Beyond Prebendalist Systems
State, Democracy and Development in Africa
Richard Joseph
Post-colonial African Prebendal System
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Mix of authority systems: personalistic, legal-rational,
military, traditional rulers
State offices as prebends acquired through appointment or
election
Exploitation of economic advantages of state offices while
pretending to uphold stipulated public duties
Clientelistic responsibilities used to justify extra-legal use of
offices
Fissiparous state order, often unstable and conflictual
Theory of Prebendal Politics
Originally an ecclesiastical term “… prebend refers to offices of
feudal states which could be obtained through services rendered
to a lord or monarch, or through outright purchase by supplicants,
and then administered to generate income for their possessors.
Max Weber discussed both prebends and a prebendal
organization of office.”
As adapted to Nigeria and other African countries: “A
qualitatively unique form of statist and clientelist political
behavior [that is] …ultimately self-destructive.”
R. Joseph, “Class, State and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria” (1983)
Theory of Prebendal Politics
“In my adaptation of this concept to Nigerian politics as well as
many peripheral capitalist nations, the term prebendal refers to
patterns of political behavior which reflect as their justifying
principle that the offices of the existing state may be competed
for and then utilized for the benefit of office-holders as well as
that of their reference or support group. To a significant
extent, the ‘state’ in such a context is perceived as a congeries of
offices susceptible to individual cum communal
appropriation. The statutory purposes of such offices become a
matter of secondary concern however much that purpose might
have been codified in law or other regulations or even
periodically cited during competitions to fill them.”
(“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
NeoPatrimonial Rule
“In patrimonial political systems, an individual rules by dint of
personal prestige and power; ordinary folk are treated as
extensions of the ‘big man’s’ household, with no rights or
privileges other than those bestowed by the ruler. Authority is
entirely personalized, shaped by the ruler’s preferences rather
than any codified system of laws. The ruler ensures the political
stability of the regime and personal political survival by
providing a zone of security in an uncertain environment and by
selectively distributing favors and material benefits to loyal
followers who are not citizens of the polity so much as the ruler’s
clients”
M. Bratton and N. van de Walle, Democratic Experiments in Africa (1997)
The Fight of Our Time
In August 2006, Barack Obama described the struggle to reduce
corruption as "the fight of our time".
Transforming prebendalist systems must be at the center of
strategies to strengthen democracy and achieve povertyreducing economic growth in Africa.
“Ways must be found to protect the state-power…from being
prebendalized and then squeezed of its resources to satisfy the
unceasing struggle among massed communities and their (selfserving) patrons for access to the public till.”
(“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
Dysfunction and Sub-Optimalism
The Nigerian State may be withering away in terms of its sensational
incapacity to provide minimal services to its hard pressed citizens. Witness,
for example, the protracted ongoing national black-out coinciding with a
terrifying heat wave.
The vacuity of a political leadership which has turned the state arena into
one of unprecedented predatory extraction as several scams burst open
almost daily…the weak stature of the country in the global knowledge
economy.
A direct linkage between the criminalization of the state populated
increasingly by what one may describe … as looting gangs and the activities of
militias in the Niger-Delta and in the North of the country.
Professor Ayo Olokotun, April 13, 2012
Primacy of Institutions
“We take institutions for granted but have no idea where they
come from.” “Three important categories of political institutions:
the state, rule of law, and accountable government”.
“Institutions were the products of historical circumstances and
accidents that are unlikely to replicated by other differently
situated societies.” “New institutions are typically layered on
top of existing ones, which survive for extraordinarily long
periods of time.”
Francis Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the
French Revolution (2010)
The Weberian State and Ancient China
The hallmarks of the modern office are a separation between the
office and the officeholder; the office is not private property;
the office-holder is a salaried official subject to the discipline of
the hierarchy within which he is embedded; offices are defined
functionally; and officeholding is based on technical competence.
All of these were…characteristic of the Chinese bureaucracy
from the time of the state of Qin – repatrimonialized during
later dynasties.
[Ancient China]… alone created a modern state in the terms
defined by Max Weber… China…invented a system of meritbased bureaucratic recruitment…
China: The Patrimonial Tug
“One of the most important causes of the decline of the Han
Dynasty was the recapture of the state by different
patrimonial elites and the consequent weakening of the central
government. The Qin effort to eliminate feudalism and create an
impersonal modern state was undone; kinship returned as the
primary avenue to power and status in China, a situation that
lasted until the later years of the Tang Dynasty in the ninth
century.”
“Kinship and patrimonialism reinserted themselves as the
organizing principles of Chinese politics. There is an inverse
correlation between the strength of the centralized state and the
strength of patrimonial groups.”
Confronting Patrimonialism
“Impersonal modern states are difficult institutions to both
establish and maintain, since patrimonialism – recruitment
based on kinship or personal reciprocity – is the natural form
of social relationship to which human beings will revert in the
absence of other norms and incentives.”
“The most universal form of human political interaction is a
patron-client relationship in which a leader exchanges favors in
return for support from a group of followers.”
“…there is constant pressure to repatrimonialize the system.”
Fukuyama and Africa
“Most people…would prefer to live in a society in which their
government was accountable and effective…few governments
are actually able to do both, because institutions are weak,
corrupt, lacking capacity, or in some cases absent
altogether.”
“Tribalism in its various forms remains a default form of
political organization, even after a modern state has been
created.” Abner Cohen: Ethnicity - “one type of political
grouping within the framework of the modern state.”
“Getting to Denmark …stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous,
inclusive and…extremely low levels of political corruption.”
France’s ancien régime
“…the actual purchase of small pieces of the state, which could
then be handed down to descendants.”
Government offices …sold to the highest bidder…Government
…was privatized down to its core functions and public offices
turned into heritable private property.
Patrimonial officeholding; venal officeholders; prebendal
The rente: selling of public offices to private individuals,
entitling office holder to a revenue stream that the officeholder
controlled.
The paulette: a rente holder could convert his office into heritable
property by bequeathing it to his descendants in return for a fee.
France’s ancien régime
The system created by the French government was an absolute
nightmare. It virtually legitimized and institutionalized rent
seeking and corruption by allowing agents to run their public
offices for private benefit...
If modern public administration is about the observance of a
bright line between public and private, then the ancien régime
represented a thoroughly premodern system. The French state
was thus a curious and unstable combination of modern and
patrimonial elements.
A market in state offices: bought, exploited, and transferred to
heirs: “property rights in public offices”. “Governments felt
they had to respect the property rights of traditional elites”.
French Prebendalism
“The state sold the right to collect indirect taxes to tax
farmers who, in return for guaranteeing the state a certain fixed
return, could keep any excess tax revenues for themselves. In
addition, the state could simply increase the number of offices for
sale, which had the effect of depressing the price of existing
offices and thus diluting the property rights of their holders.”
“The authority of the state had been built by empowering a
broad coalition of rent-seeking elites and entrenching them in
tradition and law…A modern France could not arise until venal
officeholding was replaced by impersonal, merit-based
bureaucracy.”
The Prebendalist Trap
“The French fiscal system deliberately encouraged rent seeking.
Wealthy individuals, instead of investing their money in
productive assets in the private economy, spent their fortunes on
heritable offices that could not create but only redistribute
wealth…they innovated with regard to new ways of outwitting
the state and its tax system.”
“The government of the town in France came to be controlled
by a small oligarchy who increasingly came to hold their offices
through purchase.”
“The state resorted to what amounted to a protection
racket…since virtually all of the creditors were corrupt in one
way or another…”
Beyond Prebendalism: The Bright Line
“The French Revolution was able to reestablish a bright line
between public and private interest by simply expropriating all
of the old venal officeholders’ patrimonies and lopping off the
heads of the recalcitrant ones. A new political system in which
recruitment into political office was to be based on merit and
impersonality – something the Chinese had discovered nearly
two millennia earlier – was then brought to the rest of Europe by
the man on horseback…The nineteenth-century German
bureaucracy that became Max Weber’s model for modern,
rational public administration did not evolve out of patrimonial
officeholding, but rather styled itself as a conscious break with
that tradition.”
Nigeria: State, Society and Economy
“..a deeper crisis in the political and economic order…the distinct
pattern of competition for access public resources in all sectors of
Nigerian society.”
“…the self-destructive tendencies of this system must be
thoroughly understood if ways can ever be described to escape its
debilitating cycle of political renewal and decay.” (“Prebendal
Politics”, 1983)
FF: “The critical political institution in a Malthusian world was
the state because it was the primary route to achieving extensive
economic growth.”
“…the thorough prebendalizing of the public realm created a
state that was incapable of effective macroeconomic
management.” Crawford Young (1998)
Nigeria: State, Society and Economy
“The vulnerability and fragility of the Nigerian state increased
pari passu with the expansion of its economic activities.” “The
degree to which individuals and private concerns were able to
block, alter, or circumvent state policies to suit their own
interests.”
By 1978, “a new class of Nigerian entrepreneurs – drone
capitalists – had consolidated itself in both the public and the
(nominally) private sectors.”
“When the state itself becomes the key distributor of financial
resources…all governmental projects become the object of
intense pressures to convert them into means of individual and
group accumulation.”
(“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
The Patrimonial Challenge
“Access to the Nigerian state, from the colonial period to the
present, has become increasingly central to the social struggle for
control of scarce (and occasionally abundant) resources…The
emergence of the state as the central focus or vortex of the
struggle for advancement at all levels and from all sections of
Nigerian society.”
“Procedural rules governing the conduct of state business become
fig leaves…the avoidance or evasion of formal governmental
procedures…the priority, or even decisiveness, of such
approaches and their detrimental effect on the functioning of the
swollen state apparatus.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
The Bourgeoisie and the State
“a class whose formation, and sustenance, has become closely
tied to the privatizing of public resources…” “able to fatten
themselves on oil-generate wealth…[blockage]…shifting to
really productive activities as long as sufficient wealth can be
siphoned off.”
“[The bourgeoisie]…has an economic orientation and a set of
priorities that render it fundamentally incapable of ruling without
squeezing dry the arteries of the state itself.” (“Prebendal Politics”,
1983)
“The centrality of the Nigerian state in the distribution of desired
goods and services renders it a kind of ‘market’” (Terisa Turner)
The need for a vigorous market economy to supplant the state-asa-market (Goran Hyden)
Conglomerate Society
“Ethnic communities complement the former regions and now
federal states of Nigeria as informal constituencies of the nation.”
“The ways in which the disproportionate access to goods and
services are legitimized in Nigerian society. [The]…subtle
commingling of individual procurement with communal
advancement…”
“The pervasive normative expectations…that the struggle for a
share of public goods will be conducted and assessed along
ethnic and other sectional lines…Such expectations…do not
preclude egoistic appropriations by individuals or mutual
exchanges among members of the dominant class.”
(“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
Prebendalism and Democracy-Building
“The intensity of political conflict in Nigeria…can now be fully
understood in terms of prebendal attitudes to governmental
office.”
“…normative principles of prebendal politics…an individual’s
sectional support group should obtain tangible benefits from the
latter’s exploitation of his or her public office and…pride will be
taken by these sectional clients in the magnificence of the
patron’s life-style.” (“Prebendal Politics”, 1983)
“It is my concern to analyze these…dynamics, and to see what
paths can conceivable lead from them to a more stable,
efficient and democratic polity”.
Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria (1987)
Prebendalism and Economic Growth
“A military-bureaucratic elite during the 1970s was able to act in
an authoritative and often unilateral manner to execute policy and
institute reforms.”
“With the return to competitive party politics after
1978…constraints to the full flowering of prebendal politics were
removed.”
“…the dominant class elements will not temper their greed to
make possible a sufficient downward flow of resources.”(“Prebendal
Politics”, 1983)
Nigeria 2011
61% of Nigerians (97.6 million) earn less that $1 a day. 10%
increase in poverty, 2004-2010. Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
United States Albert J. Stanley, CEO of engineering firm,
KBR, pleaded guilty to conspiring to bribe officials in Nigeria
in return for $6 billion in business contracts.
Siemens, Halliburton, etc. Negotiated fines included in cost of
doing business. “As business has gone global, so has graft…The
World Bank estimates that $1trillion in bribes is paid annually
to government officials. In Africa alone, $148 billion is
siphoned off annually…” Leslie Wayne, NY Times, March 11, 2012
“The worldwide proliferation of gray zones – part of the “great
success narrative.” Pankaj Mishra, NY Times, February 2, 2012
Gray zones rather than bright lines
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
The United States “The extent to which the legislative process
has become hostage to the lobbyists, while politicians
increasingly depend for campaign finance on big business. The
land of opportunity is thus turning into a land of rent seekers in
which business has acquired excessive power and regulators
have been captured by those they regulate.” John Plender, FT, 4.16.12
Jack Abramoff: Systematic enticing [suborning] of congressional
chiefs of staff. Subsequently, “every move that staffer made, he
made with his future in my firm in mind.” Ezra Klein, NYRB, 3.22.12
“A Congress that’s become a forum for legalized bribery.” Tom
Friedman, NY Times, 4.22.12
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
India “Democratic India finds it extremely difficult to fix its crumbling
public infrastructure – roads, airports, water and sewage systems, and the
like…” F. Fukuyama
Truck drivers pay bribes instead of license fees to use the national highway.
Uttar Pradesh and Bihar “lose millions of rupees that could be used for road
repairs”. Railway clerks systematically divert rupees collected for railway
tickets. Bala Sugavanam, FT, March 13, 2012.
Government increases passenger and freight fares to improve decayed railway
stock. James Lamont, FT, March 15, 2012
Railway Minister Dinesh Trivedi forced to resign for raising fares. March 18, 2012
Katherine Boo, Beyond the Beautiful Tomorrows (2012): dysfunctional and corrupt
governments – “citizens locked into a fantasy.” Pankaj Mishra, NYTimes, 12.2.12
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
Russia Tax rebate scam allegedly cost the Russian Treasury
more than $800 million from 2006-2010
Refunds worth $370 million granted by the same tax officials to a
string of front companies
Rebates shepherded by senior officials in government; FSB,
successor to KGB, accused of involvement
Death of informant lawyer Sergei Magnitsky in jail
Resignation of Sergei Vasilenko, Head of Anti-Corruption
Department of the Federal Tax Service, after his investigations
blocked. FT, April 13, 2012
Criminalized State and Prebendal Tax Farming
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
China…now confronts rampant corruption, rent-seeking,
cronyism, nepotism, injustice, inequalities and social
instability.” Lifen Chang, FT, March 16, 2012
The Bo Xilai/Gu Kailai affair: “Corrupt party officials have been
secretly using wives, friends, and even mistresses to transfer and
conceal ill-gotten wealth overseas.” Ms. Gu’s law firm and
consultancy: “serving as a gatekeeper to her husband and his
powerful government associates”. Andrew Jacobs, NY Times, April 13,
2012
Prebendalism as a Global Phenomenon?
South Africa Limpopo Province: “Dry pipes and powerless
plugs…the heavy toll of graft and cronyism…” “graft and
wasteful spending have sapped the government’s ability to
tackle inequality.”
Government contracts to companies run by close associates of
politicians. “It is all over the country.” Moeletski Mbeki
“Only 3 of 39 governments departments were pronounced clean
in audits …Only 7 of 237 cities passed muster…”
“…regional politicians use their offices to enrich their friends,
forming a coterie of wealthy clients.” “politicians by day,
businessmen by night.” Lydia Polgreen, NY Times, February 19, 2012
All Africa
Ghana and Nigeria Police officers and custom officials
“whose income depends on extracting petty bribes and a
politician whose primary concern is channeling state funds to his
patronage network”. Lionel Barber, FT , April 14-15, 2012
Uganda: Six government ministers forced to resign after
investigations of graft. NY Times, February 17, 2012
Angola: “An Angolan elite, centered on the presidency, has
amassed private fortunes.” FT, April 7-8, 2012 “Three of the most
powerful officials…have held concealed interests in an oil
venture with Cobalt International Energy, the Goldman Sachs
backed explorer.” FT, April 15, 2012
The Bright Bottom Line
“In the mid-2000s,Wal-Mart de Mexico was the
company’s brightest success story.”
Systematic
bribery campaign to win market dominance
Bribes paid to obtain permits throughout Mexico
Wal-Mart investigators unearth evidence of widespread bribery
Wal-Mart de Mexico concealed payment documents
Likely violations of Mexican and US laws
Wal-Mart shuts down investigation
Special Report, NY Times, April 22, 2012
The Nigerian Predicament
Feckless Democracy -> Effective Democracy [T. Carothers; R.
Inglehart & C. Welzel]
Soaring
Population Growth
Deeply Deficient Infrastructure
Woeful Education, Health, Nutrition
Economic Expansion + Poverty Increase
Crime, Insecurity, Terrorism
Mega-Corruption + Tollgate Corruption
Plutocracy + Mass Deprivation
Dynamic + Venal Leaders
Conglomerate Electoral Politics
A Prebendal Republic
“A democracy that works”, Ch 2, Democracy and Prebendal Politics
“We need to know the conditions under which democratic
institutions work and endure. By ‘work,’ I mean that they
achieve such widely desired effects as economic growth,
material security, freedom from arbitrary violence, and so
on.” Adam Przeworski (1993)
“The Nigerian federal system operates almost exclusively as a
mechanism for the intergovernmental distribution and ethnopolitical appropriation of centrally collected oil-revenues.”
Rotimi Suberu (2012)
Oil Bunkering/Political Bunkering: Tap into an artery of the state
and suction revenues. When it dries up, find another artery
Closer to Denmark?
“Getting to Denmark …stable, democratic, peaceful, prosperous,
inclusive and…extremely low levels of political corruption.”
“Most people…would prefer to live in a society in which their
government was accountable and effective…few governments
are actually able to do both, because institutions are weak,
corrupt, lacking capacity, or in some cases absent altogether.”
F. Fukuyama
Nigeria 2025 Project
Nigerian Model: designing accountable and effective
government: Lagos State after 1999
Central Challenge: From Prebendal to Inclusive and Effective
Democratic Governance
Nigeria 2025 Project
I. Civic and Communal Associations,
Corporations, NGOs, Faith Groups
II. Local Governments, States, Sub-National
Zones, Confederation
III. Qualitative Education
IV. Strategic Partnerships and Out-Sourcing
V. Engaging the Diaspora
VI. Ethical Leadership & Followership
Nigeria 2025 Project
Collaborative Learning and Action








Nigeria after Military Rule: 1999-2025
Midway: 26-year Marathon
Amalgamation,1914-2014
April 2015 Elections and Beyond
The Northern Schism and Terrorism
South-South Learning: Brazil-India-Nigeria-Indonesia
What tried? What worked? What failed? What next?
Innovations and Communications Technologies