Moral Economies of Corruption: State Formation and Political Culture in Nigeria

In Moral Economies of Corruption, Steven Pierce posits an original theory of state formation in the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The discourse on corruption pertains to the ethics of bureaucratic culture: how ethics both sanction and interact with constituted civic orders in Western Africa. The term is premised on a presumed universal ethics, the contravention of which only individual actors and cultures bear responsibility. The bureaucratic norms of the Westphalian nation-state developed out of centuries of European moral and ecclesiastical negotiations of the Family of Nations. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85 established in international law a bureaucratic framework for the establishment of African states implicated in Westphalian bureaucratic norms. Following independence, Pierce argues, Nigeria betrayed “international norms” as it became associated with profound bureaucratic malfeasance due to the irreconciliation of its ethnic “heterogeneous components” with the federal bureaucracy (7–8).Nigeria is a federation of thirty-six states and numerous ethnic groups that constituted distinct emirates, kingdoms, and chiefdoms throughout its history. In Nigerian “corruption” discourse, Pierce argues, “use of the term lies at the center of how moral questions about the distribution of public goods are negotiated” (4). The ambiguity of corruption is crucial to how Nigerians deploy the term to manage relationships between groups and the international community. Pierce defines “corruption” as a material practice, a moral discourse, and a legal category (7). Each category often overlaps with significant implications for the functionality of the Nigerian state.In Part I, “From Caliphate to Federal Republic,” Pierce tracks in three chapters the evolution of northern Nigerian concepts of authority from the nineteenth-century Fulani Sokoto Caliphate, the British Protectorate of Northern Nigeria, to its present multistate configuration under the Constitution of 1999. The Sokoto Caliphate established a centralized Islamic royal hierarchy over the Hausa emirates. The British maintained the emirate structure under the “indirect rule” theory that the Westminster parliamentary-style bureaucratic state would be cultivated in Nigeria through the endogenous monarchical constitution.According to Pierce, Nigeria's “corruption-complex” emerged from the British-mandated bureaucratization of the emirates (30). Hausa-Fulani rule involved practices, inconsistent with Western norms, such as gift-giving, the use of “public” goods for “private” ends, and symbolic taxation. These practices were not intrinsically “corrupt,” Pierce insists, but integral to the Hausa-Fulani moral economy. In the British Empire, the practices provided a rhetorical pretext used to depose errant rulers. Nigerian corruption was “a political performative” that emerged as a strategy of African rulers to mediate domains of authority under British suzerainty (37). The rhetoric of corruption “pathologized indigenous political culture” while also providing Nigerians a vocabulary of civil critique (37).Britain introduced Nigeria-wide parliamentary rule through regional parliaments with the Constitution of 1946. The introduction of legislative politics widened civic engagement but paradoxically diminished the royal hegemony on which Nigeria's parliamentary regime was predicated. Pierce argues that Nigeria's peculiar politics emerged through the struggle for a ruling-class identity independent of the royal hierarchy whose sovereignty was vested in the provincial parliaments, which was the standard constitutional model of the Commonwealth of Nations (e.g., in Australia and Canada). The British Empire facilitated a new middle-class strategically “aligned with but not identical to” the emirate aristocracy (68). The intelligentsia argued for a U.S.-modeled federalist system in which states shared sovereignty with the federal government—before the Nigerian states were created. Following a constitutional referendum, the Nigerian Constitution of 1963 introduced republican federalism at the expense of the safeguards of regional sovereignty and parliamentary subjection to the aristocracy that the Westminster-system provided.In Part II, “Corruption, Nigeria, and the Moral Imagination,” Pierce develops in two chapters a theoretical discussion of moral economy. Pierce argues that moral economy offers a useful way of thinking through the dilemmas of the Nigerian bureaucracy. Moral economy encompasses Hausa-Fulani concepts of authority, which were maladapted to the Westphalian state. The endogenous moral economy provided ethical codes of conduct by which individuals sanctioned affective networks of relational authority. The republican Constitution disjointed the bureaucracy from the royal hierarchy's affective power. The codes of obligation implicit in the endogenous traditions thus operate as a competing regime of “overlapping conceptual systems that coexist in northern Nigeria” (162). For Pierce, the moral economy of corruption is not necessarily about whether the magistrates do “good” or “bad” things, but the extent to which the endogenous ethics harmonize the federal bureaucracy. That the relationship of state and society is radically incongruent in Nigeria, for Pierce, is indicative of the limitations of the state for legitimate self-governance. In Nigeria (and many other countries), under the precedent of Westphalian sovereignty, the international community tacitly buttresses an order in which “The state is thus a function of its sovereignty rather than the reverse” (204).Pierce's study raises critical unanswered questions. Despite the vast literature on the Sokoto Caliphate, the discourses of Sokoto's founders were minimally engaged. The reform of Hausa royal ethics was the central rationale of the Sokoto revolution.1 How did Sokoto's reformation of the royal hierarchy inform Pierce's argument? The author usefully engages the literature on “moral economy,” yet the Nigeria-wide application of the theory is inconclusive. For example, the choice of a Yoruba author as the source for the “Moral Economies of Corruption” chapter is problematic (175–87). A northern Nigerian Hausa-Fulani voice is necessary to corroborate this argument, because the debates regarding regional versus state sovereignty are about whether Nigeria is to be a federal republic or a federal constitutional monarchy. Finally, the author concludes that Nigeria faces an existential challenge the resolution of which means that “the constitutional order must be brought into alignment with political culture” (229). Nigeria's “political culture” necessitates a moral economy in which the private patronage of public goods is accommodated “as a fundamental political principle” (229). Pierce's conclusion regarding Nigeria's constitutional order raises an important question: what role might constitutional referendum and the Commonwealth of Nations play in the achievement of a sustainable system of royal patronage in Nigeria?Steven Pierce's study makes a valuable contribution to knowledge on postimperial state formation in Nigeria. Any effort to understand or reform Nigeria's bureaucracy would do well to heed Pierce's prioritization of moral economy as the basis of Nigerian federalism.

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