The foundation for corruption

From some team room talk this week I got a few more examples of Nigerian government and tribal politics. One person recounted a story from Edo state where a market had burned down. The administrative head of the area wanted it rebuilt in a different area where there were more of his tribe in order to bring the wealth that way. From a business standpoint it didn’t make much sense as there were not as many customers and it was not as well connected. The administrator built a shopping center and offered everyone who moved a free place initially and about $1000. Everyone moved there for about three months in order to claim the money, and then moved back when the repairs to the original center were completed.

You can’t run for certain state government positions here unless you were born in the state. I think a lot of this is linked to a general dislike for non-locals moving in. This may be some regionalism/tribalism, but it is also economics: the majority of state revenues are disbursements from the federal government, so more people in a state means the money doesn’t go as far. I assume that the money is reapportioned periodically by census, but this doesn’t change short-term disparities and no one believes the census count. (Wikipedia, if I remember correctly, has a whole paragraph devoted to the differing counts of the number of people in Lagos.)

Read about Nigeria in the newspaper, both from within the country and from without, and you can’t escape the political patronage. Everyone acknowledges and dislikes the system, but it is self-enforcing – when people get political power, it is “their turn.”

I tend to think that one key problem is that everyone wants to be a politician. Politics pays better than almost any other profession, and not just from corruption – I’ve been told that Nigerian senators make more than U.S. senators, and that in a country where 40% of the population doesn’t have electricity to speak of. When being a politician is that attractive, a lot of people go into politics for themselves, not for altruism.

Again, I heartily recommend the Financial Times report on Nigeria at 50 and the McKinsey report on Africa as primers.