A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria / Edition 1 available in Paperback
A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0691136475
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691136479
- Pub. Date:
- 03/16/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0691136475
- ISBN-13:
- 9780691136479
- Pub. Date:
- 03/16/2008
- Publisher:
- Princeton University Press
A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria / Edition 1
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Overview
Drawing on firsthand experience, Daniel Jordan Smith paints a vivid portrait of Nigerian corruption—of nationwide fuel shortages in Africa's oil-producing giant, Internet cafés where the young launch their e-mail scams, checkpoints where drivers must bribe police, bogus organizations that siphon development aid, and houses painted with the fraud-preventive words "not for sale." This is a country where "419"—the number of an antifraud statute—has become an inescapable part of the culture, and so universal as a metaphor for deception that even a betrayed lover can say, "He played me 419." It is impossible to comprehend Nigeria today—from vigilantism and resurgent ethnic nationalism to rising Pentecostalism and accusations of witchcraft and cannibalism—without understanding the role played by corruption and popular reactions to it.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691136479 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/16/2008 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 296 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.25(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
A Culture of Corruption Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria
By Daniel Jordan Smith Princeton University Press
Copyright © 2006 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13647-9
Introduction BY THE TIME I ARRIVED in Nigeria in 1989 as an employee of an international development organization, I was well aware of the country's reputation for corruption. I had heard the common stories of immigration and customs officers who shake down arriving passengers at the airport, police looking for money who harass motorists, taxi drivers who collude with criminals to rob customers, and government officials who do nothing without a bribe. Further, I had read that the government-controlled oil industry was riddled with graft, and that beginning in the 1980s, Nigeria was believed to be a transit hub in the international narcotics trade, with widespread allegations of official collusion. The U.S. Department of State issued bold warnings about fraud in its advice to travelers and businesspeople contemplating visits to Nigeria. The country's image as a bastion of bribery, venality, and deceit has remained constant over the years. Most recently, the global expansion of the Internet delivered evidence of Nigerian fraud to the e-mail in-boxes of millions of people around the world, in the form of scam letters seeking bank account numbers and advance fees in schemes that are premised on Nigeria's worldwide reputation for corruption.
In one of my first letters home in 1989, Irecounted a story I heard as I met new friends over beers after a game of tennis:
Last night, AC, who is a businessman, told the most amazing story about how some Nigerians in Lagos duped a Texas oil executive out of one hundred thousand dollars. I don't know if you have heard of it, but apparently Nigerians commonly send letters and faxes to U.S. and European businesses looking for partners in fantastic deals where the foreigner is asked to provide money up front against the assurance that the initial investment will secure the payment of millions of dollars of ill-gotten wealth that can somehow only be released to a foreigner. The foreigner is offered a large cut of the millions in exchange for providing access to their bank account where the millions will be remitted. The fraudsters make their money by convincing the dupe that advance funds are necessary in order to get the money released. Once they lure the person in, they keep increasing the amounts necessary to get the bigger payoff, until eventually the victim realizes the whole thing was a scam. By then the dupe has lost lots of money.
Apparently these schemes can get remarkably elaborate, as AC's story last night attests. My new friends and I had finished playing tennis, and we were sitting down to share beers when AC began his story. He had just come back from Lagos and said that during his visit some of his colleagues had told him of the most recent case of "419"-419 is what Nigerians call fraud, apparently after a section in the Nigerian criminal code that describes these crimes. AC's account was stunning.
He said that these 419 guys had snared this Texas oil executive with a series of letters, faxes, and phone calls, and had convinced him that thirty-five million dollars remained in an NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) account from a huge contract for an oil-industry-related construction project. The 419 guys pretended they were high-level managers at NNPC. They told the oil executive that the money was leftover from the project, and that they needed a foreign partner and a foreign bank account in order to pay out the remaining thirty-five million dollars. All the correspondence they sent the oil executive was on official NNPC stationery. The oil executive was apparently interested but skeptical. At a point, the 419 guys who spoke with him on the phone arranged for him to call an NNPC office in London to try to assure him that the whole thing was real. When the guy seemed primed but still had not completely swallowed the bait, they invited him to come to Lagos and meet with top NNPC officials. They told him that if he came to Nigeria, they would pay all his expenses once he arrived, and that if after the visit he still was not convinced, no problem. They sweetened the offer by stressing that even if the money transfer proposal did not work out, they might be able to arrange some legitimate contracts between NNPC and the oil executive's Texas-based business.
The guy agreed to come to Lagos. The 419 guys told him not to bother to get a visa. As a guest of NNPC, they would handle everything. Sure enough, when the oil executive arrived at the airport in Lagos, he was met at the gate by a Nigerian in an expensive suit who held an NNPC placard with the executive's name. The visitor was whisked through immigration and customs without even having his passport checked or his bags opened. Each immigration and customs official he passed simply greeted him: "Welcome to Nigeria!" The oil executive had heard plenty of stories about the hassles at Murtala Muhammad Airport and he was impressed by the clout of his NNPC hosts. Outside the airport, he was ushered into an air-conditioned Toyota Land Cruiser with the NNPC logo emblazoned on the doors. He was taken to the Sheraton Hotel, the fanciest and most expensive hotel in Lagos, where he was told that all of his bills were "taken care of." In the morning, he was picked up by the same vehicle and taken to an NNPC office on Victoria Island, the most upscale area in Lagos. The guard, receptionist, and secretaries all greeted him: "Welcome to Nigeria!"
After a short wait, he was escorted into a large and expensively furnished office. Over the door the placard read, "Deputy Managing Director: Foreign Investment." Behind an impressive desk sat Ibu Onye Biribe, who greeted the executive with the now-familiar words, "Welcome to Nigeria!" Mr. Biribe immediately handed the executive his business card, carefully pronouncing his name for the visitor's untrained ears.
At this point my other friends who were listening to the story laughed uproariously because the supposed deputy manager's name, Ibu Onye Biribe, translates into "you are a fool" in the Igbo language. When the laughter died down, AC continued the story.
After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Mr. Biribe's secretary buzzed to inform him that "the minister" was on the line. Mr. Biribe had a brief and cryptic conversation in which his side of the call consisted of mainly, "Yes sir, I will do that, sir." After dropping the phone, Mr. Biribe apologized to his Texas guest, saying that it was the federal minister for petroleum resources on the line and he had no choice but to take the call. The NNPC's deputy manager for foreign investment then proceeded to explain again to the oil executive how this thirty-five million dollars had become available and why they needed a foreign partner, and particularly someone who was in the oil business in order to pay out the money. Paying the money to the Texas oil executive, he explained, would make it appear that the payment was related to the completion of the initial contract. The only problem, he continued, was that one hundred thousand dollars was necessary to secure the release of the funds because various officials would need to be paid off to facilitate the release of the money to the executive's account. "Unfortunately, so many of our bureaucrats are greedy and corrupt," the deputy manager lamented. He suggested that his guest transfer one hundred thousand dollars to an NNPC account in London rather than in Nigeria, so that he might feel more secure. As he suggested this, he buzzed his secretary and asked her to get the London office on the line. He put the call on speakerphone and the call was answered by a woman with a very British-sounding accent, who said, "This is the London office of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, how may I direct your call?" Mr. Biribe then asked for the appropriate official, and when he answered Mr. Biribe explained to him that one of their U.S. partners needed to transfer money to the NNPC's London account. He handed the phone to the oil executive. The man took the phone, and wrote down the NNPC bank account number and the instructions for how to transfer the money. The deputy manager then told his visitor that once he transferred the one hundred thousand dollars, the thirty-five million dollars would be released in forty-eight hours. The Texan's share would be 25 percent, or almost nine million dollars. Once the money was in the oil executive's account, he would then transfer his Nigerian partners' share to another account and all of this could be taken care of before the Texan departed Nigeria in three days. The deputy manager then handed his guest the phone and told him that it was an international line. He left the room while the oil executive dialed the United States. When the deputy manager came back, the Texan informed him that he had transferred the money. "Very well," Mr. Biribe said, "the driver can take you back to the hotel and I will come join you for dinner tonight. Then tomorrow and next, we can complete the transfer of money to your account in the United States and talk about other business."
That evening, the deputy manager never showed up at the Sheraton. The Texas oil executive was worried, but figured the money went to a London account and if there were any problem the whole thing could be reversed. The next morning, no one came to pick him up. When he inquired at the desk whether anyone had looked for him, he was told no one had. The receptionist then asked whether he would be staying another night. When he said that he would, she informed him that he would need to present his credit card. When he protested that his bill was being covered by NNPC, the receptionist told him that whoever had paid his bill had only paid for two nights. Now the man really panicked. He quickly hired a car to the address on Victoria Island where he had met with Mr. Biribe the previous day. When he arrived, all the evidence of an NNPC office had disappeared. AC said, "He turned even whiter than a white man"-again drawing uproarious laughter from my friends. There was no signboard, no placard over the deputy manager's door, no receptionist, nobody. When he asked a person who appeared to be cleaning the stairwell what happened to the NNPC office, the cleaner replied, "There's no NNPC office here. This office was vacated at the end of last month and the landlord is still looking for new tenants."
The panicked oil executive then asked where he could find the nearest police station. When he found a police station, the first thing they asked for was his passport. When the police looked at his passport and saw that he had no visa, they informed him that he was in Nigeria illegally. His protest and his story seemed to get him nowhere. In the end, the man had to arrange for his Texas office to wire him three thousand dollars to pay the police and immigration officials to allow him to exit the country. When he got home, he discovered that the London account to which he had transferred the one hundred thousand dollars was empty and closed. It had never belonged to NNPC.
As AC closed his story, my friends at the tennis club exclaimed variously, "Nigeria na war-o!" "We are in trouble," and "These guys are too much," expressing a combination of resignation, unease, and lament about corruption as well as a sort of admiration for the audacity and ingenuity of the 419 men. When I asked AC whether the 419 perpetrators had received assistance from real officials in NNPC in order to pull off their plot or had concocted everything themselves, he answered simply: "In this country anything is possible."
AC's story and the reception it received illustrate a profound critical collective self-consciousness that Nigerians share about corruption in their society. Ordinary citizens are ambivalent about corruption. They recognize that it undermines the country's democratic political institutions, economic development, and global reputation, yet they also realize that wealth, power, and prestige in Nigeria are commonly achieved through practices that can easily be labeled as corrupt. People frequently condemn corruption and its consequences as immoral and socially ruinous, yet they also participate in seemingly contradictory behaviors that enable, encourage, and even glorify corruption.
This book examines the relationship between corruption and culture in Africa's most populous country. It offers an answer to the question of how ordinary Nigerians can be, paradoxically, active participants in the social reproduction of corruption even as they are also its primary victims and principal critics. Taking its cue from Nigerians, who see corruption at work in every corner of social life, the book presents an ethnographic study of corruption, demonstrating that there is much to be learned about social action, collective imagination, and cultural production when they are seen through the lens of an anthropological account of corruption. The book takes readers into the everyday world of Nigerian citizens as they encounter a society plagued by corruption. From police checkpoints where motorists offer banknotes in exchange for safe passage, to Internet cafés where thousands of young Nigerians craft their notorious e-mail scam letters, to local nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) created to siphon international donor dollars into individual hands, the book provides a detailed portrait of the social organization of corruption. It examines not only the mechanisms and contexts that explain corruption but also how the intense discontent that Nigerians feel about corruption propels contemporary events and stimulates Nigerians' collective cultural imagination.
When Nigerians talk about corruption, they refer not only to the abuse of state offices for some kind of private gain but also to a whole range of social behaviors in which various forms of morally questionable deception enable the achievement of wealth, power, or prestige as well as much more mundane ambitions. Nigerian notions of corruption encompass everything from government bribery and graft, rigged elections, and fraudulent business deals, to the diabolical abuse of occult powers, medical quackery, cheating in school, and even deceiving a lover. Although the use of the term corruption risks privileging a seemingly Western concept, my aim is to examine the Nigerian experience of corruption. I argue that it is empirically justified and theoretically important to study this spectrum of ideas and behaviors under the rubric of corruption, not only because Nigerians connect them in their collective conceptualizations, but also because together they reveal the complex intertwining of popular morality, contemporary social processes, and postcolonial statecraft.
Corruption, in its many valences in Nigeria, is a potent stimulus for cultural production, both as a means for corruption's pursuit and a method to combat its consequences. Stories about corruption dominate political and symbolic discourse in Nigeria. Everyday practices of corruption and the narratives of complaint they generate are primary vehicles through which Nigerians imagine and create the relationship between state and society. The contradictions of corruption both mirror and explain Nigerians' growing expectations and frustrated aspirations for democracy and development. Further, I contend that understanding corruption and its discontents is central to explaining and connecting a wide range of important contemporary social phenomena, such as resurgent ethnic nationalism, the rising popularity of born-again Christianity, violent vigilantism, and a range of common yet seemingly bizarre fears and accusations regarding witchcraft, cannibalism, and other occult practices. It is in these cultural responses to corruption that the relationship between political-economic transformation, social imagination, and the intimate sphere of interpersonal relationships is revealed. Unraveling the connections between corruption and culture is integral to understanding not only contemporary Nigeria but also the broader dynamics of culture, politics, and social change in a world marked by enormous inequality.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from A Culture of Corruption by Daniel Jordan Smith
Copyright © 2006 by Princeton University Press . Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xix
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER 1: "Urgent Business Relationship": Nigerian E-Mail Scams 28
CHAPTER 2: From Favoritism to 419: Corruption in Everyday Life 53
CHAPTER 3: Development Scams: Donors, Dollars, and NGO Entrepreneurs 88
CHAPTER 4: "Fair Play Even among Robbers": Democracy, Politics, and Corruption 112
CHAPTER 5: Rumors, Riots, and Diabolical Rituals 138
CHAPTER 6: "They Became the Criminals They Were Supposed to Fight": Crime, Corruption, and Vigilante Justice 166
CHAPTER 7: Anticorruption Aspirations: Biafrans and Born-again Christians 191
CONCLUSION 221
Appendix 233
Notes 241
References 247
Index 257
What People are Saying About This
Nigeria is known globally as a center for scams of a variety and audacity that are astounding to those who trust that their own societies and economies run according to 'the rules.' In A Culture of Corruption, Daniel Jordan Smith draws on many years of living in Nigeria as an NGO representative and anthropologist to cast a very wide net around Nigerian corruption, to include contemporary official and unofficial malfeasance of all kinds. His exposition is graphic, detailed, and broadly supported. He doesn't flinch before quite terrifying case material. There is no other work that covers the same ground so clearly and in such a nuanced and observant manner.
— Jane I. Guyer, Johns Hopkins University
This is a path-breaking study of a challenging topic for African studies, anthropology, development economics, and social sciences in general. If any country in Africa should be able to join the world's newly industrialized countries, it should be Nigeria in view of its size and its oil wealth. The common explanation of its constant failure to do so is corruption. The great merit of this book is to show that corruption has many faces in everyday life. The term is all too often used as a blanket notion. Smith shows how misleading this is by studying it as a daily reality with manifold expressions. The book fills an urgent need. We must better understand the reasons why Africa's giant is stagnating if we want to be able to say something about the continent's present-day crisis.
— Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam
"By all measurements Nigeria, richly endowed with natural and human resources and the United States' fifth largest source of imported oil, should be one of the most prosperous of the world's developing countries. Instead it is one of the poorest. No one has done a better job than Daniel Jordan Smith of showing how and why the cancer of corruption has hobbled the giant of Africa. A Culture of Corruption is an absorbing cultural study by an anthropologist who deeply cares about the society into which he has married."—Walter Carrington, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria"This is a path-breaking study of a challenging topic for African studies, anthropology, development economics, and social sciences in general. If any country in Africa should be able to join the world's newly industrialized countries, it should be Nigeria in view of its size and its oil wealth. The common explanation of its constant failure to do so is corruption. The great merit of this book is to show that corruption has many faces in everyday life. The term is all too often used as a blanket notion. Smith shows how misleading this is by studying it as a daily reality with manifold expressions. The book fills an urgent need. We must better understand the reasons why Africa's giant is stagnating if we want to be able to say something about the continent's present-day crisis."—Peter Geschiere, University of Amsterdam"Nigeria is known globally as a center for scams of a variety and audacity that are astounding to those who trust that their own societies and economies run according to 'the rules.' In A Culture of Corruption, Daniel Jordan Smith draws on many years of living in Nigeria as an NGO representative and anthropologist to cast a very wide net around Nigerian corruption, to include contemporary official and unofficial malfeasance of all kinds. His exposition is graphic, detailed, and broadly supported. He doesn't flinch before quite terrifying case material. There is no other work that covers the same ground so clearly and in such a nuanced and observant manner."—Jane I. Guyer, Johns Hopkins University
By all measurements Nigeria, richly endowed with natural and human resources and the United States' fifth largest source of imported oil, should be one of the most prosperous of the world's developing countries. Instead it is one of the poorest. No one has done a better job than Daniel Jordan Smith of showing how and why the cancer of corruption has hobbled the giant of Africa. A Culture of Corruption is an absorbing cultural study by an anthropologist who deeply cares about the society into which he has married.
— Walter Carrington, former U.S. Ambassador to Nigeria