This chapter offers a theoretical account of socially embedded good governance. It connects the two major principles discussed in the book so far – accountability as accessibility and transparency in people – to the idea of a public–private divide and debates around good governance and corruption in Africa more broadly. Specifically, the public–private divide is written into principal–agent models of democratic accountability and forms the crux of liberal definitions of corruption. Popular conceptions of socially embedded good governance hold that the connections that make powerful people knowable and accessible in ordinary life should not be severed as they enter the public office. This requires expanding the scope of good governance beyond the formal realm of the state. The chapter repurposes Peter Ekeh’s idea of the ‘two publics’ to suggest that popular demands for transparency in people and accountability as accessibility could be understood as a demand to re-connect the social with the political and thus unite the ‘two publics’. It concludes that not only is “personal politics without clientelism” (Mueller 2018) possible but also the porousness of the state to social relations – for so long seen as the Achilles heel of governance in Nigeria - may in fact be its strength.

Politics in Nigeria teaches us that power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable. Previous chapters drew on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to theorise alternative conceptions of the constituent parts of the good governance agenda, namely, accountability, transparency, and the public–private divide. If we are to take the social dimension of these “ethnographically derived political concepts” seriously, then we need to rethink the neo-classical economic ontology of the dominant approach to good governance, which relies on principal–agent models. Thus, the book’s empirical analysis gives rise to normative political prescriptions which entail a methodological critique. The second part of the chapter argues that by neglecting the social dimension of governance, technocracy is vulnerable to populist challengers who leverage unmet demands for closeness and connection. Socially embedded governance intersects with three key debates of interest to theorists of democratic politics, concerning scale, inequality and conflict. By rethinking the contours of politics, we discover that the struggles of Nigeria’s fourth republic are not marginal to democratic theory – the struggles of a democracy yet to really get started – rather, they lie at the crux of what it means to wield power responsibly.