Standard approaches to transparency emphasise transparency in data: the principle that data about government activity should be accessible and accurate. This chapter draws on in-depth fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to show how standard data-focused efforts are insufficient to meet popular demands for a government that is knowable and visible. Transparency in data is only one conception of the core concept of transparency. Transparency in things involves demonstrating transparency through the delivery of tangible, concrete outputs, whereas transparency in people demands that the social networks, relations and obligations in which their leaders are embedded should be made legible. Political competition in twenty-first century southwest Nigeria exemplifies the tensions between these rival conceptions of transparency. Whilst the technocratic reforms of the ‘Lagos model’ meant that more government data were in the public domain, there was widespread popular suspicion that official documents may be hiding as much as they reveal. Two examples from Oyo State in the 2010s show how sensitivity to these alternative conceptions of transparency helps explain otherwise counter-intuitive popular responses to government efforts at ‘good governance’. A final section explores the possible consequences of failing to attend to transparency in people, drawing on examples of populist politics in Nigeria and elsewhere.

This chapter introduces the ‘Lagos model’, a transformative package of pro-market developmental policies and reforms that was developed first in Lagos State, Nigeria, in 1999 and subsequently expanded to nearby Ekiti and Oyo. Under progressive Governors Bola Tinubu and Babatunde Fashola, the Lagos State Government reformed government agencies, introduced public–private partnerships, and oversaw an astronomical rise in the state’s tax base. In addition to serving as an effective strategy for building a political base for the opposition, the Lagos model won plaudits from international donors who saw it as a home-grown example of their good governance agenda. The spread of the Lagos model re-animated long-standing tensions in Yoruba politics, putting a vision of leadership rooted in epistemic superiority into conflict with a more socially embedded conception of legitimate rule. In the 2014 gubernatorial elections in nearby Ekiti state, the Lagos model was rejected in favour of its polar opposite. Whilst some have seen this as a straightforward material contest over the sorts of goods that governments should provide, this chapter argues that debates over the Lagos model reveal blind spots in dominant models of good governance.

Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.

Over the past 200 years, rival political camps in southwest Nigeria have offered competing ideas of good governance. The Yoruba progressive tradition emphasises an epistemic approach to governance, embodied in the Yoruba concept of olaju (civilisation or development) and the figure of Chief Obafemi Awolowo. More populist challengers have long countered this elitist approach with a more socially embedded offering, emphasising closeness and connection between leaders and followers, and material exchange. This second populist tradition has been associated with the more nefarious aspects of Nigerian politics, from the distribution of patronage to the dominance of ‘godfather’ figures. This chapter adds nuance to debates about godfather politics, with analysis of key figures in Oyo state politics. By 2011, a new generation of politicians in the progressive tradition, led by newly elected Governor Abiola Ajimobi, repudiated the amala politics associated with the region’s godfathers and affirmed donor-originated ideas of good governance. In tracing how assorted politicians in Yorubaland have sought to honour the epistemic, social and material elements of governance, this chapter concludes that we should be sceptical of any claim to a monopoly on good governance.

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.