A sovereign state is, before anything else, a claim. It claims a monopoly on legitimate force within a defined territory, the singular authority to extract revenue from those who inhabit it, and the right to be obeyed because it is recognised. Strip away the regalia and what remains of statehood is this triple claim, defended in the last resort by capacity. Where the capacity fails, the claim curdles into pretension. Where the claim is contested by rival sovereigns operating openly within the same territory, the state has not been weakened; it has been replaced in fact while persisting in form. This is the condition into which Nigeria has now visibly slid.
The slide is no longer a matter of inference. On 7 March 2024, armed men entered LEA Primary School at Kuriga in Kaduna State and walked out with 287 pupils and staff. Two months earlier, on the night of 8 December 2023, gunmen surrounded a wedding party in Tudun Biri and the Nigerian military, mistaking the gathering for a bandit convoy, killed at least 85 mourners with armed drones. In the same Kaduna corridor, between 2019 and 2024, the rail and road links between Abuja and the country’s third city were repeatedly suspended after attacks on trains, abductions of passengers, and the closure of stretches of the highway after dark. None of this is unfamiliar. The Chibok abduction occurred in 2014; the Dapchi abduction in 2018; the Kankara abduction in 2020; the Kagara abduction in 2021; the Bethel Baptist High School abduction in the same year. The phenomenon has been continuous for more than a decade and has spread from the north-east to the north-west, the north-central, and increasingly the south.
It is tempting to call this state failure, but the term flatters by simplifying. Failure implies a state that tried and could not. What we are watching is something more disquieting: a state that continues to function with great efficiency in the dimensions that concern its operators, while the dimensions that concern the citizen have been quietly removed from the brief. Salaries are paid. Foreign trips are taken. Allowances are voted and approved. Procurement cycles complete on schedule. The state has not collapsed; it has been refitted to serve a narrower constituency, and it discharges those duties with a competence it cannot summon for anything else.
Two Sovereignties, One Territory
The political theorist’s first instinct, encountering this arrangement, is to reach for the language of weak states or fragile states. But weakness suggests a single sovereign whose grip is loosening. The Nigerian condition is better described as the cohabitation of two sovereignties on the same soil, one formal and one informal, each effective in its own register. The formal sovereignty issues currency, signs treaties, hosts visiting heads of state, and occupies a seat at the United Nations. The informal sovereignty determines whether the farmer plants this season, whether the road from Abuja to Kaduna can be travelled before nightfall, whether the schoolgirl returns from her dormitory. Each sovereignty knows the other exists. Each has learned to operate without seriously disturbing the other’s core business.
This cohabitation has tacit rules. The informal sovereigns do not, on the whole, attempt to seize the Presidential Villa or storm the National Assembly; the formal sovereigns do not, on the whole, mount the kind of campaign that would dismantle the informal operators. Even the most spectacular interventions reveal the equilibrium. When Boko Haram seized Mubi, Bama, and Gwoza in 2014 and declared a caliphate over territory the size of Belgium, recovery required a coalition force assembled with Chadian, Cameroonian, and Nigerien troops. When the Islamic State West Africa Province subsequently emerged from the Boko Haram fracture, it consolidated control over Lake Chad islands and surrounding mainland districts that remain, in practical terms, outside Nigerian state administration. The bandit emirs of Zamfara have, by multiple investigative accounts, been negotiated with by state governors, paid stipends in exchange for ceasefires, and on occasion granted amnesty packages. The equilibrium holds because, at some level neither party fully articulates, neither finds it intolerable. The citizen, who is the unrepresented third party to this arrangement, supplies the bodies, the ransoms, and the patience.
Carl Schmitt’s old test, that the sovereign is he who decides on the exception, becomes diagnostic here. When a village is overrun, who decides? When a convoy is taken, who negotiates the ransom? Increasingly, and across more of the country each year, the answer is not the state. The exception has been outsourced. And the entity that decides on the exception is, by Schmitt’s measure, the sovereign in the relevant territory, whatever the maps continue to assert.
Failure implies a state that tried and could not. What we are watching is a state refitted to serve a narrower constituency, and it discharges those duties with a competence it cannot summon for anything else.
The Optics of Plenitude
The most telling symbol of the present arrangement is the legislator’s armoured vehicle. In April 2023, reports surfaced that the National Assembly had approved the procurement of luxury sport utility vehicles for the 469 federal legislators of the Tenth Assembly at a unit cost widely reported in the range of one hundred and sixty million naira and upward, against a national minimum wage that, even after the 2024 adjustment, paid less than ninety thousand naira a month. Each vehicle thus represented, at minimum, more than a century and a half of the wages of the citizens those legislators were elected to represent. The matter recurred in 2024 with reports of further automotive allocations and, in the same period, of the rehabilitation of legislators’ official residences at costs comparable to the construction of entire rural health centres. The vehicle is not, in most cases, a serious response to a specific threat against a specific official; it is a category good, distributed across an entire chamber as an entitlement of office. It signals two things at once. To the constituents, it announces that the man who once campaigned in a printed kaftan has joined the class for whom the country is dangerous in a way that requires plating. To his peers, it confirms membership. The armoured car is not a security device; it is a uniform.
Around the vehicle gathers the supporting apparatus: the escort detail, the convoy of outriders, the siren that clears traffic for a man who, only seasons ago, joined the same traffic as a private citizen. The escort is paid out of the same fiscal pool that cannot fund the rural clinic or the primary school. The traffic he displaces is composed of citizens whose own commute is unprotected from precisely the dangers his armoured car is supposed to deflect. The asymmetry is not incidental to the system; it is the system rendered visible. One reads, in the legislator’s motorcade, an entire constitutional theory: that the lives inside the convoy are differently weighted from the lives the convoy interrupts.
The numbers reinforce the reading. The 2024 federal budget allocated to the National Assembly a sum exceeding three hundred and forty billion naira for an institution of fewer than five hundred members, a per-capita resource intensity that exceeds the operational budget of most of the country’s universities. Over the same period, federal universities entered repeated strike cycles over unpaid earned allowances; teaching hospitals operated without consumables; primary schools in the northern states reported pupil-to-classroom ratios above one hundred to one.
This is what the citizen sees when he watches the proceedings of his parliament. He sees the polished surfaces, the lavish chambers, the per diems, the foreign training trips, the recess houses. He sees the deliberation that produces nothing he can eat or learn from or be defended by. He does not need a political scientist to translate the spectacle. He understands, with the rapid intuition of those who have nothing else to rely on, that the apparatus is no longer for him. The question is not whether he believes the system is legitimate. The question is what the system imagines it is doing when it continues to claim his obedience.
The Conspiracy That Need Not Be Coordinated
When citizens describe what is happening as a conspiracy, the analyst’s reflex is to caution against the word. Conspiracy implies coordination, smoke-filled rooms, signed compacts. The analyst is technically correct and substantively beside the point. The Nigerian arrangement does not require coordination because it requires only convergent self-interest. The officeholder who finds the existing chaos profitable does not need to meet with the bandit chieftain who finds the existing chaos profitable. Each, pursuing his own line, sustains an equilibrium that punishes the citizen and rewards everyone with the capacity to extract from disorder. The conspiracy, if one insists on the word, is structural rather than personal. It is what the system produces when its incentives are left to run.
The case histories illustrate the mechanism. The Petroleum Subsidy Probe of 2012 documented the diversion of more than one trillion naira through fictitious fuel import claims and named specific firms and officials; the prosecutions that followed produced almost no convictions of consequence, and the subsidy regime continued for another decade before being formally removed in 2023. The Halliburton bribery case, prosecuted in the United States and resulting in fines of more than five hundred million dollars against the companies involved, identified Nigerian officials who had received payments to facilitate liquefied natural gas contracts; the Nigerian prosecutions that were periodically announced produced no comparable accountability. The Malabu Oil licence, the subject of litigation in Milan and London touching transfers of more than one billion dollars, returned more in legal fees than in recovered assets. None of these episodes required a conspiratorial meeting. Each required only that everyone in a position to obstruct the flow find it more rewarding to participate in it.
This is why the standard reforms keep failing. A new agency is created; it acquires its own incentive to perpetuate the problem it was meant to solve. A new commission is established; its commissioners discover that pronouncement pays better than enforcement. A new security architecture is announced; the procurement that follows is more lucrative than the security. The disorder is not a malfunction the reforms have failed to fix. The disorder is the equilibrium the reforms have been absorbed into. To genuinely dismantle it would require the people doing the dismantling to act against their own present interest, which is the one thing no system can rely on its operators to do voluntarily.
And here the question of design returns, sharpened. The citizen is not wrong to suspect that the arrangement is too consistent to be accidental. He is wrong only about the mechanism. There is no central designer. There is, instead, decades of selection: a long process by which the kind of person who could profit from disorder advanced, and the kind of person who could not was filtered out. What looks like conspiracy is the residue of an evolutionary sort, working through institutions, producing a class adapted to the conditions and therefore committed to their preservation. The design is real. It simply has no designer.
The Question of Self-Rule
It is now possible to ask the question that polite analysis has long avoided. Was the country ripe for self-government at independence? Or were the inheritors of the colonial apparatus the kind of men who would, given the keys, drive the vehicle into the ditch? The two possibilities are not mutually exclusive, and the historical record suggests both were operating at once. The structures handed over were extractive instruments designed by an imperial power for an imperial purpose; the men who inherited them were, in many cases, the intermediaries who had already learned to extract on the empire’s behalf, and who saw no compelling reason to redesign instruments that had served them. Independence transferred the steering wheel; it did not change the vehicle, and it did not change the driving culture.
This is not a defence of the colonial period, which was its own catastrophe, calibrated for a different beneficiary. It is an observation about the inheritance. A state apparatus built to extract resources from a colonised population and remit them outward will, when handed to local operators, extract resources from the same population and remit them upward. The flow is reorganised; the logic persists. The tragedy of the postcolonial Nigerian state is that its operators discovered they could keep the machine running on its original principles, with themselves as the new beneficiaries, and that the population, lacking alternatives, would continue to feed it. Sixty-six years on, the machine still runs on the same principles, and the same wonder is still expressed each time it produces the same outcome.
The comparative record is instructive precisely because it refuses determinism. Botswana inherited from the British an even thinner administrative apparatus than Nigeria did, with fewer trained civil servants at independence and no comparable resource endowment until the diamond discoveries of the late 1960s. Its first government, under Seretse Khama, chose to bind itself to fiscal rules, retain the institutional memory of traditional councils as accountability instruments, and reinvest mineral revenue through the Pula Fund as a sovereign wealth vehicle. The country has held competitive elections continuously since 1966 and ranks among the least corrupt states on the African continent. Singapore, departing the Malaysian federation in 1965 with no natural resources and a population the size of metropolitan Lagos, chose to staff its civil service from the academically strongest cohorts available, pay them at private-sector parity, and prosecute corruption with a Corrupt Practices Investigation Bureau answerable directly to the prime minister. South Korea, after decades of authoritarian developmentalism, prosecuted two former presidents in succession on corruption charges and convicted them. The point is not that these are models to be copied. The point is that none of these outcomes was the inevitable product of geography, religion, or culture. Each was the residue of decisions taken in the early years of independence by elites who construed their own interest as bound to the country’s. Nigerian elites construed theirs differently, and have continued to.
The honour systems offer a parallel diagnostic. A state retains the capacity to discipline its own operators only if the costs of betrayal exceed the benefits. In Nigeria, the man who loots the treasury is not frozen out of polite society; he is honoured, chieftained, conferred with honorary doctorates, invited to deliver convocation lectures, and granted the access to capital and patronage that lesser standing would deny. The structure of the obligation has been so thoroughly inverted that betrayal is the access ticket to advancement. James Ibori, convicted in a British court in 2012 of money laundering involving sums of approximately fifty million pounds, returned to Nigeria in 2017 and was received in his home state of Delta with the trappings of a senior statesman. Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, convicted in 2007 after his earlier flight from the United Kingdom in disguise, was granted a state pardon in 2013. These are not aberrations. They are signals to the system.
The Silence of the Global System
There remains the puzzle of why the world watches. Multilateral bodies, friendly capitals, the architecture of international concern, all of these speak of African sovereignty in tones of careful respect, and the respect translates into non-intervention. There are good reasons for this restraint, rooted in the bitter history of intervention badly done. There are also less defensible reasons. A Nigeria in slow-motion crisis is, from certain external vantage points, a manageable Nigeria: a market that continues to absorb imports, a producer that continues to pump crude, a partner that continues to vote in predictable ways at multilateral forums, a destination for the educated young who emigrate and remit in hard currency. The crisis is uncomfortable but not yet inconvenient. The threshold at which it becomes inconvenient, at which the implosion begins to radiate outward in ways the global system cannot absorb, is the threshold at which attention sharpens. We are not there yet, but we are closer than the silence suggests.
The argument for external pressure is not the argument for recolonisation, and the distinction must be held firmly. It is an argument for the kind of conditionality, transparency standards, and asset-recovery cooperation that other states have applied to other states in conditions less acute than these. The instruments already exist. The United Kingdom’s Unexplained Wealth Order regime, introduced in 2018, allows the National Crime Agency to compel holders of assets above fifty thousand pounds to demonstrate legitimate provenance; the failure to do so triggers civil recovery. The United States’ Foreign Corrupt Practices Act has, over four decades, generated prosecutions touching multiple African jurisdictions. Switzerland’s Foreign Illicit Assets Act provides for the freezing and repatriation of assets of politically exposed persons. The repatriation in 2020 of approximately three hundred and eleven million dollars of Sani Abacha’s looted funds, returned from the United States through a tripartite agreement, demonstrates that the mechanisms function when the political will to deploy them exists. The Nigerian elite holds its wealth, schools its children, and seeks its medical care in jurisdictions that have the legal capacity to investigate the provenance of that wealth, that schooling, and that care.
The decision not to investigate is a decision; it is not a neutrality. Every villa on the Costa del Sol, every Knightsbridge townhouse, every Palm Jumeirah apartment registered to a Nigerian official is a node in a network the host jurisdictions could choose to illuminate. The choice not to illuminate is the global system’s quiet contribution to the equilibrium.
Before the Implosion
Something must give. The arithmetic of the present arrangement does not balance forever. A young population, with median age below nineteen and youth unemployment estimated above forty per cent by the National Bureau of Statistics before the methodology was revised, increasingly unable to find work in the formal economy and increasingly aware, through the same digital infrastructure that radicalises everywhere else, of how it is being governed, does not remain quiescent indefinitely. The October 2020 End SARS protests offered the most recent indication of the temperature of the cohort that will inherit the country. The mobilisation was organised through Twitter, Instagram, and crowdfunded payment infrastructure; it was leaderless by design; it was put down at the Lekki toll gate on the night of 20 October, an event the Lagos State Judicial Panel of Inquiry subsequently characterised as a massacre and the federal government denied. The protests stopped. The conditions that produced them did not.
The informal sovereigns themselves have their own succession dynamics, their own factional splits, their own incentives to expand beyond the current equilibrium. The fiscal foundations of the state, leaking everywhere, narrow each year.
*To be continued.
