Creating a social contract — a challenge to the elite in Nigeria, By Doyin Salami & Uddin Ifeanyi

In the end, and at the heart of the seemingly endless debates over how and how rapidly we may modernise the Nigerian State lies an urgent invitation to define the nature and implications of a social contract in line with our lived socio-political experience and ambitions. Unfortunately, our ambitions, as verbalised, remain inconsistent with our collective conduct.

One outcome of an increasingly connected world is the globalisation of the market for cultural goods. Consequently, social categories and concepts are transferred across cultural settings, often with scant regard for the processes by which they were originally produced. One admittedly perverse effect of this process is that in the societies that consume these cultural products (in search of neat explanations for difficult local phenomena), idiosyncratic experiences are simply shoehorned into new categories. According to the most popular demographic classification available today, the writers of this opinion piece are a couple representing the Baby Boomers on one hand, and the Generation Xers on the other hand. What does this mean? Only two facts are beyond dispute in the Nigerian case: the latter category comprises people born between 1946 and 1964; and the former of persons born between the mid-1960s and early 1980s.

However, does this mean that Nigerian Generation Xers are a “Latchkey Generation”? Put differently, did this cohort of Nigerians, like their American counterparts, return home from school to empty homes, because, as in the US, their parents were free-ranging, maternal participation in the workplace was rising and leaving fewer women as full-time homemakers, and divorce rates were on the rise? Conversely, did the Second World War have the same impact on society, here, as it did in the West – a trauma so existential that it led to an explosion in female fertility rates?

What the probable responses to these questions do, is to invite us to treat these imported ways of interpreting provincial social phenomena with considerable circumspection. Nowhere is this requirement greater than in our ongoing efforts to understand the precursors of governance failures here, and what our society needs to do to become “modern”. Often, we are told that the bane of our society is the fact that the “social contract” has failed or needs a refresh. There are few concepts in modern political theory more seductive and anodyne than the idea that the legitimacy of the state’s authority over the individuals that comprise its citizens arises from an unspoken arrangement in which the latter agree to forego some freedoms, including the freedom to do absolutely anything they want, in exchange for the provision by government of security, order, and the protection of rights.

Yet, as explanation for Nigeria’s political circumstances, this just will not do. Nothing in the constitutional conferences that birthed our new republic, nor in the numerous confabs put together thereafter to improve the efficiency of the Nigerian State resemble a social contract. Indeed, phrases with which citizens currently describe their lived experience in the country, like, “May Nigeria not happen to you” and “a state of anyhowness” speak to a different reality that is less Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and more Hobbesian. In this sense, the citizen experiences the Nigerian State not necessarily through a nasty, brutish, and short existence. Instead, more frequently, the Nigerian State describes the freedoms that it is willing for the people to exercise and deploys its monopoly of the means of violence in defence of this understanding. If your sense is that the resulting balance of freedoms favours an overweening State and its apparatus and apparatchiks, you would be readily forgiven your assumptions.

Some argue that it is no surprise that the most important attempts at re-negotiating this social contract is predicated on the emergence of armed non-state actors, whose democratisation of the means of violence has made them far more credible interlocutors for government than “We the people”! The challenge with this position is that the non-state actors act only in their narrow and necessarily destructive interests, which further disadvantage the many!

If, however, there exists a social contract that forms the basis of our current political organisation, in the sense in which political theory prefers to describe this, its first convocation was the exercise of might by which the colonial authorities subjugated what was to become the colony of Nigeria. This was finally approved by the regiment of Nigerians who took over that authority and its power of coercion and co-optation of dissentient views.

In the years since obtaining flag independence, whilst the second chapter of our constitution defines the purpose of government, we are still waiting on our finest legal minds to show the way to enforce, or is it ensure, delivery of the purposes so stated. For most of our fellow citizens, though, a strong case can be made that these purposes are primarily observed in their absence.

Indeed, in many areas, the gaps left by the State have been filled, with state acquiescence, by non-state actors, who assume powers to collect tithes and associated tributes – sometimes in return for enabling access to opportunities or to avoid disruptions to peaceful existence. Some argue that it is no surprise that the most important attempts at re-negotiating this social contract is predicated on the emergence of armed non-state actors, whose democratisation of the means of violence has made them far more credible interlocutors for government than “We the people”! The challenge with this position is that the non-state actors act only in their narrow and necessarily destructive interests, which further disadvantage the many!

In the end, and at the heart of the seemingly endless debates over how and how rapidly we may modernise the Nigerian State lies an urgent invitation to define the nature and implications of a social contract in line with our lived socio-political experience and ambitions. Unfortunately, our ambitions, as verbalised, remain inconsistent with our collective conduct.

Doyin Salami, an economist, is CEO at KAINOS Edge Consulting, while Uddin Ifeanyi, a journalist manqué and retired civil servant, can be reached @IfeanyiUddin.