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Representation Without Taxation: an Essay on Democracy in Rural Nigeria, 1952-1990*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 May 2014

Jane I. Guyer
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Extract

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.

Type
Articles
Information
African Studies Review , Volume 35 , Issue 1 , April 1992 , pp. 41 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © African Studies Association 1992

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Footnotes

*

The research on which this paper is based was carried out in 1968-69, financed by a grant from the NIMH, in the summer of 1987 financed by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the SSRC/ACLS, and January to March and July 1988 financed by the National Science Foundation (BNS-8704188). I am grateful to the institutions with which I was affiliated in Nigeria: The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, Ibadan, and the Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan. The paper was originally written for, and presented at, the conference on Democratic Transition and Structural Adjustment in Nigeria, Stanford August 25-29 1990. I am grateful to Larry Diamond, Thomas Biersteker and Oyeleye Oyediran for the invitation to take part. It has also been presented at The Johns Hopkins University Atlantic History Seminar. In overcoming diffidence about addressing a different disciplinary literature than my own and in relating comparative anthropology to the issues raised there, I am the permanent beneficiary of Naomi Chazan, Richard Joseph and Sara Berry. For various inputs to the present text I thank Akin Mabogunje, Ladipo Adamolekun, Claude Ake, Daniel Bach, Sandra Barnes, Sara Berry, Toyin Falola, Achille Mbembe and Michael Watts. Finally, without twenty years of intermittent exposure to the experience and devotion to local government in Ibarapa on the part of Silas Okunola Lasunsi I would have learned far less than the limited material presented here. The decisive nature of these people's influence on the ideas presented does not, of course, constitute their endorsement.

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