trying to use the power of the state to get private businesses and economic growth and transformation going locally? What problems did it run into?
Portia;
So something…when we were talking about before, this idea behind a lot of the active state of intervention was this idea that we need to attract investors. And so what is it that investors need? Whatever it is investors need is the top priority. And this led to, I think, sometimes a slightly confused understanding of different political priorities. Something I look at, and I don't think it's actually in the book, but it's something I'm looking at in a subsequent article, is I often found that people were talking about Maslow's hierarchy of needs. So, in general, this is like a little pyramid that says the most basic needs that people have is for material survival, and then it's psychological survival, and then at the top is something like self fulfillment or whatever. The meaning it was given in different political discussions was about how do you rank the priority of different needs and priorities in government? And it was often used in kind of opposing ways. I think it helps us kind of understand some of the contestation that was going on in Ekiti and also Oyo.
So if we take the list of priorities from the kind of Ajimobi progressive train, there's this idea of, first of all, we need to attract investors. To attract investors, we have to make the city attractive and accommodating to them. And there's explicit discussion of, like, so we need some good nightclubs, and we need a five star hotel, and the government should be active in creating these things. Which is rather odd because we tend to think of the government's obligations primarily in the spheres of things like health and education and security and whatever. And definitely there were elements where the Lagos model in Oyo state was very attentive to these things as well. So I'm not saying they ignored them. But what was interesting was you have this situation where we say the top priority is for the state to make sure that there are good nightclubs and recreational facilities for investors coming from outside. And we do see the development of things like Agodi Gardens… I forget the name, is it Premier Hotel, the one on the top of the hill?
Tobi;
Yes.
Portia;
And basically being told that this is the number one development priority. And yes, at the same time, people who are more everyday people in the state maybe who don't have that much money or who are struggling with unemployment or whatever, they're looking at this and they're thinking the government says that it won't do amala politics, it won't give out up small, small money to ordinary people on the street. It's knocking down our shops, it's doing demolitions, it's making our livelihoods hard, it's telling us we have to be making sacrifices. And yet the elite seem to be getting all of these benefits as if it's the most essential thing for development. I think you see this kind of debate about what should be prioritized? Who is it who has to wait for development? And often the outcome of this is that the poorest people are being told they have to wait and that the immediate benefits are going to go to the richer people. So, for example, one of the achievements of the Ajimobi governorship was that they built a flyover in Mokola in Ibadan, and that speeded up journey times. But who benefits from that? It's people who own cars, because often the buses are not even allowed over the flyover.
And so, in a very kind of everyday, direct way, people were seeing infrastructural development and they were seeing that it benefited the richer, more elite people. And I think there are genuine ideological tensions there over, like, what is the best route to development? What are the models we should be pursuing? But this came out really clearly in the Ekiti State election. So in 2010, there's the election of Dr. Kayade Fayemi, who in many ways is like the prime example of a technocratic politician. Very highly educated. He actually has a PhD from my own institution, King's College, London. Really smart guy. People describe him as omoluabi, so very cultivated. Not only is he smart, he has the correct moral dispositions, you know? And so he came to power in 2010, and he was seen as delivering this long term progressive vision. And yet in 2014, he came up for reelection, and his opponent was this guy, Ayo Fayose the Populist, this kind of pantomime expression of all of these more patrimonial tendencies. And from the Fayose campaign, we get this idea of “stomach infrastructure”.
Tobi;
Yeah. A phrase he popularised by himself, no less.
Portia;
And so we have, like, a challenge. Okay, well, Fayemi, he builds infrastructure. Me, I'm going to build stomach infrastructure. And there's a phrase that originates in Yoruba, I only know the English version of it, which is, you cannot tar a road without tarring the stomach. And so he was famous for distributing bags of rice, chicken, just very short term goods that fill people's bellies, but don't necessarily contribute to long term development. I know a lot of people who are more progressive just see this as an example of corruption fighting back. But I think it's important to pay attention to the temporality, by which I mean, like, how does this connect to different ideas of time? So if on the progressive approach, the kind of Fayemi approach, we have this idea that you have to wait for development. It's a long term project. You have to make sacrifices. You won't see the benefits today. And yet the people who are benefiting today are often the kind of people at the richer end of the spectrum, and then you're saying to the poorer people, you have to wait. It's not surprising that you have political entrepreneurs, as you say, emerging, who are offering much more short term benefits.
And this is in a country where a lot of people don't know how they're going to get to the end of the week, the end of the month. So telling them they have to wait is quite unrealistic, or this is the kind of argument that was put forward. So I think these ideas around what does development look like? What should the priorities be? They were real areas of contestation in places like Oyo and Ekiti. And the interesting thing was that so in 2014, Fayemi loses the election, and this becomes like a warning sign to all of the other Lagos model governors who were elected in 2011, because it shows, you know what?
Tobi;
It was a real shock.
Portia;
Yeah, like, people were shocked. And if you look at what progressive commentators are writing around the time, they're really despairing at the state of Nigerian democracy. And there was a sense of, well, we thought we were doing everything right, but maybe our diagnosis was wrong or maybe our approach was wrong. So there's also a real moment of soul searching among progressive politicians. Then the 2015, the following year, when a lot of those state elections were taking place, including in Oyo, they were kind of in the shadow of Fayose's victory in Ekiti. And when I was doing my fieldwork, everyone in Oyo state knew who Fayose was. Sometimes they laughed when I mentioned him or they gave me this look, but he kind of loomed large, this specter of even if you haveTinubu support, even if you have all of the donors cheerleading what you're doing, there's still this specter, this ghost…
Tobi;
They’re still vulnerable.
Portia;
There's still this vulnerability. And I guess my book is really trying to make sense of that vulnerability and get beyond this kind of corruption fights back narrative and ask was there something maybe deeper going on?
Tobi;
So one of the things I was able to and you can correct me if I'm wrong about this… one of the things I was able to abstract from the book and even from your answer right now, is that I think part of the failures of the progressive kind of governance and epistocratic model of the Awosit movement, which Fiami also kind of sort of represents in a way, though he’s from a different era, is that sometimes I think economic transformation for that model is not really about the people. Because it's one thing to ask voters to wait, but they have to know what they are waiting for. The signs really have to be there that things really will get better if we persist with what we are doing. It's not a case of oh wait, your tone will come, you know, it may never come. This is politics. There are other dynamics at play. Like you said, these are places where some times the livelihood of the population is really vulnerable. Many people live on daily wages, even from their micro businesses. So I feel perhaps maybe the progressives and this whole idea of technocratic epistocracy, you know, they have the wrong priorities sometimes. Like you said, the hotels, the bridges. Imean if we compare with Asia there are also transformative policies and public spending that you can do even alongside your hotels - things like agriculture that really touches upon the lives of the everyday people. Oyo state is very, very huge in agriculture. Ekiti state, I imagine the same thing. So I see your point that they are really out of touch, and I see how that can be quite vulnerable to the brand of politics of Fayose who will sit with you and eat corn on the road and convey the image of a guy who really feels the pulse of the street.
Portia;
Yeah, I think what you said, you're asking people to wait their turn, but their turn may never come, I think is a really interesting way of thinking about it. And all I can say on this point, really, is that I think this debate is only more relevant today than it was when I was writing, because we've had the announcement of the withdrawal of the fuel subsidy. I'm sure most of your listeners will know what this is, but the Nigerian government subsidizes the price of petrol, which means it's available at a cheaper rate than it would be at market prices. And for many people, this is the only thing they get from government, right?
Tobi;
Yeah.
Portia;
They're paying taxes. Government makes their life hard in terms of getting a visa or a driver's license. There are so many ways in which they are suffering from government and the only thing they get is they get slightly cheaper petrol. It's been on the table for a long time. There have been multiple attempts to remove it and Tinubu has, again, committed to remove it. And talking to people, being in Lagos kind of this past week and talking to people, people are really worried that they kind of think it's going to happen. And I think this will be a test case for how is Tinubu and the people around him, many of whom have long experience, but some of whom are kind of young, more technocratic, fresh blood, how are they going to navigate this point when exactly what you say [that] you can't ask people to wait for that long without giving them something in the meantime? I guess it really just demands statecraft of how do you maintain legitimacy whilst withdrawing the kind of one benefit that a lot of people see that they have from government? Especially at a time of massive economic depression and the currency, cash crisis, all of the other things that are kind of making life in Nigeria hard for many, many people.
And I should say, when I talk about people are struggling to get to the end of next week or the end of next month, this isn't people who lack education, this isn't people who lack the skills. You know, oh, we should empower them to give them some skills, they have the skills. They probably have a university degree. You've got people out there with pharmacy, engineering degrees and they're in exactly the same position. So just to say that, just to prevent against kind of mischaracterization of the Nigerian voting public. So I guess, yeah, it's a test case. Tinubu has been a great political operator. He's been able to achieve some of these things where you demand sacrifices of the population, but you kind of keep them on board. You carry them along, as perhaps Nigerians might say. And so on this front, you know what? Maybe it's unwise, but I do have a little bit of optimism. Because I feel like if someone is able to balance the competing demands and to push something through and really make something happen? You know, Tinubu does have track records in this regard in a way that Buhari just was not active. Like he wasn't proactive. He wasn't able to balance different competing groups, different competing elites, different competing demands. So a little bit of me is looking to the President and hoping that he's able to pull off a miracle.
Tobi;
Two things I would love us to touch on before we wind down this conversation. And one is, you know, it’s one of these things like corruption that never really goes away, which is accountability. If we look at the technocratic sort of conception of good governance, accountability then means that there's a rule book and there are things you have to conform to. For example, in the context of the new government; we are talking about asset declaration, and early in the conversation we talked about the use of numbers and statistics and this is what it really means to be transparent. Transparency as accountability.
But one point you drove home in the book which I found relatable was sometimes for the voters, accessibility is what they find accountable. How accessible are you? How approachable are you? How much of you can they see and interact with? From there I want us to then move into this your idea of socially embedded governance, because sometimes the challenge when we talk about the social dimension of governance is that they do not acquire the necessary inertia because they are weakly institutionalized. So where I want you to sort of close off is how can we then practically institutionalize some of these lessons that we have learned from looking at the social dimension, not just the material and the technical dimensions of government?
Portia;
Great. Thank you so much. So I want to get to accessibility, but if I can just come back on this idea of is technocracy always a case of setting stronger rules and setting up the rule? But I'm not sure that's always what's happening. And this is actually one of my critique of the kind of newer forms of governance reform that a lot of donors and the World Bank and DFID and the British government are pushing. And I think sometimes it's lost in the debate. So traditionally, yeah, the critique of the African state, the post colonial African state, is it's weakly institutionalized. So it's neopatrimonial. Like, maybe it has some of the trappings of rules and this idea of having, like, a Weberian rule bound state, but in reality, it's run like a private household. The big man sitting at the center just gets to decide what to do.
So the goal has always been stronger rules, greater institutionalization, more predictability. And yet this has kind of been intention, this idea of good governance as being mimicking the private sector. We don't necessarily always talk about, oh, government would be better if it had more rules. We say government should be more agile, it should be more lean, it should be more innovative, more entrepreneurial. And actually, some of the things that we see be these good governance, kind of friendly, donor friendly, Lagos model governments doing actually lead to the kind of underinstitutionalization of the state. So I'm thinking of things like outsourcing, the creation of public private partnerships to deliver infrastructure and services and the use of consultancies. And so this often leads to a situation where actually the rules that govern how the state behaves, so the civil service or laws are basically being circumvented and bypassed by the bringing in of private sector agents to do things that the state would otherwise be doing. And often that's seen quite favorably, like, great, the private sector is more efficient, it has better ways of working, maybe it brings in international best practice, these are people who've worked in very high achieving international environments.
But we see things like consultants, they're not necessarily accountable to the people, they're accountable to their shareholders or kind of the pursuit of profit. And I'm not saying they aren't doing good things at the same time, but there are definitely democratic concerns around that. And I'd also really highlight the case of PPPs. So, public private partnerships. So it used to be that privatization was at least quite straightforward. We had a state water company and then we transfer ownership of it to a private water company and we can try and work out what the private water company, are they doing well or are they doing badly, et cetera, et cetera. The form of public private partnerships that we're currently seeing emerging and backed very, very strongly by international financial institutions are some of the most complex legal and financial instruments you've ever encountered. It's often hard to work out even who the private partner is, because they come around via special purpose vehicles that are created by consortia, by asset managers, often bringing together very complex financial arrangements, often hosted offshore. So there are kind of confidential and kind of tax arrangements that mean we don't even know who run them.
One of the things I have concerns about is that we think that these kind of technocratic, PPP, private sector led development is going to bring in clearer rules and less corruption. And yet often they're creating a situation where it's impossible to know what the rules are because they're so complex. And you need to be, like, quite an advanced kind of corporate lawyer to even understand what's going on. I guess I'm raising it because it's a bit of a kind of concern of mine, and I think it's something that we really don't understand enough as scholars or commentators. So I just wanted to kind of flag that. And I think it's something that I'd really like to see more discussion of within that kind of, like, Nigerian public sphere. Because my sense is that people have a very, very positive understanding of public private partnerships without necessarily knowing on a case by case basis, are these working in favor of the people or are they just kind of a big shift of risk onto the state? But I know your question was much more tightly linked to this question of accessibility.
Tobi;
Yeah.
Portia;
The idea of accessibility, for me, it's an example of how we can learn from Nigerian politicians and voters. How the rest of the world can look at what Nigeria is doing, and actually, you know, you're able to articulate something that's valuable for the rest of us. So in political science, we don't really have a term that captures what accessibility gets at. And yet whenever I spoke to people, okay, you said, you think this politician is doing a great job, why is he doing a good job? Oh, he's accessible. Or contrastingly, when people criticize politicians, they often said, well, he was arrogant, he was aloof, he was inaccessible. And so something I try and do in the book is I try and delve down into, okay, but what does accessibility mean if we had to give it an academic definition? And I define it as the maintenance of space for direct communication between the ruler and the ruled. So in practice, this normally means face to face, but it can also be by, like, telephone or something. And the thing is, in that moment when you're directly communicating with your ruler and with your kind of followers, is a moment where accessibility can happen through social sanctions. So all politicians, no matter how rich they are, no matter their control of party structures, the one thing they don't like is being booed or being heckled. And if they know that they're going to be booed, they often try and hide. They don't want to be accessible. So it doesn't necessarily happen all of the time when people in communication with their leaders, but there is a kind of possibility for alternative forms of accountability to play out in those moments of communication and accessibility. So this often relates to things like people say, we voted for this politician, he ran off to Abuja, and we haven't seen him in four years. How can you be accountable if I've never seen you? And this is something that people say in Nigeria, but it's also something that I found in studies of politics in places like Ghana and the UK. So a bit further afield.
So this is why I think we have it's a case where we can say that Nigerians were the initial originators of this idea, but it's actually universally applicable. And then you asked, okay, if accessibility is one of the elements of socially embedded good governance, how can we institutionalize it? How can we create rules or procedures or expectations that enable us to kind of put this into practice? And so I do this in the book. I give some very, very basic suggestions, and yet they're rather different from what you would see in good governance agenda set of recommendations. So one thing, maybe you should live in your constituency. If you're a politician, you need to live where your constituents are, because otherwise, how will they have access to. And maybe that sounds kind of willfully simplistic, but I think it's kind of a good, provocative idea, especially as people often like to run away to the nicer, richer areas. But also there's something that Nigerians are already doing that I think kind of captures this idea of accessibility. So if you go on the website of a lot of government agencies, and Lagos State were really the forerunners of this, you'll see the personal telephone numbers of the people who are running these agencies. And that kind of speaks to this level of accessibility of, like, the state is both a bureaucracy, but it's also a set of people. And you need to have access to those people. And often this is being seen as a liability for government that if the people have access to politicians and elected officials, they'll ask them for money or chop or they'll make these personalistic demands. And I address some of the kind of critiques around that in the book. But I also think that we have to think about how can we open up government and have more accessibility rather than less? So that, for me, would be like an example of how we could institutionalize socially embedded good governance.
Tobi;
I mean, I asked that question because I think and this is more of a personal point for me and it's a bit of a Marxist point, if I should say, is that my personal frustration with the works of people like. Thandika and the rest is that they are often very short on practical proposals. Whereas what you're critiquing, at least if we look at Washington Consensus, there's a list of ten clear policies that you should pursue. But there's always a shortage of, okay, so if this falls short in some very important ways, then what next? What should we do? If I win office tomorrow and we've done this and it doesn't work, then what do I do? Now. So it's always short on practical part. That was why I asked you. I like your answer. It sounds simple, but I like it. Live in your constituency is something we can really, really make a hard rule, because, like you said, you're right. My local government chairman does not live in my neighborhood here in Lagos, actually. [S]he lives in a much more nice, richer, high part of the state. And, I mean, she only comes around for party constituent meetings. It sounds very simple, but it’s a very…
Portia;
Maybe let me add to that a bit then, just because sometimes I wrote this book, it's like 80,000 words long, it took like seven years to write. And then people are like so your conclusion is we should put telephone numbers on websites, that's it?
[laughs]
So let me maybe add to this a little bit. So I think there are a number of things that already happen in Nigerian politics, almost like traditional conventions of how you do politics. And I think we can understand them in terms of accessibility. So there's a long history of rulers holding court by sitting outside of their residence or their palace and being accessible to the people. So they might come with with petitions, they might come with complaints, but they basically have to spend some of their time sat on view, not so surrounded by security that you can't reach them at all. There are these ways of making those who have power have to be on show and have to be visible. You know, there's a Nigerian tradition of the courtesy call. And when I first arrived and I started reading Nigerian newspapers I couldn't understand why every… so many of the stories were this head of government office has paid a courtesy call to this traditional politician, this head of this party has paid a courtesy call to the… and I was like what is? It was clear that there was something going on that I didn't fully understand. And so my attempt to make sense of this over time has been that what they are saying is I was accessible. I created a moment of communication between me and this representative of this social constituency or this trade union or this community. It's showing that they are keeping open the lines of communication. And of course we don't necessarily know what is said in those places. And what is said in those places may be negotiations or demands that we're not very happy with. But at least I think it's the signaling of respect by maintaining communication.
So I think maybe we need courtesy calls from the leader of Islam or an informal settlement. Maybe we need more courtesy calls. And this was something that came out if you look at the campaign materials of Ayo Fayose in 2014, this kind of big populist figure, something that really stuck in my mind was on his website. He said what is the most common phone number in Ekiti? It's my phone number. Everyone has access to me. Not only that, but he says if you call this number I will pick it myself. What he's saying is, it's not like you call my number and you get through to a secretary or a handler and they'll just fob you off, and actually you'll never get to talk to me. Which was often the complaint made of Ajimobi that these civil society groups that had been working for many years, they'd go in and they'd say, we want to see the budget, we want to talk to the governor, and they would wait hours and they'd come back day after day and they'd never get to speak to him. So I think this idea of being accessible and available is really, really important. But think the wider point is also to think that you can't monopolize accountability with only one understanding of what it means. And so when I talk to these people who are in this technocratic class, they often think like, well, all we need to do is deliver and perform. What is it that we need? We need roads, fine, we'll build roads.
But that, I think it gives you a very fragile understanding of accountability that doesn't serve everyone, it doesn't meet everyone's demands. But also, maybe this is a pessimist in me, but there are going to be times when even the most fantastic government cannot deliver and cannot perform, because there are certain factors beyond the control of the government - world oil prices, currency fluctuations, and increasingly, as we look to the future, Nigeria is very, very vulnerable to climate change. So there may be years where even the most fantastic, technocrat, highly educated leader is not able to deliver much that is visible to the population. And so the question is, how will they remain accountable? And how will they keep some trust and legitimacy among the people, even when things are going really badly? And I think that's where you need to be attuned to these alternative understandings of accountability, so that you can carry people along with you, even when that village is flooded and there's nothing you can do, even when there's drought, whatever it is. So I think the wider argument for socially embedded good governance is that it makes states more resilient, and it makes that legitimacy deeper and stronger and kind of more multilayered. Rather than just relying on this idea of, okay, we can perform, we can build the infrastructure, we can give people the public goods that they need, because that's only one strand of it.
Tobi;
Like you said in your allusion to Fayose, I was going to say that accessibility has never been a problem for amala politics. I mean, you can, at least, relatively…you can see Adedibu on a Friday. The chances of you seeing Adedibu and having a very short conversation with him on a Friday, the chances are very high, unlike some other political figures who are a bit more progressive or technocratically minded. And I'll tell you one interesting story about Akala, actually. But on this point of accessibility in his hometown in Ogbomoso, he comes around every weekend. And I've also seen scenes of this, so it's not just hearsay. So he comes “home” every Friday and you see lines of people. Pool that are in his house just to collect cash, not just handouts, oh, I want to start a business, I want to pay school fees. And he just hands out cash, sometimes unbelievable sums of money to people. But the funny story I have about Akala, which made me laugh when I read that part in your book, of him being an ATM. So I think this was in 2011 when he was campaigning. So I was traveling, I was driving to Ilorin, so I stopped in Ejigbo to buy fruits. So after buying a very large basket of mangoes, I was out of cash. So I wanted to go to the... I think it was just one bank in Ejigbo at the time, Skye bank it was called back then. So I wanted to get some money. Unfortunately for me, Akala was campaigning in Ejigbo that day. So he basically walked into the bank and after making a withdrawal, the bank had to shut down.
So I think a bank staff sort of told us that he collected 200 million naira and the bank just had to close shop that for today, no cash. So Akala was really an ATM.
Portia;
Yeah. So like this point you make about if you wanted to see Adedibu, you could probably see him. And I think that links to a critique that sometimes I've got from people when I presented my work, which is maybe what you're talking about accessibility, maybe it works at the village level, maybe it works at the local government level, maybe it works at the city level. But like realistically, in a country of 200 million people, is this an idea that can actually work at the macro level? Because it's impossible for 200 million people to see to newborn on a Friday. And so what I'd say to this is when we think about accessibility and what are the correct social relations that politicians are meant to have with their constituents, it's not necessarily about direct personal experience necessarily. So it's not necessarily the question of how does the governor treat me, but it's often the question how does the governor treat people? So what I really noticed in the run up to this most recent election is that we saw one of the candidates, Mr. Peter Obi, often celebrated for this exact reason that he was accessible. And people used this word he's accessible. They're not saying necessarily that they themselves met him. What they're saying is that maybe they saw a video online of him interacting with someone he just met in an airport or someone in the street. And so it's about people's understanding of the social relations that these leaders have even if it's not with them directly. And I think this is why in the book, when I get into the more like analytic, academic, theoretical part, I really emphasize that I'm not talking about personalistic relations or private relations between me and you as individuals. I'm talking about social relations which might just be what are the sort of relationships that someone cultivates, what are the sorts of ways of behaving and then judging someone on the basis of that. And often when we talk about clientalism, we talk about relationships where the followers of the voters are directly known to the leader or the person who's their kind of patron. And that's not really what I'm talking about in the book. I'm talking about more this intermediary level of kind of social relationships that can go beyond just individuals. And so that's why I think it's possible for even the president to demonstrate that he's accessible without having to be directly accessible to every single Nigerian citizen. But that's one, I think, very sensible critique that sometimes people do raise to this argument.
Tobi;
Also, I would like to respond to something which relates to your point on what you are seeing as an increasing embrace by the donors of a different way of doing things in government. So I did election special for the podcast. I'll send you a particular episode we did with one of the persons that used to run the Lagos State Emergency Service Management. So we did a very interesting episode on some of the challenges in trying to run public service and provide public goods alongside.
And one thing that actually came up, which it's not a defense of that approach, but which just sort of made me see maybe as a runaway pragmatism, is that sometimes and you see this with the federal government as well, the civil service, the rules around hiring are very amorphous, they’re not very clear. So sometimes using consultants are sort of the easiest way to get things done and not be buried in the bureaucracy. I used to live in Abuja and you have cases where literally your file go missing trying to get approval for one thing or the other. Your file just sits there in somebody's desks who wants something or forgot or doesn't think it's priority enough. And I think that civil service, which then sort of feeds into what you talked about with the Lagos model and how sometimes public services and the civil service is usually used as an employment creation scheme and sometimes very loose culture, or should I say ethics around professionalism and what the job actually entails and how that can then slow down the process of execution of policies in some cases. So, and I think that using consultant sometimes is [practical]….it’s not an ideal solution. Personally, I don't like it as well, especially on the accountability point. But I see it as a sort of runaway pragmatism.
Portia;
Yeah. So I think your point about the civil service and the challenges of getting things done really resonates with so many of the critiques of the state in Nigeria. And a lot of the people I've been talking with in my new project have shared similar concerns, and it's obviously like a major issue. But again, I think I would kind of return to the question I posed at the very beginning of our discussion, which is that often when we spend spend a lot of time thinking about the critique decrying corruption in Nigeria, it creates, again, a false consensus about what it is we actually want. And when we come to that kind of positive vision of the future, there's no guarantee there's going to be full agreement. And actually, that's where the contestation lies. So my question would be, if we want a more efficient civil service in Nigeria, what do we want it to do more efficiently? To what purpose do we want to put that efficiency? So, again, if we want to build state capacity, okay, but what are the goals to which we want to direct that state capacity? And it makes me think of an article again by Thandika Mkandawire where he talks about monocropping and monotasking, and he talks about how the good governance agenda and public sector reforms in the 1990s basically prepared states to do one task and one task only, and that was to attract FDI and to guarantee the property rights of foreign investors.
So that basically is taking risk away from foreign investors and allowing them to do what they want, but also not demand from them to really give back or kind of guarantee any benefits. And that you can build up a state to be very, very efficient for some things, and yet you don't necessarily have kind of democratic consensus on what those goals should be. And so I think there are different things that the state in Nigeria could be aiming for. And it relates to conversation we were having before the recording started as well of, what actually is the economic ambition of Nigeria. And people put it very simply of, oh, we want more investment, we want more growth. But what is it that you want to do? Do you want to build up domestic firms? Do you want to enforce economic activity that is maybe more decentralized or more labor intensive? There are a whole number of different ambitions. The word that's often the elephant in the room is redistribution. Maybe you want a stronger state so that you can radically redistribute and eliminate the kind of off the charts inequality that we see. But that's definitely not the sort of thing that the good governance agenda or public finance initiatives are going to equip you to do. No one is talking about a cap on earnings, for example. And again, I'm not saying this is necessarily the solution, but I just want to highlight the way that there are certain things which are not currently on the menu. And if you're going to have a full discussion of the full range of things that Nigerian state and government could work towards, these need to be some of the options just so that you know that you've kind of explored all of it. And people say there's no ideology in Nigerian politics, and here I'm borrowing from the work of Saeed Hussaini, but often the ideology happens before you even notice it, in limiting the menu of options of what it is a state can do. So I think even in what seems like quite an uncontroversial discussion about the civil service, it probably should be more efficient. There's still something hiding there of what is it exactly that the civil service would be able to do in ideal situations? To what ends do you want to kind of make it work? In that regard, I'd kind of highlight the work of people like Mariana Mazzucato and the idea of the state that is much more focused on specific agenda, whether it's around climate change or whatever else, or if you look at the experience of the South Korean government and their kind of industrial policy. So I think we should be alert to just having an efficient civil service does not exhaust the discussion of what it is that we need to be doing in civil service reforms.
Tobi;
This has been a very interesting conversation.
Portia;
Thank you very much. And thank you so much for having me for this really fascinating and insightful discussion. It's such an honour to have someone read it so thoughtfully and intelligently and then connect it to clearly a very wide kind of political experience and insights.
Tobi;
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Rethinking Good Governance