(UN)CIVIL SOCIETY?
STATE FAILURE AND THE CONTRADICTIONS
OF SELF-ORGANISATION IN NIGERIA

A Call for Concept Papers
[November 2004]

(This text is also available for DOWNLOAD. [.pdf-format, 61 kB])

The Heinrich Böll Foundation's (HBF) Nigeria Office in Lagos invites to submit, before 31 December 2004, concept papers for a conference / book project

(Un)civil Society?
State Failure and the Contradictions of Self-Organisation in Nigeria

In the course of democratic transition processes in Africa since the 1990s, "civil society" has been a carrier of great hopes and expectations. This has been so despite the fact that the socio-economic foundations for a civil society in the European sense (from where the concept originally derived) are largely missing in most parts of Africa. Pressure groups, organisations defending rights, independent policy consultants etc. - these and other structures that have become known as "civil society organisations" exist in Africa largely due to the external funding provided, and even the media are weak in most African countries. An African civil society in this sense exists, but it remains weak and externally dependent, at least for now.

However, there are broader concepts of civil society - comprising a wider range of forms of social self-organisation that are neither part of the state nor part of the private sector. They form a "third sector", as analysts have come to call it. Nigerian society has produced a whole range of forms of self-organisation falling into this category. The spectrum extends from community-based forms of self-help to bodies of ethnic or religious representation, and even militias. Some of these forms of self-organisation have rather narrow, pragmatic aims. Others have an explicit socio-cultural or political agenda. Overall, associational life in Nigeria is highly developed and multifaceted, and reaches far beyond what is usually called "civil society organisations" (CSOs) or non-governmental organisations (NGOs).

The main line of argument of the conference/book project outlined here can be summarized in three core statements:

• Numerous forms of self-help and self-organisation have developed in Nigeria since the 1980s. To a good extent, they are resulting from the weakness of the Nigerian state's ability to deliver services and to provide functioning regulatory frameworks. Self-help and self-organisation, thus, reflect aspects of state failure in its various dimensions.

• Forms of self-help and self-organisation resulting from state failure have created what may be called a "broader" civil society in Nigeria. This civil society flourishes in many manifestations. It is dynamic, resourceful, and of fundamental importance for the very survival of numerous people in the country.

• However, self-help and self-organisation arising out of state failure are double-faced. They come at a cost. Among self-help actors, deficiencies of information as well as insufficient government regulation may lead to a lack of co-ordination and multiplication of efforts. Self-help actors may pursue activities that contradict or obstruct each other, leading to less-than-optimal results; in the end, efforts may wipe out each other. On the broader level of society, the cost of self-organisation may even be higher. Self-help and self-organisation under the condition of state failure lead to the emergence of groups that operate on the fringes, or outside, of the bounds of law. An underground emerges, linked to plainly criminal activities. Violence (or threats of it) may challenge the legitimacy or even the very existence of the weak state. Thus, self-organisations may become destructive - for the actors themselves as well as for the wider society. The term "uncivil society" has been tentatively employed in recent years for such manifestations of civil self-organisation in Nigeria, especially, but not limited to the Niger Delta conflict (see, for example, Ikelegbe 2001, Ukiwo 2002).(1)

The conference / book project outlined here intends to explore the linkages between state failure, self-help, and self organisation. It looks at the emergence of Nigerian civil society in the broader sense. It looks at its roots, outlines its dynamics and successes, but also points at its costs, ambivalences, and "dark sides".

Outline: State Failure and the Contradictions of Self-organisation in Nigeria

It is often said that Nigeria poses a paradox: Being a huge country with abundant human and natural resources, Nigeria remains stricken with poverty, conflict and dependence. Reasons popularly given for this sad state of affairs are: indiscipline, corruption, bad governance, the lack of good leadership etc.

More recently, Nigeria's very wealth in (petroleum) resources has been identified as a key factor in explaining the country's problem. As an oil-dependent rentier state, Nigeria has fallen in virtually all possible traps set up by the "resource curse paradox" (Gary & Karl 2003):

• Its economy largely depends on oil, to the detriment of all other productive economic activities. More than three decades of oil export have underdeveloped Nigeria, rather than developing it.

• Nigeria's political system and institutional fabric is corrupted by easy access to the revenue from oil. This revenue, centrally collected and distributed, creates a perverse (and often enough violent) political competition around "sharing the national cake", rather than promoting policies and activities aimed at generating wealth. The sharing syndrome has resulted in large-scale corruption and an extraordinary inefficient spending of public resources, marked most visibly by the systematic failure of the Nigerian state to provide and sustain basic infrastructures and services.

As a result, Nigeria provides a classical (and in many ways, an extreme) example for the theory of the neo-patrimonial state in Africa - a state that combines the surface of a 'rational' modern administration with all-pervasive informal client-patron relationships operating in the background (see eg., Forrest 1995:6). In a neo-patrimonial system, many among those who are supposed to act as 'servants' of the state (civil service, politicians etc.) subvert the state's very institutional fabric and functionality. It is they (and not merely the lack of resources) who create a weak state. Over the years, this Nigerian experience in this regard has been labelled by terms such as "pirate capitalism" (Schatz 1984), "prebendal politics" (Joseph 1987) or even "predatory rule" (Lewis 1996, on the Abacha years).

Two of the last-mentioned characterizations of the Nigerian state, it should be noted, refer not to periods of military rule, but to the years of civilian government in the Second Republic (1979-83). While democratisation since 1998-99 has opened up avenues for improvement (for example, with regard to increased transparency on some levels of governance, and by attempts to strengthen service delivery through commercialisation and privatisation of parastatals), there is little indication that the foundation and character of the Nigerian state and its institutions have changed fundamentally. Even if optimists' expectations for improvement should materialize in the longer run, serious weaknesses in many areas of state activity - state failure - will continue be experienced for many years in Nigeria.

State Failure

Nigerians experience state failure on a daily basis. State failure affects virtually all dimensions of economic, social or political life. The spectrum of phenomena of state failure extends from blackouts to the failure of planning and plan implementation in the big cities (resulting in overcrowding, traffic chaos or flooding) to the generalized fear of the average citizen to become a victim of criminal or illegal acts, some of them even condoned by the police. All these manifestations of failure, taken together, conjure the picture of a "failing" - some may called it already: a "failed" - state. It is justified to speak of "state failure" not only in the case of a state breaking up or descending into civil war, such as Somalia or Congo - though, of course, such kind of break-up constitutes the most obvious and drastic indication that a state has failed. However, these are extreme cases, and state failure may be more appropriately conceptualised as an on-going process, with numerous deficiencies emerging that administration and politics are unable to handle, and with people increasingly loosing trust of the state's ability to deal with them. Thus, an endless chain of minor manifestations of state failure constantly erodes the coherence and legitimacy of a state. A final "big" failure - by means of state break-up - may, or may not, stand at the end of the process.

How do people react to state failure? They complain, and they may even become cynical about "politics" and "government", as witnessed in Nigeria today. First and foremost, however, they have to survive. They do so by organising themselves, individually and collectively.

Many forms of self-organisation in Nigeria create rules and regulations for aspects of public life, such as market or professional organisations. Others provide substitutes for public goods which the state fails to deliver: not only social services (an area in which hundreds, if not thousands of civil society organisations operate), but also security (e.g., by vigilante groups and militias). Other forms of self-organisation aim at improving state practice, for example by advocacy work. Others again, like churches and other religious groups, give guidance for problems of life which a state that has lost a national vision, and cannot provide minima of security and living standards, does not even claim to provide any more.

Survival Strategies: Individual Self-Help and its Ambivalences

In order to continue life in a failing state, people have to employ survival strategies. They help themselves, in a very wide sense.

Some survival strategies are individualistic. Examples are: to get one's own generator in order to cope with NEPA failures; to bribe one's way through a corrupt bureaucracy; to try to get what one can't get otherwise by force or fraud and becoming a criminal; or the "exit option", i.e. to leave the country, legally or illegally, and sometimes by desperate and dangerous means. Some of these roads to survival are taken truly individually, pursued by lonesome riders or wealthy individuals. Other strategies, while pursued individually and primarily aiming at the individual's progress, still require the co-operation of a group or the collaboration of others.

Individual survival strategies, if applied successfully, may help the individual to achieve his or her aims. However, they come at a cost.

One obvious problem is that individual action of this kind frequently constitutes a kind of avoidance behaviour. It constitutes a strategy of least resistance that searches for niches, nooks and crannies where it can operate. It avoids confrontations, rather than to address problems head-on. Thereby, it unwillingly contributes to a perpetuation of a sad state of things, rather than towards developing alternatives - politically and economically.

Another problem is that of accumulation of deficiencies, negative side effects and overall societal costs. Many individual survival strategies, when applied in thousands of individual cases, in parallel or over an extended period of time, generate their own, systemic problems. Corrupt acts, for example, even if they take place on a small scale, contribute to the emergence of large-scale corruption, creating a society where virtually everybody subscribes to the self-fulfilling prophecy that bribery is universal and unavoidable. Individual survival strategies applied on a large scale also create a characteristic form of anarchy: a fight of everybody against anybody else, at the cost of all others. Anybody ever stuck in Lagos traffic will confirm how individuals who are trying to achieve minute advantages for themselves, not only create general confusion and aggression, but also damage the overall progress of all others, including themselves - up to the point of complete standstill. Three principles converge at this point: first, the principle of the survival of the fittest, second, the logic of unregulated market behaviour (with everybody using his or her own little comparative advantage to the extreme) and, third, pure anarchy. And as they converge, they frequently produce the worst possible overall outcome: waste, chaos and standstill.

Collective Strategies: Group Self-Organisation and its Darker Sides

Other survival strategies are based on collective action: on co-operation and self-organisation. Here, some of the most impressive and enduring examples of civil self-organisation in Nigeria are to be found. Clearly, without their youth, women's, professional, communal, neighbourhood and similar associations, Nigerians would be much worse off than they are. Associations of this type are centred around the immediate economic and social self-interest of their members. These associations do not only offer solidarity and practical help in financial and other matters. They also set frameworks to regulate relationships among their members, and for the members' interaction with the wider environment. Thereby they reduce the cost and damages that would arise from entirely unregulated behaviour and the anarchic, hyper-competitive strategies of individual survival.

Self-organisation of this type has been very efficient in some cases, not only in regulating everyday affairs: For example, there are impressive success stories of some "town unions" in bringing about local development in rural areas over several decades (Egboh 1987, Francis 1996). However, many associations of this type appear to be ridden by problems, such as "personality clashes", factional strife and break-up, the "free rider's" syndrome, and even corruption. Self-organisation based on the social and economic interests of particular groups is an important means of survival for Nigerians, but it certainly does not constitute an all-purpose remedy for the group members' problems. A realistic, empirical evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of these models of self-organisation - especially within an overall framework of socio-economic stress - is still outstanding.

More formalized "higher level" forms of self-organisation in Nigeria include CSOs and NGOs in the usual, narrower, sense of "civil society". It emerged primarily from human rights work under the military in the 1990s. But it has expanded vastly after the beginning of the democratisation process in 1998-99, exploring new fields of action and new forms of engagement. The spectrum extends from the provision of services that the state has failed to deliver to political and legislative advocacy, working with parliamentary institutions as well as in the open field of the public sphere. It is the Nigerian NGO community that, most pointedly, has identified various areas of state failure and deficiency. Some NGOs are trying to substitute for, or supplement, those services; others work with state institutions with a view of improving their functioning, for example by involving them in constructive criticism or even by providing training measures for parliamentarians and civil servants.

At the same time, the NGO community itself is ridden with numerous problems. Its general lack of an independent financial foundation makes it dependent, largely, on external donor funding. In a situation of massive unemployment of young academics, and with salaries being low or not paid at all at universities and in the civil service, the creation of an NGO has become an avenue of self-employment for professionals and enterprising individuals alike (thus making it another form of individual self-help rather than a collective strategy). In practice, many of the most advanced NGOs operate as experienced and efficient consultancy agencies for the implementation of externally-funded projects. Numerous others flood the market for donor funding with proposals of limited creativity and, sometimes, doubtful honesty. Furthermore, networking among NGOs to bundle forces (and to create what may more rightly be termed a "civil society") remains rather limited - resulting, perhaps, from the fixation of NGOs on external donor funding and the resulting strong feeling of competition among them. Overall, societal self-organisation on the NGO model in Nigeria has created some remarkable successes in both service-provision and advocacy vis-à-vis government. But it continues to remain a far cry from the ideal of a self-conscious and self-sustained "civil society" able to pose a counterweight against state power and its possible abuse.

The most blatant examples of ambivalent self-organisation - of "uncivil society" in its most drastic sense - have emerged out of the failure of the Nigerian state to provide security to its citizens. The police force, understaffed and under-funded under the military regimes of the 1980s and 1990s, though re-built in staff size under Obasanjo, has not only been inefficient in combating crime. It also is widely perceived to directly contribute to the very problems it is supposed to solve: by being exceedingly inefficient and openly corrupt, and by presenting a menace to the safety of the public - from outright brutality (such as the cases of policemen opening fire on public transport vehicles whose drivers refuse to pay bribes) to direct collaboration with criminal gangs.

As a reaction to the failure of the police to provide security, licensed private security companies have emerged, but only businesses and wealthy individuals can afford these. The "common man's" solution to the security problem is the formation (or employment) of vigilante groups, the spectrum of which extends from locally-organised neighbourhood watch groups up to large-scale armed groups and militias, epitomized by the "Bakassi Boys" in Southeastern Nigeria which originated as a self-defence force organised by Aba traders around 1998 and by 2001 "cleaned up" Onitsha with a wave of brutal extra-judicial killings (Harnischfeger 2003). In a similar vein, the Yoruba militia Oodua People's Congress (OPC), which originated in the political protests against the cancellation of the 1993 election results, provides security services to local communities. While provision of security by such groups may work, at least in the short run, its costs and risks are very high: vigilantes may act against the immediate security interests of the people and communities who have invited them, by degenerating into mafias living on "protection money"; they regularly commit arrests and adjudication outside the legal system, with forms of questioning sometimes amounting to torture; they may be used by local big men in pursuit of political ambitions; and they may act as armies in situations of civil disturbance, terrorizing and killings migrant members of other ethnic groups. Overall, vigilantes and militias constitute the most outright challenge to the legitimate monopoly of physical force of the Nigerian state; they are challenging its very legitimacy and may even challenge it by means of armed struggle. They form the most drastic examples of the emergence of an "uncivil society" in a failing state, with often destructive - and self-destructive - results.

Other Aspects

Up to this point, I have outlined some core dimensions of social self-organisation under the condition of state failure in Nigeria, and some of the ambivalences produced by it. However, the list of possible themes presented here is obviously not exhaustive. Not all manifestations of self-help and self-organisation related to state failure easily fall into either of the categories of the typology (individual self-help vs. collective self-organisation) chosen. Two other examples deserve to be mentioned:

(a) Weakness of rule of law and the judicial system,
violence, and the search for alternatives

Even though the Nigerian legal system, its institutions and the legal profession in general are highly developed, the rule of law in Nigeria is fragile at best. At times, the executive and law enforcement agencies take extra-legal action, and, at any rate, large segments areas of the society are hardly reached by state institutions at all. Furthermore, the legal institutions themselves are subverted by corruption and objects of informal influence.

One of the results is violence. Unjustified or excessive violence is exacted by state agencies against purported or real violators of the law - this happens on an everyday basis in the form of police brutality against citizens, and it happens in extreme forms in situations of civil strife when, in Odi and elsewhere, entire communities fell victim to brutal military "pacification". However, the lack of trust in the rule of law also produces violence "from below" - with individuals and entire communities settling conflicts by violent means, attacking and killing law enforcement agents etc.

With the formal institutions of legal protection being out of reach for ordinary citizens (or even perceived to work primarily against them), many alternative instruments of conflict resolution have emerged. Some mediation institutions even have been instituted by the state (such as the "Multi-Door Courthouse" institution established in Lagos State) or NGOs (such as the "paralegal" services supported by HBF Nigeria). Others operate largely or entirely informal, by means of local consensus among the parties, such as the traditional rulers and other informal mediators who deal with land and civic matters in rural communities.

However, other instruments of alternative dispute resolution are far less benign and transparent, as Nigerians became aware during the scandal around the Okija Ogwugwu shrine in Anambra State in August 2004. In Okija (as probably in many other places), institutions of traditional religion were and are employed as decision-making bodies in conflict situations, and as guarantors for the fulfilment of contracts, with the penalty for contravention believed to be death through divine intervention. As yet it is unknown how these practices, which originate in pre-colonial systems of adjudication, have been transformed over time; it is clear, however, that the operators of the Okija shrine were linked to politics and financial crime.

The events around the Okija shrine showed that the weakness of the rule of law, and the lack of trust in the state's judicial institutions, led a good number of Nigerians to fall back on systems of justice based on religious belief, expecting the Gods, rather than the state, to be able to right the wrong.

But the hopes for an improvement of justice by a return to a legal system based on religion, rather than state law, are not restricted to the Nigerian Southeast: The popularity of the (re)introduction of Sharia criminal law in Northern Nigeria since late 1999 was informed as well by the expectation that a foundation of the legal system within Islamic law would bring about a more just society, and that Sharia courts would function better than the existing area courts. To be sure: these popular hopes for Sharia were manipulated by Northern Nigerian politicians and Islamic activists, to whom the Sharia issue (also) meant a vehicle to further their careers. The very violent conflicts which arose out of this setting, however, prove that the failure of the Nigerian state to secure the rule of law endangers not only the legitimacy, but the very existence of the Nigerian state.

(b) Privatization of state power - the use and transformation of state institutions for and by private interests, and the self-reproduction of corrupt practices

In the neo-patrimonial state (as mentioned earlier in this text) "servants of the state" tend to use state institutions for other than official purposes. They usually do so for their own private gain, or for that of their peer group or constituency. This "privatisation of state power" results in corruption, inefficiency and often enough outright failure of state functions. One graphic example is the subversion, in practice, of the Federal Government's trade policies (as regards import restrictions, revenue collection etc.) caused by the proverbial corruption at the customs and in the ports, and resulting in perhaps half of Nigeria's imports being smuggled into the country. To be sure: This includes not only relatively harmless items such as banned textiles or foodstuff, but also growing amounts of small arms carried into the Niger Delta conflict area. In effect, through the action (and inaction) of its servants, the Nigerian state has, to a good extent, lost control over its international borders. Another example is the systematic daily exploitation, by "hungry" policemen and civil servants, of the rest of the population. Their demands for bribes in exchange for leniency on incorrect or illegal behaviour further contribute to anarchy experienced in daily life.

A comprehensive anatomy of corruption in Nigeria will have to include a look at its character as an (illegal) form of self-help with state resources. In a society where, due to massive failures of the state to provide basic services and security, self-help has become a normal way of life, corruption becomes normal as well: by helping oneself with government property, or by helping oneself through the use of state power in order to extort and exploit others. The myriad of single acts of misuse of state power for private gains have led to an image of the omnipresence of corruption, not least in the perception of Nigerians themselves. It is difficult to fight corruption successfully if virtually everybody views everybody else as actually or potentially corrupt. It is difficult to check the misuse of state power by civil servants and politicians if virtually everybody expects nothing else and regards it as "normal" (as the sentence "You know, we are all Nigerians", frequently heard in such contexts, appears to imply). It is difficult to combat the prevailing culture of political entrepreneurship, where political aspirants invest enormous amounts of money in election campaigns in order to recoup their investment while in office (by corrupt means, necessarily, as the legal compensation for the job represents only a fraction of the investment made) - and where a good part of the population condones such behaviour, or even regards it as legitimate, as long as some of the spoils of office trickle down on them. From this perspective, corruption appears as a vicious circle; it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is not only the bad examples given by corrupt leaders which reproduce corruption, but also the popular perceptions of corruption's omnipresence and unavoidability. Thus, corruption reproduces itself, and thereby even creates its own legitimacy.

The Conference / Book Project

The Nigeria Office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation (HBF) in Lagos intends to organise a conference in preparation of an edited volume of contributions by (primarily) Nigerian scholars, writers, and activists.

The book's working title - (Un)civil Society? State Failure and the Contradictions of Self-Organisation in Nigeria - may still be subject to debate, as are other aspects of the ideas summarized in this call for concept papers.

The essence of the volume is to contribute to the on-going broader debate about state failure and civil society in Africa. This will be done by taking a dispassionate view towards social self-organisation in Nigeria: highlighting not only its benefits and achievements, but also its problematic aspects, ambivalences, contradictions, and "dark sides".

Contributions to the volume should address their respective themes from an empirically well-grounded social science perspective. They should not be just general complaints about the sad state of things in Nigeria, as they can be read on a daily basis in the editorials of the Nigerian press. Instead, original contributions are expected which

• provide factual information on the problem, based on empirical research,

• properly document the sources of information used,

• study the problem in its development over time, i.e. giving some historical perspective to the analysis, and

• analyze and contextualize the problem on the background of state failure in Nigeria.

This call for concept papers has outlined a possible range of topics, but more and different ideas are most welcome.

A tentative (but not necessarily complete) table of contents may look like this:

• Introduction: State Failure and the Ambivalences of Self-Organisation: The Framework
(a revised and extended version of this concept paper)

• The Economy: State Failure and Self-Help
(an overall economic review of the effects of oil dependency, of structural adjustment, of failed economic policies; and of the role of self-help activities, including the informal sector, in Nigeria's economy and the economic survival of the majority of the population)

• State Failure and the Infrastructure
(Empirical review of various problem areas; attempts of government to address them - is privatisation the answer?; forms of self-help - borehole to generator use etc. - and their ambivalent consequences)

• State Failure and Security
(Analysis of crime statistics; history of vigilante groups and militias etc.)

• Civil Society / Non-Governmental Organisations in Nigeria: A Critical History
(a review of the development and structural problems of the NGO community)

• Local Self-Organisation: Potentials and Problems
(analysis of development and problems of community-based self-organisation; why do "town development unions" appear to be less efficient today than they were a few decades ago?)

• Criminal Self-Help: Economic Crime
(a history of 419 crime and large-scale corruption)

• The Quest for Solutions Based on Religion:
(emergence of new / Pentecostal churches, their miracle/healing/worldly success orientation; the introduction of Sharia as a form of search for justice)

• State Failure and the Rule of Law: Alternative Solutions?

• State Failure and the Niger Delta Conflict
(numerous failures of the Nigerian state to address the Niger Delta issue are obvious; a possible guiding theme for a contribution could be: the failure of the state to act as arbiter between communities and oil corporations)

• State Failure, Self-Organisation, and Nigerian Women
(Which are the gender-specific dimensions of state failure in Nigeria? Which specific forms of self-help and self-organisation have been developed by women? Do they have specific advantages and successes?)

• An Anatomy of Corruption: Corruption as "Legitimate" Form of Self-Help in a Corrupt Society? (Corruption as "privatisation of state power", as outlined above)

• More ideas and approaches are welcome …!

Roadmap & Procedure

HBF Nigeria invites to submit concept papers for the planned conference and book.

Concept papers should reflect (or critically engage) the approach described in this call. They should sketch not only the general argument made, but also describe the empirical basis on which the paper is based. A concept paper should not be longer than three pages.

Concept papers should be submitted before 31 December 2004.

Concept papers should be submitted preferably by email to axel@boellnigeria.org

HBF Nigeria will undertake a pre-selection of the concept papers received and will inform authors about acceptance of the proposals by early January 2005.

On acceptance of concept papers, authors will have a period of about three months to complete their contributions.

HBF Nigeria will invite to a conference where papers will be presented and discussed. This conference is tentatively scheduled for 12-13 April 2005, at the HBF office in Lagos.

The editorial process for the planned volume will start immediately after the conference and should be completed by mid-2005, to be followed by the publication of the volume.

Dr. Axel Harneit-Sievers
Director, Nigeria Office, Heinrich Böll Foundation
8 November 2004

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ENDNOTES

(1) Originally, the term "uncivil society" appears to have emerged to denote "dark sides and murky corners" of self-organisation operating on the fringes in the international system (or in its open/uncontrolled spaces, created by failing or failed states), such as the international drug trade or terrorist groups (see for example High Level Panel (2003:5); for the context see the UN Panel on Civil Society at http://www.un.org/reform/panel.htm). This paper applies the term and concept of the "uncivil society" to situations within weak or failing states as well. Both usages of the term coincide in so far as they focus on problematic activities and outcomes emerging from zones where regulatory frameworks and/or enforcement by national or supra-national agencies are missing.

(2) This fact may even be behind the peculiar usage, in Nigeria, of the term "civil society" as a synonym for "NGO" (and consequently, the term "civil societies" - in plural - is frequently used to denote "NGOs"). This usage appears to have lost sense of the original concept of "civil society", conceptualised as the whole of organised social forces in a society that belong neither the sphere of the state nor that of the market, but constitute a "third sector" based on the principle of voluntary association.

(3) "[…] the value of smuggled imports in 2003 was put by the Manufacturers' Association of Nigeria at about N800 billion. That equals 55 per cent of total imports thereby transforming smuggling into the mainstream activity in import trade with imported goods passing through the official channel playing second fiddle." "Banning importation of cement and other products" (Editorial), The Guardian, 17 August 2004.

REFERENCES

• Egboh, Edmund Onyemeke (1987). Community Development Efforts in Igboland. Onitsha : Etukokwu Press.
• Francis, Paul (1996). State, Community and Local Development in Nigeria. Washington D.C.: The World Bank. (= World Bank Technical Paper No. 336).
• Harnischfeger, Johannes (2003), "The Bakassi Boys: Fighting Crime in Nigeria". Journal of Modern African Studies, 41, 1, 23-49.
• High Level Panel on UN - Civil Society [Relationships] (2003). Civil Society and Global Governance. Contextual Paper … by the Panel's Chairman Fernando Henrique Cardoso.
http://www.ngocongo.org/Cardoso%20paper1.doc
• Forrest, Tom (1995). Politics and Economic Development in Nigeria. Boulder, Col., Westview (Updated Edition).
• Gary, Ian & Terry Lynn Karl (2003), Bottom of the Barrel: Africa's Oil Boom and the Poor. Catholic Relief Services.
• Ikelegbe, Augustine (2001), "The Perverse Manifestation of Civil Society: Evidence from Nigeria". Journal of Modern African Studies, 39, 1, 25-50.
• Joseph, Richard A. (1987). Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria. The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
• Lewis, P. M. (1996). "From Prebendalism to Predation: the Political Economy of Decline in Nigeria." Journal of Modern African Studies 34(1): 79-103.
• Ukiwo, Ukoha (2002), "Deus ex Machina or Frankenstein Monster? The Changing Roles of Bakassi Boys in Eastern Nigeria". Democracy & Development - Journal of West African Affairs, 3, 1, 41-53.
• Schatz, Sayre P. (1984). "Pirate Capitalism and the Inert Economy of Nigeria." Journal of Modern African Studies 22(1): 45-57.

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