Democracy and prebendalism: Emphases, provocations, and elongations

Abstract

In the very first week of January 2012, with the New Year’s air still redolent of the odor of the previous year, major towns and cities across Nigeria exploded in spontaneous civic rage. The immediate provocation was President Goodluck Jonathan’s announcement of the federal government’s resolve to remove the "remaining" subsidy on petroleum products distributed in the country. With that seemingly irreversible decision, the pump price of petrol was to rise from 65 to 41 per liter, an increase of more than 100 percent. Earlier, as 2011 drew to a tense close (parts of the north and the federal capital, Abuja, had been rocked by deadly bomb blasts for which the radical Islamic group, Boko Haram-Western education is sacrilegious, had taken responsibility), major Nigerian newspapers gave conflicting reports on the status of negotiations between the federal government and representatives of the Nigeria Labor Congress (NLC). On the one hand, it appeared that the NLC was willing to concede to subsidy removal at a certain percentage, but not until government had demonstrated good faith by committing itself to investment in long neglected physical infrastructure, especially Nigeria’s aging and perennially damaged oil refineries. For its part, the federal government, in an all too familiar pseudo-Weberian grandstanding, trotted out data that appeared to support its claim that subsidy removal was imperative if an oil industry in its last throes was to be resuscitated.