Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rdxmf Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T15:42:23.100Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Be Accessible! Accountability, Performance and the Politician Who Is ‘Always in a Meeting’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 April 2023

Portia Roelofs
Affiliation:
King's College London
Get access

Summary

This chapter argues for a conception of accountability as accessibility. Drawing on qualitative fieldwork with local politicians, market traders and NGO activists in Ibadan, Oyo State, it shows the ubiquity of calls for accessibility in Nigeria and beyond. Politicians are accessible insofar as they maintain spaces for direct contact between themselves and their constituents. At the level of theory, accessibility reveals a blind spot in dominant conceptions of accountability, which rely on principal–agent models, and poses new conceptual questions about the interaction between communication and sanctioning power. Thus, Nigerian political discourse gives us the language to describe a universal but neglected aspect of accountability and hints at a more socially embedded approach to good governance. Political competition in the twenty-first century southwest Nigeria shows how the politics of competing conceptions of accountability play out in practice. The rise and fall of the ‘Lagos model’ in Oyo and Ekiti states can be understood as a struggle over different conceptions of democratic accountability. Where technocratic notions of good governance insulate decision-makers from their constituents and favour abstract data over face-to-face interaction, it leaves open the field for populist politicians to promise accessibility through exaggerated, almost pantomime performances of connection and communication.

Type
Chapter
Information
Good Governance in Nigeria
Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century
, pp. 146 - 174
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×