Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T05:56:35.017Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Popular Reactions to the Petro-Naira

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 November 2008

Karin Barber
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

During the last decade, the flow of oil revenue into Nigeria has expanded spectacularly, dwarfing other sectors of the economy. Its implications for development, for the growth of a commercial capitalism, and for the corresponding emergence of a more defined class structure are crucial issues about which much has been written. What we have heard less about, however, is how the ordinary people of Nigeria react to the floods of petro-naira which they themselves cannot reach. Fortunes are being made out of oil, but the living conditions of the rural and urban masses deteriorate as agriculture declines and the urban centres become overcrowded with the jobless and the impoverished. What are the attitudes of these people to the petro-naira? The answer to this question is no less important than an analysis of the hard economic data for our understanding of what is actually going on in Nigeria today.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Modern African Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 3 , September 1982 , pp. 431 - 450
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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.)

References

page 431 note 1 However carefully a questionnaire is prepared and administered, there are inevitably problems, among the most serious of which are the following; (i) The document reflects what the sociologist, rather than the person being interviewed, thinks is important. To some extent, the conceptual framework will determine what is asked and how the answers are interpreted. (ii) Distortion arises from the unnatural situation established by the administration of a questionnaire, especially in a community unfamiliar with the whole idea of a sociological survey. People tend to give answers calculated either to please the interviewer, or to give absolutely nothing away. (iii)If a questionnaire is administered widely enough to be representative, individual interviews are likely to become superficial and mechanical.

page 432 note 1 Macherey, Pierre, A Theory of Literary Production, translated by Wall, Geoffrey (London, 1978),Google Scholar and ‘Problems of Reflection’ in Barker, Francis et al. (eds.), Literature, Society and the Sociology of Literature: Proceedings of the Conference held at the University of Essex, 1976 (London, 1976), pp. 41–54.Google Scholar

page 433 note 1 I have been attached to the Adejobi Theatre Company as actor and observer since April 1981.

page 433 note 2 It is true that élite social clubs do occasionally invite the companies to give special performances for their members. When this happens, the gate-fee is usually very high, ensuring that the audience is composed only of well-to-do people. The atmosphere is very different from the usual rowdy, bawdy one. One such performance that I watched in the élite K-S Motel in Ibadan was attended mainly by well-dressed, middle-aged women. The hall was not filled. The audience was appreciative but restrained, and there was little of the usual exuberant participation. The play was interrupted twice for lengthy donation-collecting ceremonies organised by and for the social club's members. However, though members of the élite do sometimes watch these plays, popular theatre is still disparaged and regarded as rather frivolous and tawdry. It has not been legitimised by the academic establishment. In the Department of African Languages and Literatures at Ife, for instance, a B.A. degree in Yoruba is awarded without the students having taken a single course on popular theatre. It is neither traditional (like the genre of oral poetry) nor written (like the Yoruba novel and western-type drama), and so falls between two stools.

page 434 note 1 Oil money now makes up 90 per cent of government revenue. Between 1966–7 and 1977–8, that revenue has increased from £170 million to N7,650 million, namely twenty-two fold.

page 434 note 2 Up to the end of the nineteenth century a very common form of hired labour was the ìwòfà, a bondsman who was made over by a debtor to a creditor as a form of interest on a loan. The ìwòfà was usually a junior relative of the debtor, and when the debt had been paid he would be released from his servitude. Under the colonial cash-crop economy, the ìwòfà was replaced by a labourer (often from another ethnic group) who was hired by the day or for a specific piece of work. It is unclear how extensively the labour of slaves (erú) was used in the pre-colonial era, except in the household of the Qba and of the great nineteenth-century Ibadan warlords where many slaves were kept.

page 435 note 1 There are, of course, exceptions to this general pattern: for example, in eighteenth-century Oyo, when the power of the great chiefly families had become most entrenched, it is likely that wealth and position were inherited rather than achieved by individual effort. And in the nineteenth-century war states like Ibadan, wealth was achieved by conquest rather than by productive labour, though the great war-chief did have extensive farms as well as large armies. On the whole, however, wealth was achieved by work; even an Qba had usually been a farmer at some stage in his life. In three modern cocoa-farm towns visited in and 1976 –Odigbo–Ore, Sunmibare–Ondo, Temidire–Ilesa – even elderly men, because of changing family patterns, were actively farming with little assistance. These towns had an extremely strong regard for hard work, and a young man caught wandering around during the daytime, instead of working on his farm, might be publicly beaten for laziness.

page 435 note 2 See Pearson, R. Scott, Petroleium and the Nigerian Economy (Stanford, 1970).Google Scholar

page 435 note 3 The Nigerian Government's oil revenue has increased overall for three reasons: total production has gone up; prices have risen; and an additional share of th total profits was brought about by a change in taxation regulations relating to oil in 1967, when O.P.E.C. terms were imposed on companies operating in Nigeria. However, this income is unstable, as severe cutbacks in 1981, and again in 1982 have shown.

page 436 note 1 Turner, Terisa, ‘Commerical Capitalism and the 1975 Coup’, in Panter-Brick, Keith (ed.), Soldiers and Oil: the political transformation of Nigeria (London, 1978), pp. 166–97.Google Scholar

page 441 note 1 In an interview with Chief Ogunbanjo, the millionaire ‘captain of industry’ who owns and part-owns some 30 Nigerian subsidiaries of foreign companies, the interviewer Amma Ogan commented in the Daily Times (Lagos), 11 April 1981: ‘All kinds of myths are built around the very rich in Nigeria. And Chief Ogunbanjo would want us to believe that he is a very private person, very humble, a man of simple wants, that his aim in life has been to “assist his fellow men”.’ Accordingly, the good Chief rises early, takes a simple breakfast, puts in a full ‘working day’, dresses simply in spotless white lace, and espouses the philosophy of being content with one's lot!

page 443 note 1 The audience certainly felt that the play implied the use by Fosko of money-magic. One woman talking about the play the next day, spontaneously told the whole story of how money-magic is made, and how it inevitably brings about the destruction of its user, as if this were, in fact, the theme of the play. Rebecca Akindele, Okuku, 24 December 1981.

page 449 note 1 Bayo Akanbi, 28 November 1981, Ibadan.

page 449 note 2 Admiration of insouciance, intransigence, and generally outrageous behaviour are much in evidence in orlkì (appellations) of prominent people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Barber, Karin, ‘Oriki in Okuku Town: relationships between verbal and social structures’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of Ife, 1979.Google Scholar

page 450 note 1 Akindele, Okuku, 24 December 1981.