| This dissertation explores the reasons for Nigeria's lackluster developmental performance and rejects as too facile answers which concentrate on scarcities, unfavourable terms of trade or other exogenous factors. Focusing instead on governance as a central explanatory variable, the logic behind the State's actions (and inactions) is analyzed. The thesis pursued is that the State, staffed by officials modelled neither in the image of Platonic philosopher kings nor of Fabian administrators but by bureaucrats with their own interests, is developmentally counterproductive. Consequently emphasized is the necessity to complement the state-oriented perspective of neo-classical development economics pointing to ubiquitous market-failures with the equally likely syndrome of state-failure. Especially in a context of state autonomy, reasonably assumed for a military regime with an independent resource base, there are few constraints to arrest the wastage of scarce resources. Of equal or greater importance is that nothing prevents such a State from pursuing regulatory policies which pre-empt the mobilization of those potentialities which lie ungarnered in civil society.;To provide historical depth, the origins of the bureaucratic Nigerian State are traced to the colonial government's omissions and commissions as well as to the specific forms of nationalist opposition these gave rise to. The colonial State failed to create private land-ownership, open the civil service to qualified Nigerians and abolish produce marketing boards after the emergency situation of World War II. It used traditional chiefs as its extension agents which ensured stability, yet at the expense of development. Similarly, it prevented the emergence of a manufacturing sector and of a productive bourgeoisie. Then, in the twilight of its existence, and financed with ruinous agricultural taxes, it heavily intervened in the economy through the expansion of the state sector, unwieldy regulation of private activity and through direct participation in production. The nationalist opposition consisted mainly of westernized intellectuals, both a product of colonialism and dependent on the colonial economy for their livelihood, yet who were also intensely frustrated because of the colonial government's disinclination to involve them in political matters. The State became a trophy as important as national sovereignty, or more, and dirigiste policies the natural reflex of this etatiste fixation. The post-independence Nigerian State, so my contention, uncannily fits Weber's ideal type of a patrimonial State. By applying this model to the 1970s and 1980s, the discrete logic of the Nigerian State's interventionist policies (to seek and distribute rents) comes into sharp relief as does the desirability of greater market-reliance and a respectively oriented State. |
