Introduction
In postcolonial Nigeria, among the numerous challenges confronting electoral politics is the phenomenon of money politics. The term ‘money politics’ is used here to mean capital-intensive electoral politics and, also, the use of material inducement to manipulate elections and their outcomes. Prohibitive electioneering campaign costs and pecuniary inducement of voters as well as electoral personnel and security agents in order to unduly influence election results have become defining features of electoral contests in Nigeria. This has elicited both public outcry and academic inquiry. Different explanations have been offered in the literature as to why money politics emerged and is on the rise: dearth of political ideology, zero-sum character of politics, lucrative nature of politics, inadequate electoral laws and corrupt/weak institutions. These are indeed all relevant to understanding the challenge posed by money politics.
Attempts to contain the challenge of money politics in postcolonial Nigeria have come mainly by way of electoral laws designed to regulate campaign spending by candidates and political parties. For instance, the 2006 and 2010 Electoral Acts (as amended) have provisions that limit both campaign contribution and spending. However, in spite of their provisions limiting political donations to, and campaign spending by, candidates and political parties, the culture of prohibitive campaign spending has persisted. Inducement of voters and other election stakeholders before, during and after elections has not abated – an indication that efforts to contain money politics through the instrument of the law have failed. The predominant explanation in the literature for this failure is poor or non-enforcement of the existing electoral laws (Bryan and Baer 2005; Adetula 2008, 2009; Uwais Electoral Reform Committee 2008; Egwu 2009; Öhman and Zainulbhai 2009; Okoye 2013; Onuoha and Ojo 2018).
Tenable as this lack of enforcement narrative is, it has a major weakness: it does not take cognisance of how inherent biases in the electoral law perpetuate money politics and, most importantly, how the prevailing ‘rigged’ political economy and attendant inequality and poverty coalesce around, and engender, prohibitive electioneering, patronage politics and electoral inducement. While it is not disputed that poor enforcement of the electoral laws has over the years remained a major challenge, the problem with the hypothetical optimism about effective enforcement is that it ignores the class character of the law and the link between money politics and economic structure of the state. State law is usually a by-product of the politico-economic structure of the state, which in turn reflects the ideas of the dominant class; hence, ‘the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas’ (Marx and Engels 1846, 1998, 67).
Drawing on secondary sources and personal observation, this article challenges the lack of enforcement narrative and argues instead that, to understand why money politics has persisted in Nigeria and why attempts to contain it using laws have failed, we must pay attention to the link between the law, class and economic structure of the postcolonial state. Doing so will help us to understand not only the crisis of state–society relations in Nigeria, but also how the ensuing extreme poverty makes the masses vulnerable to material inducement; laws that govern access to state power are intrinsically designed to legitimise and perpetuate unequal relations between social classes.
The term ‘classes’ is used here in its crude sense: the poor and the rich. Such crude contextualisation is partly informed by the fact that ‘transposing’ the definition of classes as offered by Marxist scholars to the analysis of states in Africa does not capture in toto the various manifestations of classes in the continent (Ekekwe 1986). Lenin, for example, defined classes as ‘groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy’ (Lenin 1965, 421). But in Africa, there are people who fall into the subjugated class category not because their labour power has been exploited, but because of their economic exclusion or lack of employment. A crude application of class gives room for multidimensional class analysis. And it is with such multifaceted analysis of class that ‘the dynamics of social structure in Africa today’ could be understood (Noret 2017, 654).
The article further contends that when a political system is deliberately monetised to serve the interests of the dominant class, there is little that the law can do to remedy the likely consequences because ‘if laws are passed to control the domination of leaders, it is the laws which gradually weaken, and not the leaders’ (Jaspers as quoted in Varma 1975, 149). A case in point, as this article will demonstrate, is how campaign finance laws in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic are rendered toothless or ineffective.
Nigeria: historicising the evolution of state, democracy and money politics
The proper locus for the study of the dynamics of money politics and electoral law is the state. Like most political ideas, the state is a keenly contested concept as there is no consensus among political scientists on its origins and purpose. Nonetheless, various scholarly arguments tend to suggest three basic ways in which states emerged: gradual metamorphosis from families to tribes, villages and then to city-states and larger political units (organic evolution); conquest or force (inorganic process); and covenant or choice, which is a kind of federal arrangement (Elazar 1991, 2–3). States in Africa such as Nigeria emerged through the inorganic process: it was a creation of colonialism which itself was a consequence of capitalism. Faced with a declining surplus value at home and in search of cheap labour and raw materials for their industries as well as markets for their finished goods, European capitalists invaded the continent of Africa, dominated its peoples and pillaged its resources. At the Berlin Conference of 1884–85, traditional African societies were balkanised and shared among the European colonial powers. Colonial states emerged from subsequent redivision of the spheres of influence that emerged from this balkanisation. These emergent colonial states were to serve metropolitan colonial interests, primarily domination and resource exploitation (Rodney 1972; Umozurike 1979).
To achieve this aim, the colonialists imposed Western values and practices, such as liberal democracy and election of leaders through the ballot box, on the colonial states. In pre-colonial African societies, leadership recruitment was through heredity, gerontocracy and heroic deeds. Leadership selection was never through election and the ballot box (Fortes and Evans-Pritchard 1950). It also did not require campaigning that would consume vast resources; prospective leaders did not have to campaign for votes before they could become leaders. With a few exceptions, leaders were born; they were not made (elected). Even where persons became leaders by virtue of their exceptional charisma or heroic deeds, they still did not have to possess enormous wealth for leadership to be vested in them.
Unlike the politics in pre-colonial Africa, property/money is key to politics in a liberal democracy. In its earliest form, democracy was exclusionary as only male citizens were allowed to participate in politics: women, slaves and resident alien males were denied participation (Coleman 2000). That was the democratic tradition in ancient Athens, from where democracy originated, and ancient Rome, which was the successor to Greek democratic civilisation. When democracy became enmeshed with liberal ideas (such as liberty and private property) in the 18th century following the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism (Laxer 2010), its exclusionary character remained, as suffrage was limited to the property class. Again, when democracy was imposed on the colonial states, it was accompanied by its exclusionary character. For example, the elective principle (electoral democracy), which was first introduced in Nigeria in 1922, came with an income-based franchise (Jinadu 2010).
Property/money has always been an integral part of democracy. Even after the abolition of property-based voting and the emergence of ‘one person one vote’, money has continued to be important in liberal democracy. The importance of money in liberal democracy has increased in contemporary times and has also extended to ‘illiberal’ democracies, such that it is inconceivable for any modern state to conduct a successful election and for any political party or candidate to run a good campaign without money. It is no wonder therefore that one American politician – Jesse Unruh – once said that ‘money is the mother’s milk of politics’ (Cannon 1969, 99).
Money could also be a poisoned chalice of politics. The ‘quality of democracy and governance’ could be influenced by the role of money in politics (Office of Democracy and Governance 2003, 5). From injection of big money by Political Action Committees to fund the election of candidates and political parties that would protect their interests, as is the case in the United States (Currinder 2009), to the use of illicit money (e.g. money from political corruption, drug peddling, advanced fee fraud etc.) and illicit use of money in politics (e.g. vote buying, inducement of electoral officers, undue influence of electoral outcome etc.) that are characteristic of politics in Third World countries, money can endanger democracy and the politics of rule. Accordingly, Annan (2012) posited that uncontrolled use of money in politics undermines the integrity of elections and leadership legitimacy.
Much of the challenge of money politics in postcolonial Nigeria emanated from the colonial heritage inherited at independence. To facilitate neo-colonialism in postcolonial Nigeria, the departing colonisers not only imposed liberal democracy, which is quite expensive given its inherent nature, but also created and bequeathed power to comprador bourgeoisie. Ake correctly noted this unfortunate conspiracy when he remarked that in Africa:
With few exceptions, the gaining of independence was not a matter of nationalists’ marshalling forces to defeat colonial regimes. More often than not, it was a matter of the colonisers’ accepting the inevitable and orchestrating a handover of government to their chosen African successors, successors who could be trusted to share their values and be attentive to their interests … it was often a convenience of deradicalisation by accommodation. (Ake 1996, 3–4)
It is worth noting that late-colonial and early post-independence infrastructural development in Nigeria was possible because pre-capitalist relations had been neither completely eroded by, nor succumbed totally to, capitalist exploitation which was bequeathed by the colonisers; hence, elite accumulation was limited. However, a combination of protracted military rule, the Biafran war (1960–70), an oil boom and ‘prebendal’ politics (Joseph 1991; Onuoha 2014) would see the emergence of new ruling and business elites heavily implicated in intensified processes of crass accumulation.
The unfolding of these events started with the postcolonial elites who had little or no capital and so resorted to using state power to accumulate wealth and shore up their ‘material base’ (Ake 1996, 3–6). To gain and consolidate power, these elites deployed different strategies: identity politics, election rigging and electoral violence (Nnoli 1980; Dudley 1982). Consequently, ‘political competition assumed the character of warfare’ and attracted ‘the specialists of violence, the military’, who then intervened in politics (Ake 1996, 6).
But the Nigerian military was first a ‘mercenary’ army, in that it was originally created by the colonialists to maintain colonial rule (Luckham 1971), and as it ‘transitioned’ to a national army following decolonisation, it was politicised along ethnic lines by the Nigerian political class, both in recruitment and promotion. Thus, the post-independence military is only national in name but ethnic (tribal) in orientation. Like the political class, the military is ‘divided’ and lacks the nationalism and discipline needed to unite the country and put it on the path of national rebirth. This explains why the first military coup on 15 January 1966 was given ethnic colouration, which consequently intensified mutual suspicion between the major ethnic groups (Hausa-Fulani, Igbo and Yoruba), triggering a counter-coup and accompanying pogrom that led to a three-year civil war (1967–70) (Dudley 1982; Achebe 2012). By the end of the war, behaviour previously restricted largely to the ‘civic public’ had crept into the ‘primordial public’, as leaders had started stealing even from their own town union and religious organisation coffers (Onuoha 2014). Crass materialism, and unbridled corruption and privatisation of public or state resources, became widespread.
A post-war oil boom further entrenched this political economy of graft and excess, with vast quantities of petro-dollars enabling the military (who dominated post-war politics) to both cultivate and broaden patronage networks, and invest in instruments and forces of coercion, as it consolidated its grip on state power (Dudley 1982; Joseph 1991; Ake 1996; Adekanye 1999; Watts 2017). Local and international pressures would force the military out of politics in the late 1990s, but not before military elites had accumulated significant wealth from oil rents. And in order to hold on to power and its trappings, even if by proxy, a fraction of the wealth accumulated was then used to unduly influence electoral outcomes in the various transition elections organised by the military, a legacy which has survived into the era of civilian rule, often with increased intensity.
Enactment of laws to regulate how money is raised and spent on political campaigns by political parties and electoral candidates is the commonest approach adopted in tackling the negative role of money in politics (Nassmacher 2003; Ashiagbor 2005; Öhman 2013). In postcolonial Nigeria, most state laws are designed from the outset to favour the elites by being weak either in their content or in framing and morphology (Ikpeze 2013; Jibueze 2016). From ‘plea bargaining’, which makes it easy for the privileged class to circumvent justice completely, via the unusually lenient censure they receive when they actually fall foul of the law, to ‘constitutional immunity’, which tends to protect corrupt politicians and public office-holders, laws in Nigeria are skewed in favour of the elites. For example, Section 308 of the 1999 Constitution provides immunity for the president, vice president, governor and deputy governor against civil and criminal prosecution while in office. In practice, occupants of such offices hide behind constitutional immunity to abuse their powers and evade prosecution. Thus, the former governor of Bayelsa State, Diepreye Alamiesigha, who stole and laundered millions of dollars while in office, could not be arrested and tried in Nigeria because he enjoyed constitutional immunity (Ikpeze 2013). And even when he was arrested in the United Kingdom in 2005 for money laundering and other related offences while still governor, he escaped from police custody and fled to Nigeria, where he enjoyed the protection of the law.
Legal frameworks that regulate campaign funding represent another example of laws which operate to serve the interests of the dominant class. In what follows, we shall explicate how laws purportedly enacted to mitigate the negative role of money in Nigeria’s electoral politics have actually been legitimising and promoting the practice.
Electoral laws and the legitimisation of money politics in postcolonial Nigeria
All over the world, regulating campaign funding is a complex and difficult task (Walecki 2009), made even more daunting in the societies of countries like Nigeria with weak regulatory capacity (Situation Room 2015). Over the years, a number of laws have been enacted to regulate electoral politics in general and political financing in particular. Many of these laws have been introduced in the recent past mainly to contain the growing negative role of money in electoral politics, a phenomenon which has become particularly insidious during the Fourth Republic. The wealthy now ‘own political parties and deploy them at will … donate party secretariats and huge funds and in return dominate the party decision process’, which then creates room for party supremacy and independence to be compromised (Adetula 2008, xxxiii). Not only have fees for securing party nomination soared (Jinadu 2010), but election campaign costs have also become prohibitive. In the 2015 general elections alone, political parties and their candidates spent about US$1.5 billion on political campaigns (Punch 2017). Needless to say, a considerable amount of this huge campaign expenditure was on inducement.
The electoral laws that ought to pre-empt the phenomenon of money politics are encumbered by the dearth of strong institutions, which hinders effective enforcement (Uwais Electoral Reform Committee 2008; Simbine as quoted in Vanguard 2017). But beyond the challenge of weak enforcement, aspects of the electoral laws seem to be grossly inadequate, a situation condoned by powerful interests that are not averse to laws being amenable to elite manipulation. Such inadequacies range from seemingly premeditated omissions, through bogus provisions, to light penalties for infractions, all of which have become recurrent features of electoral laws in the Fourth Republic.
Although the 1999 general elections that ushered in the Fourth Republic were conducted without an electoral act, the National Assembly has since promulgated three different electoral acts, namely the Electoral Act 2002, the Electoral Act 2006 and the Electoral Act 2010, which have provided constitutional/legal frameworks and guidance for the conduct of subsequent general elections. Despite the seemingly modest provisions of these acts, they all have inherent biases that promote money politics. For example, the Electoral Act 2002 had no restriction on party nomination fees and candidate/political party campaign spending. The consequence was that plutocrats (the wealthy few) had a field day during the 2003 general elections. The Electoral Act 2006 (as amended) had campaign spending ceilings for candidates. Section 93 Subsection 9 of the Act pegged the maximum political donation that could come from an individual or entity to a candidate for the purpose of electoral campaign at 1 million naira. Section 93 Subsections 1–8 limited campaign spending by candidates. For candidates contesting elective office, the Act allowed a maximum campaign expenditure of 500 million naira for those running for president; 100 million naira for those looking to be elected governor; 20 million naira for candidates seeking election to the Senate; 10 million naira for aspiring members of the House of Representatives; 5 million naira for State House of Assembly/Local Government Chairmanship aspirants; and 500,000 naira for local councillorship. However, these upper limits were high enough to represent an inbuilt advantage to candidates with greater rather than lesser spending power. Thus, ‘money politics’ manifested itself widely during the 2007 general elections, which saw lavish campaign spending (Adetula 2008, 2009).
The successor electoral law – the Electoral Act 2010 – did not address this weakness. Rather, it raised permissible campaign spending by 100%. While Section 93 of the Electoral Act 2006 (as amended) permitted presidential and councillorship candidates to expend a maximum of 500 million naira and 500,000 naira, respectively, Section 91 of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) increased maximum campaign spending to 1 billion naira for a presidential candidate and 1 million naira for a councillorship candidate. One would have expected that since the 2010 Electoral Law was amended following public outcry against the undue influence of money, the amendment would have sought to reduce campaign expenditure below the limits allowed under the previous Electoral Act. Indeed, if the justification for an upward review in campaign spending was to restrict politics to those with serious intent while preventing electoral contests from becoming ‘all-comers’ affairs, it failed utterly; it only succeeded in stymying the ambition of contestants of modest means while guaranteeing ‘moneybags’ and charlatans a virtual monopoly of the terrain of electoral politics, as flagrant displays of wealth and blatant deployment of money to influence election results during the 2011, 2015 and 2019 general elections (that were conducted under the 2010 Electoral Act) showed (Olorunmola 2016; EU EOM 2019).
Indeed, the electoral law arguably legitimises money politics since political parties and their candidates can capitalise on the generous campaign spending limits allowed by the law to spend excessively on electioneering. Thus, while politicians often spend far more than they are legally allowed to, as in the 2015 general elections when campaign expenditure of candidates of particularly the People's Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) exceeded the spending cap prescribed by the electoral law (Onyekpere 2015), it is still possible for a candidate to operate within the generous spending limits permissible under the law and still have resources left over for vote buying and other forms of inducement.
Laughably inadequate penalties for breaching campaign funding laws are yet another tacit way of encouraging money politics. As with the 2002 and 2006 Electoral Acts, a penalty of 12 months’ imprisonment with an option of a fine prescribed by Section 91, Subsection 10 of the Electoral Act 2010 (as amended), is not enough to deter politicians and their associates from contravening regulations on campaign spending. For instance, during the 2015 general elections and 2016 by-elections, the police and Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) arrested and prosecuted 491 persons for a variety of electoral offences, including vote buying and possession of multiple voter cards, although only 62 have thus far been convicted (INEC as quoted in Punch 2018).
Not surprisingly, despite this ‘improvement’ in enforcement, money politics has not abated. In subsequent off-cycle gubernatorial elections in 2017 and 2018 in Anambra State and Ekiti State, respectively, the leading political parties and their candidates were reported to have induced voters with cash ranging from 3000 naira to 5000 naira (Onuoha and Ojo 2018). Similarly, the 2019 general elections were fraught with widespread ‘commercialisation’ of politics, as campaign venues and polling booths were turned into ‘markets’ where voters sold their support and votes to politicians and political parties. In the 23 February presidential and National Assembly elections, as well as the 9 March state elections, inducement of voters with cash or food items by the leading political parties – APC and PDP and their candidates – was observed across the states of the Federation, including in Enugu, Kano, Bayelsa and Osun (CDD 2019; EU EOM 2019).
In the presidential election, the inadequacies of the electoral law were laid bare in Gombe State when a local government councillor – Ishiyaku Garba – was caught handing out 295,000 naira to voters. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) arrested and charged him in court on three counts bordering on vote buying. But on conviction, the trial judge sentenced him to one month in prison on each count but with an option of fines totalling 170,000 naira (Punch 2019a), i.e. an amount less than the sum of money the convicted councillor had for inducement at the point of arrest. Given the fact that most Nigerian politicians are rich or have rich backers, it is most likely that the convicted man could easily afford and would seize the option of paying the fine. While the law has been enforced in this case, the deterrence effect seemed minimal or non-existent.
The flaw in the electoral law is not surprising because in Nigeria, laws in particular and reforms in general are usually designed to be ‘cosmetic’ and thus incapable of remedying those ‘deficiencies’ that serve the private ends and group interests of the elites (Okeke and Nwali 2016, 42). This is partly why reform agendas in Nigeria rarely succeed in bringing about desired change and transformation in that, however real and promising such agenda or reform may appear, it merely serves as an instrument of deception aimed at hoodwinking the masses. In this regard, the former INEC chairman – Maurice Iwu – was disarmingly frank in his observation that:
The very same forces that are bent on frustrating our collective hope for a better Nigeria are really not in support of any meaningful reforms of the electoral system but are only interested in having a Commission that will do their bidding. (Iwu 2009, 16)
For instance, there is currently no law capping party nomination fees, even though political parties have charged aspirants to elective office increasingly prohibitive fees to secure party nominations since the 2007 general elections. And yet, between June and December 2018, the National Assembly forwarded to President Buhari three revised versions of an Amendment Bill seeking, among other things, to cap party nomination fees, with the president withholding his assent each time, citing inconsistencies in the Bill and conflicts with existing law (IRI/NDI 2019, 20). The absence of such a cap enables political parties to ‘price’ non-elites out of electoral contests, as party primaries during the 2019 general elections showed. For the ruling APC, the nomination fees skyrocketed to 45 million naira and 22.5 million naira for presidential and governorship aspirants, respectively, as against the 27.5 million naira and 5.5 million naira it charged for the same positions in the 2015 general elections (Olorunmola 2016; Vanguard 2018). Exorbitant nomination fees discourage aspirants of modest means who are nonetheless ‘credible’ and willing to run for political office. For example, Christian Akpodiete – an APC presidential aspirant in the 2019 poll – was compelled to drop out before the party primaries because he could not afford the eventual nomination fees.
But while much of the focus remains on aspiring males with limited resources being deterred from realising their ambition of holding elective office, exorbitant party nomination fees and prohibitive campaign costs act as an even bigger deterrent to women and youth – two often vulnerable groups at the wrong end of income inequality. Little wonder, then, that the percentage of youth and women occupying elective positions in Nigeria is currently in decline (IRI/NDI 2019). By monetising the electoral process, political elites not only undermine meaningful popular participation in electoral politics; they also actively exclude non-elite women and youth from political contests and positions of power (Onah and Nwali 2018), thereby intensifying their marginalisation and exacerbating their vulnerability. This enables the elites to control access to state power and resources and ultimately perpetuate a political economy that guarantees elite accumulation and widening socio-economic inequality.
Money politics and the political economy
The character of Nigeria’s political economy, particularly links between crass accumulation, mass poverty and money-induced political behaviour, helps to explain why money politics is thriving and electoral laws enacted to curb it are failing. Nigeria’s political economy is skewed in favour of the ruling class. Consequently, it enriches a few individuals while impoverishing the vast majority. This largely accounts for growing inequality and poverty since independence. Thus, about 81 million Nigerians out of the estimated population of 190 million (now) live below the poverty line of US$1.90 per day, and it is projected that ‘by 2050 … more than 40 percent of the extremely poor people in the world will live in just two countries: Democratic Republic of Congo and Nigeria’ (Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 2018, 6).
As poverty has intensified in both incidence and severity, vote buying and other forms of inducement have become more commonplace. The ‘growing impoverishment of most Nigerians paradoxically … cemented their reliance on patronage networks for survival’ (Campbell 2011, 25). When people are so poor that they can barely afford basic necessities such as food and shelter, they somehow become susceptible to all sorts of political manipulation and enticement just to satisfy their basic needs. Take recent elections: in the lead-up to the 2019 general elections, the ruling class capitalised on prevailing abject poverty to entice prospective voters with interest-free loans. Specifically, President Buhari, through the Federal Government, launched an ‘empowerment’ scheme called ‘TraderMoni’ just a few months prior to the elections. Under the scheme, selected petty traders were each given a 10,000 naira interest-free loan (EU EOM 2019). But TraderMoni turned out to be camouflaged money politics (Transparency International as quoted in Punch 2019b): the beneficiaries were promised more loans if they voted for the president, who was seeking re-election. In some cases, where there was suspicion that the beneficiaries might not vote as expected, they were compelled to surrender their voter cards in exchange for the loans, an action that is tantamount to vote suppression. In this way, a potential empowerment scheme became a tool for political inducement and disempowerment since it either disenfranchised the beneficiaries or induced them to vote for their benefactor. Also, reports from international and local election observers indicate that voters openly traded their votes for paltry amounts of cash on polling day (EU EOM 2019; Situation Room 2019).
That some Nigerian voters would exchange their votes for cash or food items is a sign of acute hunger and poverty rather than poor enforcement of the laws. No amount of electoral laws and level of enforcement can successfully contain the negative role of money in politics in a country with widespread extreme poverty because ‘it is not regulations … or punishment, but … economic development that will guarantee good elections. Elections are difficult in abysmal poverty’ (International IDEA, as quoted in Smah 2008, 72). This is why allocation of resources in a society should be such that:
No citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself. (Rousseau as quoted in Macpherson 1977, 16–17)
Colonialism actually laid the foundation of Nigeria’s evolution into a predatory state by creating an unproductive elite class and a dysfunctional statist economy (Ake 1996). Thus, the postcolonial elites cannot engage in ‘productive’ economic activities or play politics productively because they are conditioned from the outset to be unproductive. But the elites are not only unproductive: they are also feasting parasitically on rents from state resources. Postcolonial Nigeria is a petro-rentier state suffering from the tragedy of the resource curse (Collier 2007).
The replacement of craft, manufacturing and food production with resource extraction by the colonialists caused internal dislocation of the domestic economy and created a postcolonial economy that is dependent on rents from resource extraction (Ake 1981; Nnoli 2010). Thus, what emerged was an enclave economy that extracts and provides raw materials for ‘value addition in another economy’ (Murombedzi 2016, 60) but could not satisfy the basic needs of Nigeria, especially food security. But there was another tragedy. The state’s statutory marketing boards for the various raw materials (mainly cash crops such as cocoa, palm oil and groundnut) became channels for exploiting peasant farmers.
The international commodity prices may be controlled by London, Wall Street or the Bourse, but the difference between such prices and those offered to the farmers [was] often significant and this provided one of the most important rake-offs for the political class. (Cohen 1972, 241)
What is more, a political economy embedded in oil rents and corruption emerged. Thus, while over five decades of oil production have yielded more than US$1 trillion in oil revenues, much of this, maybe running into several billions of dollars, has been siphoned off (Watts 2017). Available statistics show that in the last 40 years alone, 31 billion barrels of Nigeria’s oil reserves have been extracted, and crude oil worth US$1.09 trillion was exported between 1980 and 2015, yet socio-economic development and savings within this period have remained abysmal (NEITI 2017). Some 85% of Nigeria’s oil revenues are appropriated by the ruling class, who make up just 1% of the population (Watts 2008; Watts 2017). In a sense, Nigeria’s vast oil wealth enriches a tiny privileged elite and its offshore partners (international oil companies and their home governments), while the ensuing corruption unleashes impoverishment on the populace and environmental degradation in the oil-producing communities. This has created a paradox of penury in the midst of plenty (Ross as quoted in Lubeck, Watts, and Lipschutz 2007). The impoverished populace thus becomes vulnerable to inducement, while the elite uses part of its unjustly accumulated wealth to purchase votes during elections and, by implication, consolidate its hold on power.
The foregoing shows how over time, the colonial legacy is transformed both in structure and manifestation and masks its implication in internal events that seemingly have no direct links to colonialism. Unproductive political elites – created by colonialism and reproduced by subsequent events and processes – often manipulate state laws (including electoral regulations) and abuse state institutions through political control (appointment and promotion of personnel). Along with poor remuneration, this leaves personnel of these institutions vulnerable to political pressure and susceptible to pecuniary inducements, which largely explains why institutions like INEC, the police and the military are readily used by powerful elites to rig elections. For instance, in the 2019 general elections, state agents were compromised, mostly by incumbents. In particular, the military was used to intimidate voters and disrupt collation of election results in states such as Rivers, and possibly to manipulate election results elsewhere (IRI/NDI 2019; Situation Room 2019). What this indicates is that elections in Nigeria are mere periodic transfers of power from one set of predator elites to another, facilitated in part by the sometimes illegal use of money and questionable deployment of state apparatus.
Once power is transferred, insatiable accumulation begins. The predator elites accumulate wealth by outright embezzlement of public monies and also by securing outrageous salaries and allowances for themselves. For instance, amid growing poverty, a national minimum wage of 18,000 naira (less than US$50) per month and several months of unpaid salaries for ordinary workers, each member of Nigeria’s central legislature, the National Assembly, receives about US$174,829 in annual allowances and a basic annual salary of US$10,132 (National Institute for Legislative Studies 2015). A considerable amount of state resources goes to the upkeep of political office-holders such that ‘one-third of the national budget is spent on elected officials, especially parliamentarians’ (Olukoshi as quoted in International IDEA 2017, 11). Politicians find the huge remuneration and allowances as well as other paraphernalia of political office irresistible, thus viewing politics as a lucrative ‘investment’ which must be undertaken at any cost.
The implications of the increasing monetisation of politics in Nigeria are numerous: it has made electoral politics affordable only to the rich or those they sponsor; made pecuniary inducement the defining feature of elections in Nigeria; and led to elected office-holders concentrating on recouping election expenses and accumulating wealth at the expense of governing, with primitive accumulation becoming both the means and the end of electoral politics. The danger is that resources that should have gone into development infrastructures (such as roads, electricity, schools, health care etc.) are appropriated by the elites, causing further decay of the productive forces, which in turn leads to economic stagnation or retrogression. This pushes more people below the poverty line and makes those who are already poor poorer. As poverty levels increase, more people become vulnerable to all sorts of pecuniary inducement from politicians. In this way a vicious cycle is created in which money politics deepens poverty, which in turn perpetuates money politics.
Not even the two decades of ‘democracy’ since the military ‘left’ power in 1999 have changed this lingering perversion of politics. Instead, democracy now provides ‘legal’ justification for elite accumulation since ‘elected’ political leaders (including the self-acclaimed socialists among them) use their offices for self-enrichment, which is why it is important that ‘in dismantling … fraudulent structures (that promote the exploitation of the demos anywhere in the world), it is time to pursue a different standard by reimagining … democracy from a renewed socialist perspective’ (Cross 2017, 355).
The failure of democracy and its accompanying reforms in neo-colonial Nigeria is not surprising, because such reforms (e.g. the electoral laws) have been partly informed by a neoliberal agenda championed by the capitalist West and its institutions. The more political elites become increasingly capitalist and ‘externally oriented’, the more they have adopted market reforms and laws that unleash austerity and further economic exploitation and political alienation of the masses. With this crop of political elites ‘superintending’ the affairs of the state, Nigerian democracy as well as its essential element – elections – could be ‘anything but redemptive’ (Amuwo 2009, 37). Even attempts by pressure groups such as the Nigerian Labour Congress to challenge the neoliberal policies and the consequent alienation (Mustapha 2017) have yielded meagre returns.
Usually, most state laws that emanate from a political class with such capitalist orientation and parasitic character do not serve the common good. Such laws are designed to serve the interests of the elites even though they may appear otherwise on the surface. Laws, especially in a capitalist state, often serve the purpose of consolidating class exploitation and domination (Pashukanis 1980, 284). Sometimes exigencies, such as a threat of imminent revolt or the need to achieve political legitimacy or to moderate intra-class competition and rivalry, might demand that certain laws be put in place even if they would benefit the masses indirectly. But such laws ultimately serve the interests of the dominant class in the long run since they help the ruling class to achieve political legitimacy, prevent social instability and suppress revolt.
Conclusion
In the final analysis, money politics in Nigeria is a function of the interplay of the political economy of parasitic accumulation and mass poverty. Campaign funding laws meant to contain the phenomenon have serious flaws which end up perpetuating it. Regrettably, these flaws cannot be addressed through effective enforcement of the laws because the flaws result not from lack of enforcement – they are ingrained in the laws. Yet, amending the electoral laws or promulgating new laws to address such inherent flaws may also be ineffective because the main factors pushing money politics are largely economic rather than legal. Thus, it is illusory to presume that laws and their enforcement alone can yield many positive results.
Moreover, the intrinsic character of the law tends to favour the ruling class and sustain inequalities in wealth. It is little wonder that centuries ago, Jean-Jacques Rousseau observed that ‘laws are always of use to those who possess and harmful to those who have nothing: from which it follows that the social state is advantageous to men only when all have something and none too much’ (Rousseau as quoted in Macpherson 1977, 17). Although the law is essential for regulating social behaviour to conform to societal expectation(s), it has some limitations: it may mean little to the poor trying to survive and nothing to the elites who can manipulate it to advance their interests. Regardless of the position of the electoral law on pecuniary inducement, those who are struggling to make ends meet are more likely to accept material inducement from politicians than those who have conquered poverty and are able to meet their basic needs. We are not oblivious to the fact that the rich too can be induced, as attested by the Nigerian experience in the 2015 general elections where some traditional rulers and influential party chieftains were each given several million naira by politicians seeking elective office (Omotola and Nyuykonge 2015). But even in such a scenario, the recipients of such monies were expected to use them to induce their poor subjects and loyalists to vote in favour of these politicians. Ultimately, the poor are the main target for material inducement during elections.
A challenge of this nature cannot be effectively tackled with enforcement of laws alone, for no level of enforcement can eradicate the vulnerability and subservience that poverty unleashes on its victims. Therefore, reforms that perhaps can successfully contain the phenomenon of money politics in Nigeria are those that not only guarantee stringent campaign funding laws and effective enforcement, but also recalibrate the political economy to balance class relations and reduce inequality. To achieve this would require mass action; and there is a sense in which money politics has given rise to a form of social protest and class survival strategy whereby it is the politicians that are being cheated by the electorate. Put differently, Nigerian politicians often try to win elections through monetary inducement of voters, but in some cases voters collect such inducements from the politicians with no intention of voting for them. Although the propriety of such an action is questionable, it nonetheless suggests a form of resistance to electoral manipulation by the power elites.
There have also been cases in the past when the masses resorted to violence to resist electoral manipulation and ‘theft’, as in the 1983 elections of the Second Republic, in states such as Ondo, Oyo, Ogun and Niger where popular protests against rigged elections descended into violence, arson and the lynching of some ‘rogue’ politicians and their suspected collaborators in the Federal Electoral Commission (Joseph 1991, 74–75).
What this tells us is that money politics, if not properly or effectively controlled, could trigger ethically deficient class actions. Even though the merit of such class actions is diminished by the ethical and legal questions they raise, they nonetheless open up a nuanced vista of money politics and its dialectics that requires closer attention/study (to broaden the debate on political finance) and reinforces the compelling need for reform. Such reforms, which will ultimately alter the current predatory state formation and develop a regime of social inclusion, are necessary to reduce class inequality and extreme poverty and to ensure that no voter would be so poor as to contemplate selling his or her vote, and no political leader would be able to accumulate wealth through the instrument of state power, or use it to unduly influence electoral outcomes. Civil society organisations have a role to play in this regard: they should become part of a vanguard for change and, through public sensitisation and mobilisation, reorient and organise the masses towards sustainable and ethically/legally acceptable mass action (e.g. protest votes in election, protest/picketing and civil disobedience) to press for an inclusive and representative political economy.