The German army recognised before 1914 the importance of communication to the third command task, reducing uncertainty, and evolved organisational, personal and technical means to handle it. Realities of battle in 1917 confirmed some pre-war ideas and disproved others. Headquarters expanded and were forced to the rear by firepower. Bureaucratic burden continually increased despite attempts to reverse it and partly because of failure to adopt modern methods of information handling. Personal contact remained essential to command, though 1917 conditions made it more difficult. The same conditions led to ever-greater reliance on technical communications means and organisations, which were continually developed. Performance of the communications system in the spring fighting was at least adequate, including because of the attackers’ slow tempo. Subsequent developments of doctrine and organisation. Unstoppable growth of bureaucracy and linked problem of falsified reporting were danger signals that the urge to reduce uncertainty had got out of hand.

The previous chapter demonstrated how politicians and voters in southwest Nigeria value accessibility as a form of accountability: in order to be accountable, leaders should maintain spaces for direct face-to-face communication with their constituents. This chapter builds on further empirical examples to give a theoretical account of accountability as accessibility and argues that it helps reveal the ontological limits of dominant scholarly approaches to accountability, namely, principal–agent models. It starts by asking what makes communication an intrinsically valuable part of accountability. Theories stressing the power of communication in the public sphere to confer recognition and dignity on citizens are considered and found to capture part of the lived experience of accessibility. However, they neglect the way accessibility draws on social sanctions to constrain rulers in the context of unequal power relations. A review of the historical roots of the principal–agent models in liberal theory explains why dominant theories struggle to accommodate the sanctioning power of communication. More generally, the assumed desirability of an anonymous and impersonal modern state leads to a neglect of the more socially embedded aspects of governance. In contrast, Yoruba political vocabulary fluently expresses the political importance of social sanction via the concept of olá (social honour).

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.

The revenue management system engenders non-rule-based tax collection. The strongest concern they raise is not corruption, but the conversion of what would have been compliant taxpayers into “semi-compliant” ones, i.e. compliant with the dictates of government employees rather than the requirements of law. I lay out a conceptual framework for analyzing the revenue management system, captured by “atomistic coercion.” “Atomism” means that (i) instead of a government organization, the authorities that taxpayers obey are individuals; and (ii) tax collectors acquire taxpayer information that they need not share with the state apparatus. “Coercion” conveys the idea that taxpayers perform compliance activities only because they are monitored by government authorities, not because of some social norm of complying with the law. Coercion secures compliance through government observation and intervention. Intervention can secure compliance along behavioral margins that are accurately observed. But as the state’s powers of observation and intervention are bounded, compliance can prove very low along the vast portions of taxpayer behavior not observed by the state or where the state’s capacity for intervention is constrained. This is illustrated by several examples, most importantly the phenomenon of taxpayers formally registering with tax authorities while dodging most specific compliance obligations.