The Political Economy of Nigeria's Post-military Elections, 1999–2007

Introduction and the Problematique

Several liberal thinkers have established the link between economic wealth and political democracy. They have also underlined the salience of the agency of the entrepreneurial middle class in the democratisation process in Western Europe to advance personal and class freedom and protect and enhance property rights, often out of enlightened self-interest. This phenomenon is summarised in the famous Barrington Moore epigram: no bourgeoisie, no democracy, the latter read as neoliberal democracy (Moore 1966, p. 418). It has also been argued that neoliberal democracy is a rare public commodity in agrarian societies or poor countries. In view of Africa's generally low levels of GNP per capita and low economic growth rates, veteran political scientist Samuel Huntington (1991, pp. 12–34) has gone so far as to contend that, in many African countries, democratisation will face severe challenges well into the twenty-first century. However, Africa need not take the western route to democracy and development.

In Nigeria, since the mid-1980s the impact of people-unfriendly market reforms has been worsened by wrong domestic political choices. Market-related economic and social reforms have only resulted in social turmoil, worsening unemployment, run-away inflation and stagflation, spiralling prices of food, unaffordable housing, the enhanced diminution of the majority and (a feat achieved by the Obasanjo presidency, May 1999–May 2007) the near collapse of the energy/power sector, which has crippled manufacturing and virtually everything else. Simultaneously, transnational capital, domestic capital and their objective ally, the state/political elite, have brought in vast fortunes from the neoliberalisation of the economy. For the latter group, and others with access to power, the country's huge oil wealth remains, by far, the most coveted political trophy. As a consequence, the country's state/political elite has been driven by an intrusive and offensive mercenary mentality. This has resulted in a phenomenal loss of the spirit of political evangelism and reforming zeal, fired by commitment to the cause of political nationalism and Pan-Africanism, found in a cross-section of the immediate post-independence elite.

Financial and material resources privatised from the public sector are massively deployed in intra-party and inter-party political contests in a brazenly violent and venal manner. To that extent, elections are often no more than selections whilst democracy, as a project of social transformation, is a victim of a permanent coup d'etat by the ruling elite against the majority. As the democracy crisis deepens, the legitimacy deficit of democratic institutions and elected representatives tends to worsen, resulting in further distancing and alienation of the representatives from the electorate. To the extent that Nigeria's democracy has hardly gone beyond electoral consultations, it is perhaps legitimate to talk about both a democracy and development impasse.

This article proposes a structural and empirical analysis of the interface between the politics and economics of post-military elections in Nigeria. It situates the discussion within the context of contemporary economic globalisation, which is both a structure of opportunity and constraint, but more of the latter than the former for developing economies such as Nigeria. The imposition of market policies has led to the reduction of politics to an elite competition between rentier bourgeois groups. The consequence is that elections have been reduced to a ‘winner takes all’ competition for control of the state and the spoils that may thereby be accessed. The article explains why elections in Nigeria, right from the early period of independence, were to a considerable extent a competition for spoils, although it is arguable that by tearing down whatever remained of the country's emergent developmental state, market reforms transformed Nigeria into a deeply corrupt rentier state. Market policies have done little to solve the problems of venality and political competition for spoils. On the contrary, they have tended to exacerbate these problems. This article contends that during the Obasanjo years further market policies worsened these propensities in Nigerian politics. In particular, this was due to the enmeshing of the remarkable wealth, partly derived from direct primitive accumulation of retired senior military officers turned active politicians, with that of ‘professional’ business operators, in what has been described as the ‘military-business complex’ (Adekanye 1999, p. 29).

As politics becomes increasingly monetised and invariably volatile, neoliberal democracy and periodic elections lose their meaning for those for whom the state has become increasingly irrelevant under market reforms. On the contrary, those who have the power and leverage to structure phoney democracy and organise flawed elections, bask in the euphoria of big business and investment that delivers huge financial, political and electoral capital. Haynes (2001, pp. 30–31) argued that while structures are determinant in routinising democracy, they are far from being deterministic, and that ‘what individual actors do’ is equally significant. In the event, beyond public rhetoric, neither President Obasanjo nor the state governors did enough to demonstrate a genuine commitment to entrenching democracy, the rule of law, due process and transparency in the governance of the country's public sphere.

It is proposed that a way out of the democracy and development impasse in Nigeria is a democracy with social relevance and resonance. This is envisaged as a remedy for lessening the intensity of flawed elections and mitigating the impunity with which such elections are foisted on the people and the palpable arrogance of their beneficiaries in power. It is argued that political struggles are necessary to recover the state and politics from the stranglehold of structural relations of power between transnational and domestic capital; they should be re-inserted into the public space where they really belong and used for public purposes, including credible and legitimate elections, social justice in the economic relations of power and participatory democracy. This calls for popular political struggles and strategies to reconstruct and transform the Nigerian post colonial, post-adjustment state. One such strategy would be a far-reaching and multi-faceted alliance between critical non-state organisations/actors and fractions/factions of the state/political elite that are committed to deep-seated structural and systemic transformation in the political economy.

The article is divided into six sections. The first section analyses the theoretical relationship between neoliberal political economy and the state. The following section examines the structural relations of power and commodified democracy in Nigeria. The third section expands on market reforms and their debilitating political and electoral consequences, whilst the fourth section investigates the nature of political parties and democratic and electoral politics. The next section briefly looks at the political agency of President Obasanjo. The conclusion recommends what should be done to make democracy a people's affair in Nigeria.

Neoliberal Political Economy and the State

The post-Cold War framework of neoliberal political economy has two strands: a neoliberal or market economy and neoliberal democracy. Neoliberal analysts of states in the Global South often give the impression that both strands of neoliberalism are required for development to take place. Thus, writing in the heady early days of structural adjustment and political liberalisation in Africa, Larry Diamond (1992, p. 32) lamented that for many emergent neoliberal democracies in the early 1990s, ‘debt service obligations swallow up scarce resources needed for investment and imports to rekindle economic growth and thus strengthen public commitment to democracy’. Whilst making a case for debt forgiveness by the western powers so that ‘new democracies’ would not be stifled by ‘continuing economic stagnation, popular alienation and political turmoil’, he entered a rider: ‘these new democracies deserve a fresh economic beginning if they are willing to pursue serious market-oriented reforms’ (Diamond 1992, p. 32, emphasis added). For Diamond, ‘promoting democracy…implies fostering market-oriented economies…only market-oriented economies provide the conditions for legitimating democracy’ (pp. 27–28).

It would appear that given his neo-conservative leaning, Diamond chose to ignore the implication of this: that authoritarian governments would be needed to implement market reforms more or less successfully. Clearly, illusions about democracy and development within the context of latter-day globalisation persist, with serious negative consequences for developing countries. Here, economic liberalism has proven to be a robustly anti-democratic project, which attempts to divorce democracy from human development, in the belief that democracy and development can flourish in the absence of an effective and efficient state.

The state in Africa has been extremely ineffectual in using globalisation and market fundamentalism for nationalistic purposes. Both in its post-colonial format and in its further weakened post-structural adjustment form, the nature of the African state in relation to democracy and development has been an object of severe interrogation. From a comparative South-South perspective, Boron (2005, p. 168) lamented that after several years of democratic transitions, what was on offer were ‘democracies without citizens, or free market democracies whose supreme objective is to guarantee the profits of dominant classes and not the social welfare of the population’.

The internationalisation of the state, exacerbated after the Cold War, has tended to subordinate critical domestic concerns for genuine democracy and human development to the dictates and demands of transnational capital. The World Bank, the IMF and the G8 routinely deploy both soft and hard powers in order to make poor nations toe the line of neoliberal policy. They are urged not to re-invent the wheel in their quest for development, but to imitate the supposed market-based, private sector-led development trajectory of the West. The state, it is claimed, has little or nothing to do with this process other than to provide an enabling environment for transnational capital and other market-driven actors to deliver development.

Many African governments have accepted this myth as an article of faith. Private sector-propelled development, a core element of the Washington Consensus (WC), constitutes little more than a thinly veiled macro-economic blueprint for the maintenance of the international division of labour structured by colonialism. The original WC imposes neoliberalism and market fundamentalism on developing economies through, inter alia, fiscal discipline, subsidy withdrawal, financial and trade liberalisation, openness to foreign direct investment (FDI), privatisation and deregulation. In contrast, the main emphasis of a post-WC rethink of neoliberal market orthodoxy, which emerged in the late 1990s in the wake of severe contestation of the WC by transnational social movements, is economic policy that is not only ‘socially sensitive’ but also capable of allowing the state to discipline and socialise the market (see, amongst others, Vilas 2003, pp. 97–98, Stiglitz 2004, pp. 218–221, 229–230, Adesina 2005, pp. 33–62). This post-WC view favours corporate governance, flexible labour markets, anti-corruption, World Trade Organisation (WTO) agreements, social safety nets, targeted poverty reduction, etc. These hegemonic global policy discourses insist that there is little in the way of alternatives to the market reforms for ailing developing world economies they offer.

Whilst some neoliberal market instruments are undoubtedly required to make the economies of developing countries more competitive, individual states have barely had the necessary space and autonomy to take hard economic and political decisions on their own terms. The ‘credit contract’ has often impacted negatively on the ‘social contract’ between governments and citizens in many African countries. The consequences have been dramatic; in much of the continent, the tendency has been an over-reliance on foreign direct investment (FDI), materials, personnel and skills at the expense of national resources, including people. The sum total of increasingly frail public institutions and grinding economic and material hardship of the population is mass political alienation. An overtly technical approach to social questions has tended to obviate a more sanguine and pragmatic political approach capable of dealing with this alienation. In order to move forward, this situation has to be reversed.

Structural Relations of Power and Commodified Democracy in Nigeria

In order to strike a socially-relevant balance between the roles of the state and the market for development purposes, it is crucial for both state and non-state actors to be more attentive to Joseph Stiglitz than to Larry Diamond or Charles Lindblom, who argued, even earlier than Diamond, that market-oriented systems and political democracy have always been mutually reinforcing elements of neoliberalism. He famously wrote:

African ‘high priests’ of market orthodoxy need to listen to Joseph Stiglitz. In his The Roaring 90s (which has an instructive sub-title, why we're paying the price for the greediest decade in history), this former World Bank chief economist and, like Sen, Nobel laureate in Economics, makes several important observations which are pertinent to the further elaboration of the problematique in this article. First:

Stiglitz equally contends that whereas the logic of credit contract in the ‘economic’ or ‘market’ world has led to the dismantling of ‘essential pieces of the social contract’, the logic of the latter in the real world hinges on ‘implicit contracts, understandings, norms which enable society to function well’ (Stiglitz 2004, p. 273). Such understandings and norms, within the context of Africa's communal and moral-security societies, sit uncomfortably with America's triumphalist capitalism and its vision of rugged individualism that were unconscionably forced upon African countries through neoliberal policy. The result has been a lack of judicious balance between the roles of the state and the market. Nearly three decades of neoliberal economic policy have shown that deregulation/liberalisation/privatisation, a product of ‘the big, bad government myth’, has hardly delivered on its promise of ‘robust long-term growth’; rather, it has often ‘unleashed new sources of conflicts of interest, new ways of manipulating markets’ (Stiglitz 2004, p. 276). Finally, Stiglitz juxtaposes the ‘materialistic values that are paramount in the growth and efficiency agenda’ with what he describes as the three core values of Democratic Idealism: social justice; democracy and freedom; and the relationship between individuals and the communities in which they live (Stiglitz 2004, pp. 294–295).

Writers such as Schneider (1999, pp. 325–334) have demonstrated the relevance of such preoccupations (described as ‘historically produced societal behaviour and the structures that accompany it’ by Haynes 2001, p. 31), and of path dependence, for the design of appropriate reform programmes and policies in the African context. In Nigeria, despite protests by students and workers against key elements of market reforms (in particular ‘deregulation’), they have, nonetheless, been implemented since the 1980s with scant regard to important questions of equity and social justice. In order to adequately grasp and analyse the structural relations of power and commodified democracy in Nigeria which explain this, it is necessary to: (1) revisit and reassess the electoral and democracy legacy of British colonialism in Nigeria and the role of its contemporary offshoot, the donor and international community; and (2) apprehend the character of market reforms before and during the Obasanjo years, as well as their impact on the Nigerian state and politics, inclusive of its impact on social differentiation and on the efficacy or otherwise of electoral democracy.

On the first point, and at the risk of over-simplification, the debate in the 1960s and 1970s at, amongst others, the Universities of Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and Ibadan (Nigeria) split African scholars, mainly political scientists and historians, into two camps. The first camp consisted of those who argued that colonialism was no more than an ‘episodic event’ in African history and politics. The second was made up of those for whom the consequences of colonialism on the politics, societies and economies of African states were of an ‘epochal dimension’. Two diametrically opposite ideological orientations would emerge from the debate. The first camp was made up of ‘neoconservatives’ who felt that after independence Africa should stop blaming colonialism for its underdevelopment and move on. The second consisted of more progressive scholars and analysts who were persuaded that colonialism left a permanent negative mark on the continent's development outlook and body politic, and that Africa could not move on without dealing with it. As if echoing the epochal dimension of colonialism, Haynes (2003, p. 52) argued that ‘democratic outcomes (are) linked to pre-existing structural characteristics’. Based on the Ghanaian case in which elected governments have had to contend with an international financial and economic system that has not become any more favourable to what is an emergent neoliberal democracy, Haynes (2003, pp. 48–76) contended that post-independent African governments have been forced to work with international and domestic structures that undermine attempts to deliver changes to the substance of rule. While there is little doubt that neo-colonial interests and domestic clients have always benefited from the state's primordial task of organising production for external profit, this process has been exacerbated since the 1980s by market reforms (Khadiaghala 1990, p. 348).

Looking at Nigeria, British colonialism left an indelible conservative imprimatur on the country's politics and society. The general perception of informed public opinion is that ‘the British programmed Nigeria to fail’. According to Abati (2005), a leading Nigerian columnist, ‘by the time (the Brits) were leaving in 1960, they had sown enough seeds of division that would keep the country permanently in turmoil’. In a fundamental sense, the propensities in Nigerian politics for deadly political competition, spoils and corruption have, at origin, an original political/electoral and demographic sin by British colonial authorities. The political/electoral sin was the rigging of the foundational 1956 regional and 1959 federal elections in favour of pro-British conservative politicians of the Northern People's Congress (NPC) and their allies in the Eastern and, to a lesser extent, Western Regions who did not really desire political independence. The demographic sin consisted in the falsification of the 1952 foundational census, ostensibly to give ‘an artificial majority to a North that was largely feudalist by tradition and conservative in political outlook’ (Soyinka 2006, p. 61). Taken together, this amounted to the very negation of the Nigerian nation and the hollowing out of a legitimate state.

In explaining this, Mackintosh (1966, pp. 32–33) referred to the attachment to Northern Nigeria of colonial officials who had served in the region, something that was absent amongst those who had served in the South. In contrast to Southern leaders such as Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and Chief Obafemi Awolowo who were considered ‘radical’ by the colonial authorities by virtue of their so-called ‘word of warfare, accusations and challenges’ against the colonial government, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa was the ‘poster boy’ of the British. Not only were his speeches said to share ‘the same moderation, the cautious phrases, the doubts about rash or rapid action and the same hint of underlying toughness’ comparable to those of Macmillan, he and his colleagues in the NPC were regarded by the British as ‘the best hope for the country, men with whom it was possible to deal on a frank and realistic basis’ (Mackintosh 1966, p. 33). In addition, the British colonial regime pursued a policy of stopping Awolowo, his Action Group (AG) and their programme for democratic socialism.

Little attention was paid to the fact that the British Parliamentary system was being artificially grafted on to ‘a patchwork nation with different pre-colonial histories and systems of self-governance’ (Soyinka 2006, p. 63). This resulted in a fractured and divided country in which national cohesion and unity were largely rhetorical and the civic public realm essentially fictional. It explains why Nigeria imploded only five short years after independence, and highlights the need to interrogate this precedent for election rigging as an acceptable substitute for free and fair elections. As Soyinka (2006, pp. 62, 68) has noted, even in the early heady days of rampant nationalism and nation building, ‘electoral robbery, rather than equitable contest was already the rule of the nation’. According to Harold Smith's unpublished 1987 autobiography, he was ‘ordered’ by the Home Office to participate in the rigging of the 1959 elections, something which has led him to conclude that ‘it was the British who taught Nigerians the art of rigging’ (Soyinka 2006, p. 61, note 1; see also Ankomah and Price 2005).

This may well have driven emerging nationalist/post-independence leaders and their political parties into their respective primordial, security and ethnic camps from where they have yet to effectively re-emerge, nearly half a century after the formal dismantling of the colonial edifice. It was as if they had no choice but to defend their privileged political turf against foreign rule. Thus, Taylor and Williams (2008, p. 139) miss the point when they castigate the Nigerian ruling elite for relying ‘upon the trapping of a rational order (neo-Weberian) even as they consistently subvert it for their own advantage’. Similarly, Chabal and Daloz (in Taylor and Williams 2008, p. 141) were wrong when they suggested that Africa's democracy deficit is largely due to the lack of consolidation of the colonial democratic legacy. The deficit is a function of the attempt by the political leadership to consolidate rather than systematically repudiate the anti-nationalist ethos and credo in the colonial legacy. This explains the current democracy, political and economic impasse. So, if it is true that, in contemporary times, ‘clientelism, patronage and corruption are absolutely central to understanding the political economy of Nigeria’ (Taylor and Williams 2008, p. 141), it can be deduced that all that the post-colonial inheritance elite has done has been to imitate its colonial predecessor (Aremu and Omotola 2007, pp. 53–79). However, it is essential that not only its crude and self-serving origins and antecedents are grasped, but also its contemporary manifestations, lest the analysis becomes mired in the sticky clay of essentialist reasoning.

Why did the post-independence elite not change the paradigm of governance it inherited? First, it suited its leading members perfectly. More specifically, the ruling party at the centre that stood to benefit the most from a paradigm bereft of a deliberative ideology of governance of the public realm had no desire to change it. Virtually all Nigeria's post-colonial governments to date have been thrust to power without a concise national ideology, let alone a popular and liberating one. Indeed, the impact of neoliberal policy is so socially debilitating precisely because there is no viable, cohesive and people-friendly state to pursue authentic pro-poor, pro-growth and pro-development alternative policies. However, the country is not short of time-honoured endogenous principles, ideas and values that can anchor the process of Nigeria's modernisation (Nduka 2006), and without which the Nigerian state and its rich oil economy will continue to be looted by international capital and its domestic allies. Reform-minded governments and political leaders have had little room for autonomous public policy initiatives, while what passes for political stability is really neoliberal democracy in disguise. Thus, there is an international clientilist system linking the country's state/political elite and the ruling class in key western capitalist countries, a system that seeks to make Nigeria safe for globalised capital. International clientelism feeds into its domestic variant at the level where the state/political elite exercises relative hegemony, perhaps as a means of compensating for their vulnerability at the international level. In this regard, the Nigerian political system has not developed much since the colonial period. Neoliberal economic reforms undertaken, first by the Babangida and Abacha military regimes and later by the Obasanjo government, have had the effect of further entrenching state/political elites, including members of the military-business complex, in power. By the same token, they have further concentrated the state and its resources in their hands. The article now turns to the market reforms.

Market Reforms in Nigeria and their Debilitating Political and Electoral Consequences

Markets are a means to an end; their goals are generally narrow, such as higher living standards and material well being, rather than broad-based values, such as social justice. Thus Stiglitz (2004, p. 292) has argued, not only that ‘unfettered markets often fail to achieve even these limited objectives’, but also that ‘poverty may increase even as the economy grows’ whilst ‘unemployment represents the most dramatic failure of markets’. The World Bank and the IMF have tended to present markets to African governments as if they are financial institutions that are sacrosanct and infallible. However, in reality they are political institutions that can and do fail. They are also susceptible to manipulation, not only by monopolies and oligopolies, but also by the global powers that be. Hence Payer's (1991, p. 117) contention that ‘the truly scarce commodity in the world today is not capital, it is markets’.

Its deepening and widening inequalities notwithstanding, the US, the archetypal capitalist if ‘inhumane society’, is perhaps ‘the model society’ that countries such as Nigeria, with its American-type presidential system of government, are expected to mimic (Przeworski, in Good 2002, p. 85). The Enron scandal exposed the limits of deregulation. Although the firm had been presented as ‘the model of the new American enterprise’, one that showcased the virtues, both of deregulation, and of ‘how innovative American firms could help shape a more productive economy if only they were given the chance’, Enron's profits were due to the manipulation of the market by its executives in a way which covered up the firm's liabilities whilst exaggerating its income (Stiglitz 2004, pp. 241, 242–243). This prompted some perceptive analysts to argue that ‘hidden theft had evidently been part of capitalism for a long time’ (Stiglitz 2004, p. 273). By buying into the deregulation mantra, the Nigerian state/political elite knew exactly what it wanted: the hollowing out of the state's commanding social purposes such that special interests could override the overarching public interest, the latter expressed as social justice and as a democracy that grants concrete rights. The consequence has been a huge deficit on the supply side of the social and economic dividends of neoliberal democracy. By undertaking another round of market reforms, on top of the ruinous social legacy of those by its military predecessors, the Obasanjo government exacerbated this deficit.

This is explained by The Economist Intelligence Unit (2006, pp. 30–31). Throughout the eight-year life span of the Obasanjo government, the People's Democratic Party PDP, the ruling party at the centre, did not enunciate any discernible policy blueprint or coherent ideology of governance that Nigerians could debate and buy into. Beyond inchoate expressions of political and economic reforms, there was hardly any declaration of commitment to the politics of structural and systemic transformation of the Nigerian state. The government's National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategies (NEEDS), echoing the Abacha government's Vision 2020, was conceptualised as an economic reform programme anchored in the private sector as the principal engine of growth and development. This neoliberal policy was largely characterised by the inability of the state to discipline capital. As in the past, this was evident in the oil industry and in the hegemony of the military-business complex, which was dominated by the country's retired military elite and Corporate Nigeria. The oil sector has always had a notorious reputation for lack of transparency and accountability. Under Obasanjo, who for much of the period doubled as Minister of Petroleum, basic information on oil transactions involving production volumes, costs and export prices was hardly shared with relevant government agencies such as the Federal Revenue Service and the Office of the Accountant-General. In its absence, these agencies found it difficult to discharge their statutory functions of assessing and reconciling taxes and verifying government revenues. Similarly, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), officially the senior partner of the oil production joint ventures operated by the oil majors, lacked the capacity for independent sourcing of information on the production data of foreign and domestic players in the industry. Moreover, contrary to the letter of the law, royalty calculations were done on the basis of budget-related output figures rather than on the basis of the higher wellhead production data, something which explains why the theft of crude oil continued to be a routine occurrence. An estimated 300,000 barrels of crude oil were stolen on a daily basis during the Obasanjo years. More astonishing was the fact that, in flagrant violation of existing laws, royalty and petroleum profit tax were paid in naira instead of US dollars, the currency of transaction.

The Nigerian Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (NEITI), an international protocol to which the Obasanjo government subscribed in its early days, aimed at ‘following due process and achieving transparency in payments by Extractive Industry (EI) companies to governments and government linked entities; and in the revenues received and reported by those governments and entities’ (NEITI Secretariat 2005, p. 4). However, this did little to stem the tide of rampant venality in the oil sector (The Economist Intelligence Unit 2005, p. 29). For example, in May 2006 there was an unreconciled shortfall of US$250 million in government revenue between the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) figures (Revenue Watch Institute 2007, p. 3).

Due to a combination of undue political control by successive Nigerian governments and a seeming lack of professional autonomy at its apex, the CBN has never excelled in keeping proper and accurate oil payment and sales records. It was thus not clear whether the huge shortfall mentioned previously had been ‘misclassified, wrongly posted or somebody …did not make payment of what (they) should have paid’ (The Guardian 2006, p. 25). These agencies and, by implication, the Obasanjo government, could not account to the Nigerian public for the use to which high oil rents was put. The international market price of a barrel of oil rose from a paltry $20 in January 2002 to $68 in August 2005 to approximately $100 before the 2007 elections. The government was earning at least $100 million daily from the sale of crude oil overseas. With foreign reserves bulging and the government getting richer each day, it was paradoxical that domestic prices of petroleum and petroleum products increased continuously, in defiance of the logic of the market. This was due largely to the fact that the government continued with the practice, started by the Abacha regime, of importing refined petroleum products for domestic use. This was due to the inability (and perhaps also unwillingness) of the government to ensure that necessary repairs to, and maintenance of, the country's refineries were undertaken. This further deepened venality in the oil industry through the apparently reckless award of contracts for the importation of refined petroleum products.

Elite competition for resources and power involving an array of players (oil companies, marketers and importers, many of whom act as fronts for senior government officials, party financiers and ‘godfathers’, retired military officers, veteran politicians, etc.) grew fiercer as the sector raked in huge foreign exchange earnings. The public quarrel between President Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar, his deputy, in the countdown to the 2007 general elections, about the illegal diversion of oil monies in the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF) to fund their re-election in 2003, gave Nigerians a rare glimpse into the operation of the spoils system during the Obasanjo years. Mutual accusations of corruption showed the pattern of the system: cronies, aides and associates got access to easy money for personal use, conspicuous consumption and, invariably, to buy votes from an impoverished electorate (This Day, 2006). Ndibe (2006a) would welcome this development to the extent that, until then, ‘Nigerian leaders (including the worst of its military dictators) passed themselves off as patriots and visionaries seized by the impulse to serve’; for him, the public argument provided ‘a rare peep into the larcenous ways of their so-called leaders … (and) the perfidious modes employed by the likes of Sani Abacha, Ibrahim Babangida, Obasanjo and Atiku to accumulate their Olympian wealth’. Abacha's extraordinary loot, estimated at between $3 and $5 billion, is well documented, apparently because he was the object of investigation by the Obasanjo government. The latter was able to do that, not so much because Abacha had imprisoned Obasanjo on trumped-up coup charges, as that the former had died in office. Babangida, whose regime could not account for approximately $12.2 billion in a Gulf War oil windfall, and the other living ex-military rulers were never formally tried and brought to justice (The Punch, 2008) The excessive monetisation of politics and the influence of ‘moneybags’ would result from the excess liquidity injected into the polity, not only by these retired heads of state, but also by the compact set of retired military and non-military ‘new-breed politicians’ thrown up by the political transition programmes of the Babangida, Abacha and Abubakar regimes (Fawole 2005).

The retired military officers and their civilian acolytes constituted the linchpin of the state/political elite that reaped a bountiful harvest from the market reforms of the military era. Due largely to their political careerism, opportunism, primitive accumulation and venality while in power, the retired military used its strong financial muscle to peddle influence and build up a formidable constituency in the politics of the 4th Republic (Adekanye 2006). This saw ‘the phenomenal entrenchment of the country's military within the system of power and privilege and its distribution’, as well as the hegemony of ‘military in government’ as against ‘military as institution’ (Akinrinade 2006; see Boafo-Arthur 2006 for comparative material on Ghana)

According to Adekanye (1999), with huge investments in diverse areas of the economy, the retired military elite has constituted itself into a ‘strong and rising new elite’ (p. viii); it is enmeshed with business in interlocking links with transnational capital through subsidiaries of MNCs (p. xii); and it has also served as economic managers in industry and the private sector, on corporate boards and as company directors, thus attempting to bridge the gap between ‘the means of destruction and the means of production’ (p. 30). This explains why the retired military became ‘the most visible political group’ at the beginning of the 4th Republic and acted as the arrowhead of the coalescence of the retired military elite with sundry civilian elite groups to serve their common interests (Adekanye 1999, pp. 148, 165). The foray into politics by this group, and its support for certain candidates, was far from being altruistic, nor was the choice of political parties they joined fortuitous. First, the political North sought to protect its strategic, political, corporate and economic interests by persuading Obasanjo to run for the presidency. Second, whilst the retired military was to be found in all the political parties, the richest and the most politically powerful chose to cast their lot with the People's Democratic Party (PDP), the only party that had the most realistic chance of wresting power at the centre in 1999. Thus in addition to Babangida, three other well-known retired generals financed Obasanjo's presidential campaign in 1998/1999: Theophilus Danjuma (Obasanjo's First Defence Minister), Mohammed Gusau (his Security Adviser) and Mohammed Wushishi (Chief of Army Staff between 1980 and 1983, with vast investments in business and farming) (Adekanye 1999, pp. 167–168, 184, 2006, Akinrinade 2006, p. 291, Ikhariale 2007). There were also several less visible players from that elite group who contributed financially to the election and re-election of Obasanjo, respectively, in 1999 and 2003. The market reforms undertaken by the Obasanjo government would reinforce and strengthen the grip of this group on power and state resources. They would also engender a crop of new political players.

This article has already alluded to the fact that markets are easily manipulated by the strong powers to protect and enhance special interests. Nowhere was this elite strategy of self-preservation more visible under Obasanjo than in their dominance of the privatisation of publicly quoted enterprises by the Trans National Corporation Plc (Transcorp). There is ample evidence that Transcorp was a highly favoured, government-driven mega-company (Abati 2006a, Aluko 2006, da Costa 2006, Ofose 2008, African Loft 2008). Its formal objectives appeared lofty. Transcorp was incorporated in November 2004 ‘as a government-backed initiative to jump-start the reform process and broaden the scope of competitiveness in the Nigerian economy’. Its founders claimed that it was modelled after the Korean chaebols with a view to creating ‘a new economic order’. It was also presented to the Nigerian public as ‘a national economic empowerment initiative’ (Abati 2006a). Yet from the commencement of its operations in May 2005, politics, not business ethics of rugged competition, has been its driving force. The interplay of the political power and financial muscle of its founders ensured that it was listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange as early as April 2006, at a time when its shares were sold to the public. Politics has ensured Transcorp's meteoric rise, which was demonstrated in its participation in virtually all sectors of the economy, including oil and gas. With capital in excess of 17 billion in 2006 raised through the stock market, Transcorp became a big corporate player, which easily acquired controlling interests in Hilton, the largest hotel in the country, and in Nigerian Telecommunications (NITEL). Early on, it also obtained concessions to build a Lekki Free Port Zone and oil refinery in Lagos, an independent power plant and a cassava processing facility (da Costa 2006, Abati 2006a, Daily Trust 2006, Aluko 2006, Nwogwugwu 2006, Ofose 2008, Ugeh 2008).

The government's much-vaunted corporate values of transparency and due process were systematically violated in favour of Transcorp. Its shares were hardly valued fairly vis-à-vis those of its potential competitors (Nwogwugwu 2006). This was most glaring in the so-called ‘negotiated sales arrangement’ between the Bureau for Public Enterprises (BPE) and Transcorp, which resulted in the sale of NITEL to the latter. After a long-winded sale process by the BPE that started in 2002, and involved foreign bidders such as the British-owned Investors International London Limited and Egyptian Orascom, in 2006 the Obasanjo government sold 75 per cent equity at the cost of $750 million (97.5 billion) to Transcorp in partnership with British Telecom and Etisalat of the United Arab Emirates (Abati 2006a, Nwogwugwu 2006, Nwakwo et al. 2008). The claim by the government that Transcorp was the most competent of all the 28 companies that expressed interest was hardly convincing. Key personalities involved in Transcorp included President Obasanjo (who reportedly owned about 200 million shares in the corporation through a blind trust), and his cronies and loyalists. The latter famously included Dr Onyiuke-Okereke, Director-General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, who doubled as the chairperson of Transcorp, and Fola Adeola, a banker and an emergent protégé of Obasanjo, the corporation's Managing Director. Nominated by Obasanjo to the Board of Tony Blair's Africa Commission at the height of his corporate power, Adeola was relieved of his appointment as Transcorp MD after he declared his ambition in 2006 to run for the Ogun State Central Senatorial District on the platform of the ruling party in the 2007 general elections. This was the same position coveted by Obasanjo's first daughter, Iyabo, the Health Commissioner in the state at the time. Other high-profile members of Transcorp eventually showed their hand in making huge donations to Obasanjo's re-election campaign and to the Presidential Library Project.¹ They were also unmistakably implicated in the campaign to amend the 1999 Constitution in order that Obasanjo could have a third term in power (Abati 2006a). Towards this end, financial inducement was used to buy the support of opponents of the proposed prolongation. There was a massive inflow of foreign exchange into the system, with many rumours about the news that each National Assembly supporter received 50 million (Adebiyi 2006). In any event, ‘bags, containing millions of naira, were dangled before legislators as bait’ (Ndibe 2006b).

The consequences of the spoils system that neoliberal policy exacerbated in Nigeria during the Obasanjo years include the following: the accentuation of existing social differentiation; the further fractionalisation of state/political elite; and the distortion of politics as big business and lucrative investment. On the first point, there are three ways in which contemporary capitalist societies are stratified. These are: ‘systematic inequalities associated with access to property, jobs and life chances in general’; ‘the possession of economic and power resources’ and consumption as ‘the basis for new social cleavages’ (Crompton 2002, pp. xiv, 11, 20). Through policies such as the removal of the subsidy on oil and its multiplier effects on consumer and other goods, and abolition of free tuition and campus accommodation in federal universities (a public policy which for nearly four decades provided the opportunity for children of peasants to access tertiary education), the Obasanjo government's market reforms encouraged the dismantling and erosion of whatever remained of the social citizenship of Nigerians, in addition to swelling the ranks of the (particularly young) poor and disadvantaged. Some of these vulnerable young men (and women) would later be recruited as foot soldiers, thugs and valiant bodyguards by political parties, politicians and emergent ethnic-based militias.

Whereas there is a pan-Nigerian ruling group that cuts across known cleavages of ethno-nationality, religion, geography, gender and political philosophies, the Nigerian state/political elite (and foreign and domestic capital) has always been factionalised and fractionalised around which personalities and ethno-national groups or sub-groups should, at any point in time, occupy the highest political offices and preside over distributive politics. This phenomenon is experienced at all the three levels of government (federal, state and municipal/local). It is experienced equally by as many political parties as are able to win power at any of those levels, although, logically, ruling parties are more prone to internal dissension and cutthroat competition. In Nigeria, ruling parties have always been subject to serious internal strife. The PDP (no less than the All-Nigerian People's Party (ANPP) and the Alliance for Democracy (AD), two of the major opposition parties) has been no exception to this rule. In view of the large number of retired military and veteran politicians jostling for influence and power within it, many of whom are spectacularly wealthy and naturally would lay claim to key political positions, the party has arguably been one of the most internally troubled political parties in the country's history. It has also been used as a vehicle for accumulation and upward social mobility for a few. Politics and elections have been reduced to inter and intra-elite competition amongst rentier bourgeois groups. A singular example suffices here: in eight years, the country had five different Senate Presidents: Evan Enwerem (May–November 1999); Chuba Okadigbo (November 1999–August 2000); Pius Anyim (2000–2003); Adolphus Wabara (2003–2005); and Ken Nnamani (2005–2007), such rapid succession reflecting destructive in-fighting within the ruling party. The party was infamously described by Wole Soyinka as a ‘nest of killers’, given its penchant for resolving internal political disputes by violent means, a phenomenon that led to a spate of high-profile political assassinations, the murder of Bola Ige, a sitting Justice Minister, in December 2001, being emblematic.

In such a context, money was used routinely not only to corrupt the political and electoral process through vote buying and vote rigging, but also to attempt to buy justice. In this connection, veteran social crusader and activist, Gani Fawehinmi (2007), has spoken of the ‘brazen and bizarre corruption by highly placed public officers at the federal level and in the states caused by the electoral robbery in the April 2007 elections’. This practice violates Section 15 (5) of the 1999 Constitution, which criminalises corrupt practices and abuse of power. He gave two case studies: first, the massive bribing of election tribunal judges and the Court of Appeal of the Anambra South Senatorial Election Tribunal; and second, the Akwa Ibom State Governorship Election Tribunal during the 2003 elections which witnessed four of the five members of the Tribunal being compromised with large sums of money as bribes by the state governor, Obong Victor Attah. Politicians in Nigeria's 4th Republic, in particular those in the ruling party, appear prepared to pay any amount for nomination forms when seeking state offices, which are considered a lucrative business and investment opportunity. Despite the fact that the PDP's price tag on these forms in 2007 ranged from half a million naira (House of Assembly, the lowest) through to 1 million (House of Representatives), 2 million (Senate), 3 million (governorship) to 5 million (Presidency, the highest), there was a rush to obtain them.

Politicians who are constrained to sell houses and landed properties to fund election contests because of insufficient (or lack of) sponsorship by political ‘moneybags’, have as their first priority, once elected, the recouping of such ‘investment’. Indeed, one of the very first acts of MPs, as much at the centre as in the states, is the sharing of spoils, including massive furniture/car/constituency allowances. Some governors went as far as to offer incredible financial inducements in order to effectively buy the support of their state legislature. Thus each legislator in Plateau and Bayelsa States received 5 million and 100 million, respectively, for the execution of ‘constituency projects’ (Adesoji and Rotimi 2008). In addition, Joshua Dariye, the Plateau State governor between 1999 and 2007 (impeached in November 2006, but reinstated by the courts in April 2007), approved a loan of 4 million for each of the state legislators without as much as a repayment agreement (Adesoji and Rotimi 2008). In the same vein, Governor Diepriye Alamieyeseigha of Bayelsa State reportedly financed the election of most of the state legislators (Adesoji and Rotimi 2008, p. 166). Whilst these practices were certainly not limited to these two states, it is instructive that both Dariye and Alamieyeseigha were arrested and tried in Britain on money laundering charges (although both jumped bail). Parallel to these practices were rapacious activities of political heads of ministries (ministers) and heads of government parastatals. As has been noted, the president and his deputy were apparently not immune from these practices.

The reckless use of the impeachment instrument for purposes of self-enrichment and illicit gain by state and federal legislators during this period was another way of cutting electoral campaign losses. The impeachment travails experienced by some governors (e.g. George Akume (Benue), Ayodele Fayose (Ekiti), Rasheed Ladoja (Oyo), Dariye (Plateau) and Chris Ngige (Anambra)) at the hands of their state legislators could, to varying degrees, be seen in this light. What these and related cases (including at the federal level) had in common was governance by impunity. This was expressed in several ways: deliberate disregard for the rule of law; selective obedience of court injunctions; disdain for the fundamental principles of democracy, including the constitutional provision (Section 137 of the 1999 Constitution) that only the courts could disqualify candidates from standing for elections; disdain for the law regulating impeachment, namely, that the House must not only form a quorum, it must have the required two-thirds to do so. Thus, the impeachment process of Fayose in Ekiti State included the purported suspension of the state chief judge and the panel he had set up to investigate the allegations levelled against the governor, and the appointment by the state legislature of a new chief judge and new panel (Abati 2006b). On a related register, Obasanjo and the ruling party chose to forgo the governorship election in Imo State rather than obey a court order to reinstate Ifeanyi Ararume as its gubernatorial candidate. The same fate befell Rotimi Amaechi's bid to contest a parliamentary seat on the PDP ticket in Rivers State (Adesoji and Rotimi 2008, p. 169). Two major implications of the foregoing come into sharp focus. First, whilst politics is, almost by definition, a dirty game played nearly everywhere by people who masquerade as public-spirited, people-friendly politicians, entrenched poverty in Nigeria (largely occasioned by the fact that only a negligible minority has benefited from neoliberal policy) has comforted and reinforced governance by and for sundry monied political charlatans. Second, politics as an extremely profitable business venture is affordable only to political, state and other elites. Leading lights in virtually all the political parties (25 out of about 50 contested the 2007 polls) are either retired military officers who looted the state coffers whilst in power or civilians who did extensive business with the military in government.

For all its public rhetoric of war against corruption, as well as ‘an impressive array of structures, institutions and laws aimed at combating corruption (and) a successful track record of recovering stolen assets’ (to paraphrase Lillian Ekeanyanwu, an expert on international anti-corruption conventions, cited in Ebiri 2007), little success was recorded by the Obasanjo government. Lack of political will on the part of the government was derivative of elite pacting and the closing of ranks by elite groups. This is because the elites have too much to lose. Writing about the contemporary South African case, Vuuren (2008, p. 33) argued that ‘the rich and powerful are engaged in a relentless struggle to allow their crimes to go unpunished. When the political will to deal with such elite crimes falters, a culture of impunity takes hold’. The propensity for corruption was worsened not only by neoliberal policy but also by several other factors. First is the highly controversial immunity from arrest and prosecution enjoyed by sitting governors under Section 308 of the 1999 Constitution. The effect of this is that Nigeria's presidents and state governors could commit crimes and still hold on to power. This has prompted calls that the clause be scrapped with only the president enjoying ‘qualified immunity’, that is, immunity on civil litigations but not on criminal matters (Jason 2005, Adesoji and Rotimi 2008, p. 170, Ibrahim 2007). Second, there has hardly been any strong action to serve as an effective deterrent to rampant venality in power. Third, selective treatment of corruption cases dealt with by the EFCC (Economic and Financial Crimes Commission) is such that in eight years there was no record that any known political ally or associate of Obasanjo was probed, let alone tried in the wake of damaging allegations against them. Fourth, there is the problematic issue of targeting scapegoats by isolating individuals rather than bringing all parties involved to justice. Fifth, the political nature of the anti-corruption campaign exhibited itself in the ‘idea of prosecuting only officials that have fallen out of favour with the powers that be’ (Adesoji and Rotimi 2008, pp. 165, 169). Sixth, Obasanjo hardly led by example; he publicly donated 130 million to the ruling party in 1999 on his behalf and that of unidentified friends. It could be speculated that Babangida and other retired generals followed suit without any public disclosure whatsoever about the size of their monetary donations. This may well explain why the introduction of a ‘code of conduct’ encompassing no fewer than seven principles of public life (honesty, leadership, accountability, transparency, integrity, openness and objectivity) by the government, and which was signed by ministers, did not contribute dramatically to clean government. Shortly after the expiry of the Obasanjo government's mandate, Femi Fani-Kayode and Babalola Aborishade, Aviation ministers at different times, were arraigned for their inability to account for approximately 19.5 billion of state funds.

Political Parties and the Texture of Democratic and Electoral Politics

In theory, political parties are premised on the concept of political inclusivity and anchored in political participation. In practice, however, parties are born mainly due to political exclusivity, that is to say, for purposes of wresting power and controlling the masses. There are likely to be few parties where politics and elections are structured by ideologies about the use to which power is put. On the contrary, where ideologies are lacking and political formations are bereft of identity, as in Nigeria, we are confronted with the efflorescence of several look-alike political parties, differentiated only by the fatness of the purse of their main sponsors and the unique mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of their leaders. Thus, during the 2007 election campaign very few of the 20 or so (male and female) presidential candidates led an issue-driven campaign. Apparently to avoid antagonising Obasanjo, the kingmaker-in-chief, the most notable refrain of their speeches was that they would ‘continue the reform programme of the present administration’. Hardly any of the many pertinent policy issues begging for lucid and clear-headed public debate were raised in any sustained manner by most of the presidential aspirants/candidates. These issues ranged from the calm nature of the oil economy because of its severe externalisation, to the type of state that could best serve Nigerians under globalisation, to economic, social and cultural rights of communities and individuals. Other issues included the fit between community-driven democracy that befitted the social anthropology and political sociology of ethno-nationalities and the individualist conception of neoliberal democracy imposed on the country; gendered democracy; citizen participation/popular alienation; material enablement and empowerment of ordinary people, etc.

What has been the nature of elections within the context of the political economy analysed above? There are at least two ways of responding to this question. The first is to dismiss all the country's elections, including the ones in 1999, 2003 and 2007, as virtually meaningless. The second response is to say that its poor record on elections notwithstanding, Nigeria has recorded some form of genuine electoral competition in the past and this could still take place in the future. The article opts to investigate the first explanation given the new heights of malfeasance electoral consultations attained during the period under review. However, given the well-known political sophistication of the Nigerian electorate since the first republic (Mackintosh 1966, p. 357), the second explanation cannot be lightly dismissed. This suggests that the electoral process is not beyond redemption. The most historic has been the 12 June 1993 presidential election that was generally judged to be free and fair (except by its military superintendents), even though it was not entirely free from fear. Two major factors have accounted for the nature and character of elections held so far in the 4th Republic. The first factor is that elections are often programmed to achieve pre-determined results. This was evident in 1999 when Obasanjo had to win and in 2007 when Yar’ Adua was appointed by Obasanjo to succeed him. The second factor is not unrelated to this: sitting governments and entrenched/ruling parties do not lose elections easily. In respect of Kenya's 1992 elections under the entrenched Kenya African National Union (KANU) led by veteran president Arap Moi, Brown (2001, p. 730) avers that ‘there was no way that KANU would have allowed itself to lose, no matter. For Moi and his allies, too much was at stake: property, livelihood, even lives’. Obasanjo infamously declared during a campaign rally for candidate Yar'Adua that the 2007 elections were a ‘do-or-die’ affair.

It is no surprise that several commentators agreed that the 1999, 2003 and 2007 presidential and general elections were highly flawed. Whilst Obijiofor (2007) wrote that the elections were ‘a carefully contrived political burglary’, Fawehinmi (2007) described the 2007 elections as the ‘most controversial and dubious general elections ever held in the history of Nigeria’. According to the 50,000-strong Domestic Election Observation Group, formed by an array of the country's CSOs, the 2007 elections, no less than the ones before it, were ‘programmed to fail’. The group cites the institutional and leadership incompetence of INEC (Independent National Electoral Commission) and government as the main reason for its stance. Election corruption and INEC incompetence tended to feed into each other and become mutually reinforcing. In the Ondo South Senatorial District, the PDP was declared the winner even though it did not field a candidate. The ruling party was also accused of violently masterminding the hijacking of ballot bags and papers in all the state's three senatorial districts (Alabi 2007). In addition, perception about INEC's lack of autonomy is boosted by its behaviour, actions and initiatives that pointed in the direction of a pro-government electoral agency. During the processes leading to the 2007 elections, the commission participated in litigation against opposition parties. This was in utter disregard of its role as a neutral umpire.

Arguably, the most serious electoral malfeasance occurred during the gubernatorial elections. This was true not only in 2003 (Piombo 2003, p. 5) but also in 1999 and in 2007. Given the amount of constitutional and empirical (or ‘factual’) power and resources available to state governments, most governors had the carriage of a semi-president. On the balance of evidence, it is perhaps fair to say that only a few of the state governors during the Obasanjo years should have had any business with the business of power and governance. More often than not, they were compromise or unwilling candidates imposed on the party and the electorate by senior/respected politicians (e.g. the role of Bola Ige in the election of Governor Bisi Akande in Osun State), or, more commonly, by high-profile political ‘moneybags’. The latter theme is returned to below.

Perhaps what the Nigerian print media dubbed the ‘Alami’ saga (already partly analysed above) best captures the character of the crop of governors in the 4th Republic. The dramatic escape of Governor Alamieyesigha from the UK, disguised in female attire, and the subsequent recovery of assets worth 50 billion by the EFCC after his impeachment, constituted bad publicity for the governors as a group. The situation was worsened by the fact that at that time several of Alami's colleagues were under investigation by the EFCC for alleged corrupt practices. These ranged from money laundering, siphoning of public funds overseas, illegal diversion of funds to inflation of project costs, high profile stealing and the illegal operation of foreign accounts. EFCC's 2005 annual report submitted to the Senate in September 2006, as required by Section 37 of its Act, supposedly established cases of corruption against 15 of the 31 governors investigated. Only Governor Donald Duke of Cross River state was cleared. Whilst all those investigated, except Governor Bola Tinubu of Lagos State, were accused of siphoning local government funds, the ‘worst offender’ appeared to have been the Abia state governor, Orji Kalu. He was accused of embezzling about 35 billion with which he built his business empire, including Slok airlines, Slok Pharmaceuticals and a newspaper house (see Aziken 2006). In addition, in October 2006 Charles Soludo, Central Bank Governor, lamented that state governors were putting him under pressure to draw down and share the country's foreign reserve. Whilst the governors claimed they wanted the money to eradicate poverty in their states, Soludo castigated them for not imbibing the values of prudent management or best practice in corporate governance (Ujah 2006).

Whilst Nigerians would believe any report of sleaze by their leaders and rulers, many of the state governors did little to endear themselves to their constituencies. They tended to use the controversial immunity clause in the constitution in a reckless, indiscriminate and disingenuous manner. Yet the 2005 EFCC report was anything but foolproof. At the demand of Obasanjo, its boss, Nuhu Ribadu, changed the storyline to read that – depending on the version read – only between three and nine governors (whose names were withheld) were allegedly charged with financial crimes. Informed reaction to the EFCC's seeming vacillation has been mixed. Whilst veteran columnist Pini Jason (2006) preferred to see the EFCC as ‘an integral part of (Nigeria's) national development’, one that should not be discredited, some others have raised important ethical and procedural issues, including influence peddling by state governors vis-à-vis the EFCC and conflict of interests (Aziken 2006). For example, it is worrying that rather than initiating its own independent investigation, the EFCC appears unduly reliant on petitions by members of the public.

Obasanjo's Political Agency

Where the ruling party was ambivalent about the delivery of social dividends of democracy and state institutions such as the EFCC were not as sharp as they could be, they resorted to the agency of President Obasanjo. Now, the transmutation of the retired general from prison to palace was as sudden as it was miraculous. There should be no illusion about the fact that the major historical compromise between transnational capital and the country's state/political elite, military-dominated at the time, which ensured Obasanjo's election could not but have stated its conditions very clearly. Similarly, it is not unlikely that this elite pact informed general and specific policy orientations of the Obasanjo government and protected and enhanced the interests of the power blocs involved in the arrangement (Madunagu 2006). In the process, the interests of other power blocs not directly involved in the political arrangement could not but have been secondary and tangential.

Obasanjo literally ‘strolled’ into the PDP, became its presidential candidate, got elected as the country's president and was inaugurated on 29 May 1999. The same coalition of transnational capital and international/domestic political forces that served as undertakers for the demise of Bashorun MKO Abiola was desperate for a Yoruba president in order to compensate the Yoruba nation for the inexplicable annulment of the 12 June 1993 presidential election (Amuwo 2007). If this coalition did not know for sure ‘what’ they wanted, they knew exactly ‘who’ they wanted: a systems man (as Obasanjo had infamously described himself in 1985) who would not only be malleable, but who could also be counted upon to make Nigeria safe for globalised capital. By all accounts, Obasanjo did well for his external and domestic principals and benefactors, forcing through anti-nationalistic policies of privatisation and liberalisation of the economy, even against the wishes of the populace (his government did not tolerate dissent, not even within the ruling party). But he was not yet done with the Nigerian masses. On the eve of his departure from power, not only did he anoint and install Yar'Adua as his successor, he also insisted on a public show of commitment by the latter to his government's market reforms. Obasanjo also gave Nigerians unwanted parting gifts in the form of significant rises in the price of oil (gasoline) and level of VAT.

In fairness to Obasanjo, his government inherited an unenviable political economy. On that basis, in 1999 he could have told Nigerians, in simple forthright terms and humility, that his government's primary concern during the first four years would be the refurbishment of the nation's physical and social infrastructure. He could have added that once a more or less solid infrastructural foundation had been laid for developmental democracy, he would devote his second four-year term to the provision of social and economic dividends of democracy. Apparently, because humility was not Obasanjo's strongest point, neither he nor his policy ‘think tank’ raised these issues this way. Instead, the government opted to feed Nigerians a cocktail of promises on a lengthy list of priorities, chief amongst which was the fixing of the oil sector and the regular supply of electricity within the first two years. When this promise failed to materialise, government's reaction was to blame unnamed political and social forces for sabotage and subterfuge. It was claimed that these were the same forces that had profited from the decrepit state of the country's energy sector during military rule.

One explanation for what would eventually snowball into systematic incompetence of the government was that Obasanjo was ill-prepared for the massive challenges with which a post-military government had to contend. Lack of preparation was evident in poor strategic planning for the highest office of the land. Nor was the ruling party (the self-styled ‘largest party in Africa’) prepared for the onerous challenges posed by a legitimately impatient citizenry. However, Obasanjo was his own worst enemy. While in power he continued to exhibit his well-known contempt for robust public debate and critical scholarship. As a good general steeped in the martial art of unquestioning obedience and loyalty, Obasanjo's ministers and advisers consisted mainly of politicians and professionals who were either too junior to take him on or too beholding to him to risk policy disagreements with him. Obasanjo seemed to have enjoyed this larger-than life image of himself. Whilst inaugurating his large and unwieldy special advisory team after his re-election in May 2003, he counselled the members not to be too timid to advise him, although he was not bound to accept their advice. Acutely self-opinionated and strong-willed, Obasanjo in power was the opposite of all he purportedly stood for outside of power between 1979 and 1999.

In the same vein, Obasanjo was too personally involved in political brinkmanship to call his loyalists and cronies involved in sundry political wheeling and dealing to order. Few played politics by the rules – certainly not ‘political godfathers’ in pursuit of revenge against their errant ‘political godsons’. This was an old phenomenon that went badly wrong during the Obasanjo presidency. Two significant cases, by virtue of their wild and widespread repercussions on the polity, merit attention. Anambra and Oyo States (both core states emanating from the old Eastern and Western Regions) were literally held hostage by political godfathers who went after their political godsons for ‘breach of contract’. What bound the two political godfathers, Chris Uba (Anambra) and Lamidi Adedibu (Oyo), together was not only a fat purse, but also high-level connections in the ruling party and in the seat of power. In addition, neither Uba nor Adedibu (now deceased) had the credentials to match their high visibility in politics. They and their kind were qualified to be no more than glorified political hangers-on, to the extent that their ‘education [was] as rustic as their moral bonafides’ (Ndibe, 2005). Thus, Uba successfully masterminded the abduction of the state governor, Chris Ngige, a surgeon, whilst Adedibu's response to the refusal by his former political godson, Ladoja, an engineer and successful businessman, to reward him with regular financial returns, was no less despicable. Political and physical violence was unleashed on him and his supporters in a bid to force him to capitulate. When that failed, the State House of Assembly, whose political allegiance had already been divided between the two gladiators, was used to impeach Ladoja. Although the Supreme Court would later reinstate him, the point had already been made: politics, as analysed above, is a huge investment, with investors and financiers almost reserving the right to use all means at their disposal to redeem their investment.

There was no public recrimination either from the ruling party or from Obasanjo. On the contrary, Uba would later be elevated to the Board of Trustees (BOT) of the PDP. On his part, Adedibu was publicly lauded by the President as a force to be reckoned with in the politics of Ibadan and Oyo State. The lacklustre manner in which the President explained the abduction of Ngige as a ‘family’ or internal affair of the ruling party (he would proffer the same explanation after Uba and his supporters, with the apparent tacit approval of the Anambra State security apparatus, visited mayhem on the state, making it ungovernable) prompted Ndibe (2005) to comment that ‘the president, in one of the most shameless acts of his scandal-plagued presidency, browbeat the [ruling] party into mischaracterising the impunity as an innocuous domestic quarrel’.

Conclusion

This article has attempted to show that contemporary globalisation, in the form of the activities of transnational capital, has tended to shape and condition public policies in developing countries. This is especially so in those countries that have failed to formulate robustly nationalistic responses to globalised capital. National policies that do no more than replicate the major tenets and norms of a neoliberal political economy tend to entrench a neoliberal democracy that is commodified and priced beyond the reach of the majority. Neoliberal democracy ends up being neither liberal nor democratic.

In view of the structural effects of globalisation on the Nigerian state, a reformist agenda (which is what a neoliberal policy amounts to) is essentially self-defeating. Unfortunately, much of the reaction of non-state actors and organisations is reformist, that is to say, overall strategy, even during heightened popular political struggles, has not been so much to disengage from the state as it is to seek compromise and collaboration with it. This is not wholly surprising because the country's non-state sector was torn between a democratic and an anti-democratic political culture during the long years of oppressive military rule. This is particularly worrying insofar as ‘it is not only the behaviour of governments and state institutions that determine democracy’ (Minnie 2006, p. 9).

A people-centred political culture of election, democracy and development specific to and informed by, amongst others, tested ‘indigenous views of participation, legitimation and constitutional procedure’ (Van Binsbergen 1995, p. 28) of Nigeria's multi ethno-nationality is a social necessity for the rehabilitation of politics and its attendant social concerns. A process for the long term, it will be enduring and sustainable only to the extent that the approach obeys more the logic of a bottom-up approach than that of a top-down approach. Two important steps need to be emphasised. First, Nigeria's ethno-nationalities, with the Ogoni and others in the oil-rich Niger Delta region taking the lead, are increasingly becoming critical sites of manifest and latent democratic struggle. Portrayed as ‘true communities of suffering and resistance’ by the Nigerian literary icon, Biodun Jeyifo (in Na' Allah, 1998), these ethno-nationalities, by contextualising and providing an ideological backbone to occasional outbursts of political populism and its legitimate demands, may yet become the spearhead of the popular movement for the true liberation of the country.

Second, since the Nigerian state is the ultimate institution responsible for deciding and implementing policy, the objective of the first leg of the political struggle is the construction of a new state institutional and structural framework in relation to globalisation. This will entail recovering and reasserting the relative autonomy of the Nigerian state vis-à-vis transnational capital, the aim being to re-orient the economy and assist the state to identify new priorities and articulate new agenda for social progress (Lumumba-Kasongo 1998, p. 140). The second leg of the political struggle is the domestic equation, which will tackle the question of social justice and equity in the political matrix of elections, democracy and development. The aim of the struggle at this level will be to make the Nigerian state and government become, in the words of Dele Olojede, ‘enablers of citizens, the makers and enforcers of the law, the guarantors of justice and equality’ (cited in Smith 2007, p. 59). Popular struggles are likely to achieve their social objectives more rapidly if they are anchored in a strategic alliance between critical non-state actors/organisations and committed fractions/factions of the state/political elite, including domestic capital. Heeding Samir Amin's (2006) call for progressives to ‘bite the bullet and recognise that they can only transform the world if they seek political power’ may further accelerate the process.

Every piece of historical evidence points to the fact that no socio-economic formation has ever developed with a democracy that is at once wholly state-driven and donor-imposed. To succeed, democracy, like development, cannot afford to be out of line with the totality of the culture and the concrete living experiences of the people. Democracy, like development, should be a function of what the people do and want, not a function of models and paradigms imposed on them.