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Review: A Culture of Corruption 9/16/10 9:06 PM

A Culture of Corruption
Everyday Deception and Popular
Buy
A Culture of Corruption Discontent in Nigeria
at Amazon
by Daniel Jordan Smith (Sierra Leone 1984–87)
Princeton University Press
November 2006
260 pages
$27.95

Read John Coyne's


interview with
Dan Smith

Reviewed by David Strain (Nigeria 1963–65)

THIS BOOK’S TITLE, given its lively use in our


latest Congressional elections, reminds us that
corruption is a worldwide phenomenon.
That being agreed, when dealing with any
transaction, says author Daniel Jordan
Smith, Nigerians always consider “the
Nigerian factor,” and the Nigerian factor is
corruption. Corruption is also the number one
topic of conversation.
Smith was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra
Leone. He returned to Africa to work for an NGO
in Igboland, where he met and married his wife.
Her Igbo community welcomed him both for his
marriage and for speaking Igbo. Smith is now a
professor of anthropology at Brown University.

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Review: A Culture of Corruption 9/16/10 9:06 PM

His research takes him to Igboland where he has


taught at Imo State University. Smith is as close
to a fly on the wall as any white American could
be.
As the subtitle “Everyday Deception and
Popular Discontent in Nigeria” indicates, the
volume is not about Nigerian generals and Swiss
bank accounts; it is an anthropological study of
corruption at local levels, and of how Igbo
citizens perceive it. Smith begins with a 419
scam, told as a joke with relish by one Nigerian
to a group of friends. The tale is of the
sophisticated taking in of a Texas oilman who,
promised millions, is stripped of substantial
“advance money” when he arrives in Nigeria.
This kind of delicious “Mission Impossible”
story, however, when Smith observes it locally,
becomes the tale of unemployed school
graduates in Owerri who for a pittance type out
in email cafés, and late at night for economy, the
come-ons which blanket the Internet. When a
fish bites, higher ups unknown to them take
over. Not much Mission Impossible there.
Nigerians use the phrase “419" broadly (419
refers to a Nigerian Criminal Code section which
makes a felony of using false pretenses to
defraud). Smith’s definition of corruption is even
broader. It pulls in acts which Nigerians do not
view as corrupt: an example, contacting a
community higher-up whose position lets him
get a daughter into a prestigious secondary
school when her test scores do not qualify her
automatically. Many Americans would agree
with Smith, although in his example the official
receives a dash, while in the US a college might
get a substantial pre-acceptance gift.
In Nigeria the corruption issue often arises out
of the patron/client relationship that orders Igbo
society. A village’s big man or high placed
individual has often arrived through the village’s
efforts, and is entitled to his wealth or power,

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earned or ill gotten, so long as he shares


sufficiently with his community. This feudal-like
mutuality of obligation is appropriate and
effective in a village setting. It is troublesome
when the patron’s job responsibilities should be
to a group broader than his own. Nevertheless,
as one state commissioner of agriculture says:
“Even if I wanted to avoid the practice of
awarding contracts on the basis of favoritism, I
could not. My people would say that I am selfish
and foolish. Who gets to such a position of power
and then refuses to help his people? Only the
worst kind of person.”
The patron/client relationship seems right to
Nigerians when the guy is your guy, corrupt
when not.
Smith examines various petty corruptions: the
“settlement” you pay to the official to register
your car, the cash you pay extra to obtain school
transcripts, the bribes to police at checkpoints,
the monetization of grades. Smith points out that
officials are often not paid, their salaries are low,
or they have fifteen children; that is, corruption
is the response of poor people to a world that
treats them unfairly.
The book’s many interesting explorations
include corruption in local elections, government
support of vigilante groups, and the use of
indigenous religion against political opponents.
The Nigerian factor does seem to pop up
everywhere, as do forces to confront corruption,
such as Pentecostal religions and renewed talk of
Igbo secession. But Smith answers “No” to the
implication of his “Culture of Corruption” title,
and agrees with Achebe that the fault lies with
corrupt leadership elites, not Nigerian culture.
The examples however suggest that many
Nigerians, imbued with the culture of
patron/clientism, are concerned less with its
corruption than with its not benefiting them in
contemporary Nigeria. Since the Biafran War

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Igbos feel politically marginalized, and in this


context, deprived of Igbo higher ups in the
federal oil administration to distribute slices of
“the Nigerian cake.” Nigerians also think that
many who do control jobs, contracts, and wealth
are “eating alone,” not sharing sufficiently. Here
there may be a tension with individual values
absorbed from the west. I recall even in the
1960s professors hesitating to return home on
holidays because of the drain of gifts expected by
their communities.
Like the exaggerated Igbo personality a
Northerner remarks upon, excess characterizes
Nigerian corruption. The government contract is
an opportunity to plunder with no regard for
fulfilling the contract. Smith gives no cultural
explanation for this quality of excess. Perhaps, as
a recent National Geographic article suggested,
because Nigerian oil revenue comes from the
federal government, politicians and government
contractors have no need of help from their local
communities and so feel no obligation to share.
Smith also lays blame for corruption on the
Western world, whose meeting with Africa at the
juncture of oil and foreign aid contracts he says
corrupts the African world. Smith agonizes over
what he claims was the inherent corruption in
his job with the NGO, which provided children’s
health services. Paid a salary (modest, he assures
us, by US standards) five times that of his
Nigerian counterpart, he felt responsible to weed
out petty corruption by Nigerian staff. Smith
describes himself as:

. . . a culpable and complicit actor in


the whole enterprise of development-
related corruption . . .. Part of the
context of understanding Western
culpability, and in this case my
complicity, in sustaining Nigeria’s
notorious corruption is recognizing the

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peculiarity of a system that legitimizes


my privilege [his salary, housing and
other perks], but is on the lookout for
a local staff person who awards a
contract to provide office stationery to
any in-law to help a struggling
business, or might terminate a driver
who carries passengers for a fee in the
office vehicle on his way back from an
assignment in order to raise some
extra cash for his children’s school
fees. These actions are viewed by
Westerners as forms of corruption. Yet
the larger system of inequality is taken
for granted, at least by most of us who
are its principal beneficiaries.

He may be right, but I am sorry that A


Culture of Corruption does not explore the
ramifications of these thought provoking
conclusions nor define how aid organizations
(and oil companies) could avoid the “corrupt”
inequality that Smith condemns.
Smith’s tells how corruption creeps into daily
life with variety, pace and clarity. With his
emphasis on what Nigerians feel, there is the
question: are Nigerians responding to facts, or to
rumors and disinformation from a less than
fastidious press? And where patron/client rules
dictate, as Smith says, social obligation trumps
“a notion of civic duty.” I wonder whether
Western ideas of corruption or civic duty are
relevant or useful where groups, artificially
forced together as in Nigeria, follow a local
culture that rewards other competing values.
Smith believes Nigerians’ full time
victimization by corruption dressed in the
clothing of democracy is an impetus to real
development and democracy. But with tribal
groups at odds, and the patron/client
relationship prevailing as the standard for right

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behavior, there is a chasm to span before actual


development and democracy can occur. Add the
idea that Nigeria’s oil riches are “cake” to
consume rather than assets to invest in
education, infrastructure and development, and
you get “the Nigerian factor” which makes
progress difficult in that “geographical
expression” called Nigeria.
David Strain, a lawyer, served in Enugu, Nigeria
where he did law reporting for the Eastern Region
Ministry of Justice. He taught at the University of
Lagos Law School in his second year of service.
Retired now from private practice in San Francisco,
he is the Book Editor of Friends of Nigeria newsletter.

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