A QUARANTINE FOR THE AFRICAN STATES?
The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the ascendancy of the state in theoretical and policy considerations of the African predicament, with a lot of effort being sunk into attempts to strengthen further relevant institutions as a way out of the legacy of underdevelopment. By way of contrast, the 1970s and 1980s were basically decades of disenchantment, given the reality of the profligacy, fragility, and non-performance of the African state and its managers. What was then witnessed was a conceptual and policy shift away from concerns over how to build the capacity of the state, mainly in order to mould and incorporate society in the march towards development, to a perspective informed by increasing evidence of the state's incoherence, incapacitation, and weaknesses. The 1990s, therefore, appear set to complete the swing of this intellectual and policy pendulum away from the African state towards the terrain of civil society, in the expectation that this will provide an alternate resource base for engineering and sustaining the development of the continent. Symbolically enough, the decade has opened with the publication of a volume whose editors and contributors have not only come down decidedly on the side of society, but who often appear to call for the state to be quarantined in order to facilitate meaningful development. Their collection of essays is the outcome of a 1985-6 workshop in political theory and policy analysis, led by Vincent and Elinor Ostrom at Indiana University, and is understandably informed by insights drawn from their work on theories of collective action, organisational behaviour, and public administration.
Deconstructing "Oluwole": Political Economy at the Margins of the State
In July 1999, following charges of age falsification and forgery of university certificates, the Speaker of the Nigerian House of Representatives Salisu Buhari was impeached from office. What a section of the press called “Buhari-Gate” is emblematic of a wider phenomenon of document forgery, one that continues to be replicated in different forms locally and nationally, and in the public and private sectors in Nigeria. Underlying the numerous scandals is the “Oluwole” phenomenon. While the phenomenon predates 1999, its regularity and currency in the public domain in the aftermath of the return to civilian rule warrants further investigation (Bayart, Ellis, and Hibou, 1999: 109). With a few scattered exceptions, “Oluwole” has on the whole attracted an embarrassing silence from the criminological enterprise,1 except for occasional media sensationalism (13). The lack of systematic research raises suspicions that even members of the intelligentsia could perhaps be caught in the web of the Oluwole phenomenon.
Cleavage, Conflict, and Anxiety in the Second Nigerian Republic
Democratic politics embraces, inevitably and inescapably, an uneasy tension between conflict and consensus. If liberal democracy is defined as the institutionalisation of regular competition for political offices and policies, then clearly, there cannot be democracy without conflict. On the other hand, precisely because constitutional democracy is the institutionalisation of conflict, it is vulnerable to the decay of political order – and of the very political liberties that distinguish it from other governmental forms – that may result when conflict becomes to intense. The containment of political conflict within certain boundaries of behavioural restraint has, therefore, long figured prominently in the writing of theorists on the conditions for stable democracy.