Presidential monologue – Part 42

Good morning, Mr President. I am back from a month-long recess. I am enlightening you on an important and ever-current issue in the developing world: the question of strong institutions. It was the subject of a lecture I delivered recently, and I will serve it to you, in instalment, for the next three weeks or so.

It is a reproduction of the lecture, and I feel strongly that it would be beneficial to your administration. This first part is the introduction and conceptualisation of institutions.

Two reasons informed the choice of the subject. One is the obvious dysfunctionality of the state in Africa and Nigeria in particular. The chaotic nature of Lagos which I once addressed in a poem titled “Lagos” published in Lagos of the Poets edited by Odia Ofeimun, captures the contemporary disfunctionality of the Nigerian state. The poem reads: When you descend, /It is a meteoric thud, / in a circumference of rancour, /Phantoms move in defiance of phantoms, Horns blare, / To the east the folk stumble/ To the west they swagger, / The nation’s hold is ugliest (Cited in Ofeimun, 2010, p. 324).

The poem addressed the Lagos condition of the 1980s. While it speaks to the social disorder of Lagos, it does not address the blood-letting feature of the contemporary Nigerian state where dead bodies beg to be picked from the streets and forests to be buried in unmarked graves. The second impulse is ever present in us academics, and Shapiro, et al (2006, p. 1) speak to it in their edited volume on Rethinking Political Institutions: The Arts of the State.  As they put it: “Institutions are the arts of the state. They give it shape; articulate its relationship, and express its legitimacy. There is no escaping them in the study of politics.”

A few years ago, President Barack Obama of the United States of America boosted the relevance of state institutions. The occasion was his state visit to Ghana, Nigeria’s West African neighbour. In his address to the Ghanaian parliament, Obama noted that: “In the 21st century, capable, reliable, and transparent institutions are the key to success—strong parliaments; honest police forces; independent judges; an independent press; a vibrant private sector; a civil society. Those are the things that give life to democracy, because that is what matters in people’s everyday lives…Africa doesn’t need strongmen, it needs strong institutions… You have the power to hold your leaders accountable, and to build institutions that serve the people…With strong institutions and a strong will, I know that Africans can live their dreams in Nairobi and Lagos, Kigali, Kinshasa, Harare, and right here in Accra.”

I now turn to the subject of state, institutions and their capture. In avoiding the ambiguity of the definition of the state, Miliband (1969: 49) says, what “‘the state’ stands for is a number of particular institutions which, together, constitute its reality, and which interact as parts of what may be called the state system.” He isolated government as the institutional expression of the state in the sense that when we claim to obey or disobey the state, it is actually the government that we are engaged with. Other institutions of the state include the administrative and the military.

The administrative one, “extends far beyond the traditional bureaucracy of the state, and which encompasses a large variety of bodies, often related to particularly ministerial departments, or enjoying a greater or lesser degree of autonomy—public corporations, central banks, regulatory commissions, etc. –and concerned with the management of the economic, social, cultural and other activities in which the state is now directly or indirectly involved (Miliband, 1969: 51).

Another important institution is those concerned with the “management of violence”, the material force of the state, that is, the military and the sister organisations, namely, intelligence units, the police, etc. It is pertinent to note that both the administrative and the military can be subsumed within the broad arms of government, namely the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary in a democratic setting. The point must be made that these arms of government are supposed to function within the ambit of the basic law, known as the Constitution. This provides us a toga to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the institutions of the state that we have highlighted above. Our scope in this context covers 1999, the year of commencement of the fourth republic to the present. However, we shall first address the notion of state capture.

To talk about weak institutions is to reference state capture. The notion of state capture in the Nigerian context presupposes the atomisation of state institutions to the transcendence of self-interest. State capture is rooted in corruption. It is perpetrated when a group exerts or maintains unwholesome influence or power on the state such that they can shape laws and policies for the benefit of a few individuals at the expense of the fundamental objectives of the state (Nwozor, Olanrewaju, Ake, Aleyomi & Lawal, 2021, citing Hellman, Jones & Kaufmann, 2003).

It is pertinent to note that state capture involves three essential pillars, namely, influencing the formation and implementation of laws and policies; and disabling accountability institutions (David-Barrett, 2023).  As Nwozor et al (2021, p. 56) have rightly noted, “…for any group of elites to capture the state, they must necessarily be in control of state power. It is access to, and control of state power that positions and empowers the political elites to facilitate the manipulation of policy formulation and implementation. State capture, therefore, makes it possible for privileged benefits from [the] government to percolate to designated beneficiaries with links to dominant political elites”. Next week, I shall discuss the historical context and nature of the Nigerian state.

Akhaine is a Professor of Political Science at the Lagos State University.