Prebendalism and the People: The Price of Petrol at the Pump

Abstract

The strength of the concept of prebendalism is that it focuses on “fundamental processes” (Joseph 1987, 1) of political sociology by suggesting that access between the people and the state may show broad similarities across time, space, and regime type. In his conclusion, written just after the return of the military to power in Nigeria, Richard Joseph asks, using the experience of the Second Republic, how multiparty democracy can be sustained if it “only generates patterns of political mobilization and conflict which threaten the very integrity of the nation itself” (184), by reaffirming officeholding as the focus of competition: “the intensive and persistent struggle to control and exploit the offices of the state” (1). Different kinds of pluralistic democracy, as well as military rule, may sustain familiar patterns of the circulation of funds and goods through the arteries and capillaries of the distribution of state resources. In principle, Joseph’s approach opens a vast field for comparative studies, of which one key empirical topic would be the actualities of government procurement through the offices of the state, otherwise known in Nigeria as “contracting,” which exists in every modern government system, without exception. Such empirical studies seem much rarer than they ought to be. For example, is there a study of how bids and tenders work for the provision of boots for the army, given that Nigeria has a shoe industry of its own (Meagher 2010, 46, 125)?