Dr Portia Roelofs & Anna Thurlbeck on Good Governance in Nigeria

In this episode, GDI PhD researcher Anna Thurlbeck speaks with Dr Portia Roelofs, lecturer in politics at Kings College London.

Dr Roelofs provides an unmissable deep dive into the background and key themes of her new book 'Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century'.

Listen now!

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Dr Roelofs has degrees from Oxford, SOAS and LSE. She has held post-doctoral fellowships at the LSE and St Anne’s College, Oxford. She has been a visiting researcher at the Universities of Maiduguri and Ibadan, Nigeria. She is co-convenor of the Political Studies Association special group on Global Development Politics and sits on the editorial board of the African Arguments book series. She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

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Intro music Anna Banana by Eaters

Transcript

Intro [00:00:02] Welcome to the Global Development Institute podcast. Based at the University of Manchester, we're Europe's largest research and teaching institutes addressing poverty and inequality. Each episode will bring you the latest thinking, insights, and debates in development studies. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:00:34] Hello. Welcome to the Global Development Institute Podcast. My name is Anna Thurlbeck and I'm a final year PhD researcher here at GDI. Today I'm joined by Dr Portia Roelofs in order to discuss her book published in 2023, titled Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the 21st century. She is a lecturer in politics within the Department of Political Economy at King's College London, having previously been based at Saint Anne's College, Oxford. Thank you for joining me today. Really good to have you here in Manchester. 

Portia Roelofs [00:01:03] Thanks so much for inviting me. Really happy to be here. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:01:07] I really enjoyed reading your book. I found it to be really thought provoking and engaging. I think you really nicely weave together your empirical material, historical material and theoretical conceptual debates that you will see in the book. I guess we should get going then. I think I'm really interested to know about the process of writing the book. But start with how would you say your research interests have evolved since, you know, starting in the world of academia? 

Portia Roelofs [00:01:36] Sure. Yeah. So, my first, I was really lucky. My first kind of engagement with Nigerian politics was during my undergraduate. So I was studying in Oxford, and there were a number of kind of very established Nigerian people, like Abdul Raufu Mustapha, and then via a somewhat kind of random, and I, to my shame, a very Oxford link, a guy who had been studying at the same college as I had been staying at in Oxford, during the Second World War, had gone on to become a lecturer. He was he was from Carlisle. He'd gone on to become a lecturer at the University of my degree in Nigeria, and he kind of appeared every five years or so to come to like alumni events and apparently had suggested to the provost, well, why don't you send one of your students to my degree, which in kind of 2008 was a certain sort of proposition, and by the time I made it was a slightly different one because, up until then, I guess Maiduguri had a reputation of being quite a kind of sleepy Sahelian town, like it was very kind of, off the beaten track, so to speak. But kind of just had a really good kind of forestry research centre and again, kind of, built some links. And then the months before I went, my degree suddenly burst into the kind of global news because there was the kind of Boko Haram insurrection of, August, September 2009. And so I went and I spent a month, as a kind of visiting student, working with some of the scholars there and learning a bit about climate change and agriculture and local politics. But really, I mean, in hindsight, I feel tremendously privileged that I got to experience something of what Modibo and Borno were like prior to what has, you know, prior to the last 15 years of civil war or, kind of militant activity, with Boko Haram. And so that kind of got me initially interested. And then when I went on doing my master's, which is so I, I wanted to continue this work on kind of northern Nigeria. And I had ideas that maybe I would do a trip to Kano or something. And increasingly, it became clear that I wasn't going to be fieldwork in northern Nigeria at the time, but I did my master's dissertation on the kind of meta conflict around the Boko Haram conflict and how was that kind of disclosed, shaping people's understanding there. And so when I came to do my PhD, I thought I was going to be interested in corruption. And this was because at the time, it was really a central kind of obsession of the African politics literature, which was like you, you turn up for what I said was a master's in African politics and kind of week 1 to 5 is corruption in different forms, so neo patrimonialism, the state failure, politics of the belly. And it all kind of circled around this idea of just a kind of central dysfunctionality of the African state and some attendant questions about the sort of corruption of African society. And so I thought if I was going to engage with this critically as a theoretical topic, why not do it in Nigeria? Why not do in the place everyone thought was like the worst case scenario, the kind of epitome of bad governance? And so for the beginning of my Ph.D., I thought I was looking at everything through this corruption lens. And as I was doing literature reviews of what people said about corruption, how would they define that? And then the kind of very early, most kind of speculative parts of my research, I was in Lagos and Abuja talking to people about corruption. And whilsy I was very happy to be back in Nigeria, the topic is actually just tremendously boring because what I found was that you could speak to anyone and they all said the same thing. It was like there was this kind of template with a script for what it was that people said about corruption. And then at the same time, something else happened. So by chance, I had this opportunity to go to a conference organised by the Obafemi Awolowo Institute of Governance and Public Policy that had just been set up near Lagos, I think in Lekki. And there was a conference organised in 2013 by (inaudible), two people whose work has hugely influential to me. And so I sort of show up and what transpires is this conference is not only about kind of questions of public policy and governance, but it's also the kind of expression of a certain political project, which is kind of building in southwest Nigeria. And it has intellectual strands, it has political strands, it has commercial kind of civil service strands. But I just kind, sometimes you realise you're kind of at the middle of something and you don't quite understand what it was. Which I now understand as a kind of expression of a long standing kind of Yoruba progressivism. So Yoruba being the cultural and linguistic group in southwest Nigeria and progressivism being a kind of a moniker that, people within this project used to describe themselves. And this conference included some really big names. Kayode Fayemi was the governor of this state. Again, I didn't quite make sense of it at the time, but this kind of moment of triumph in 2013 where from 2011 they had this sweep of election victories and they were like this opposition party on the way up, building a a kind of network, and the constituency across the southwest. And they weren't talking about corruption, they were talking about good governance. And then I realised that that's the that's the kind of way in, because if you ask everyone about corruption, they will say the same thing. Whereas if you ask me, okay, well what's the opposite of corruption, what's good governance, what should we be aiming for? That's where you start to get the real spectrum and kind of diversity of views. So yeah, I guess that was a kind of turning point where I thought okay, actually, I think this kind of moment in the South-West is going to be an angle from which I can maybe speak about some of these debates about, kind of corruption, but from this slightly alternate angle. And I guess that was a kind of beginning of what started as a PhD project and ended up as a book. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:08:12] So for those who have yet to read the book, I mean, did the book emerge in response to a specific gap that you were seeing? You know, what maybe motivated you to pursue this angle that you just explained? Based on what you were seeing out there. 

Portia Roelofs [00:08:30] So, I guess when a lot of people have this idea they might turn a PhD into a book. And I think there are different ways of doing it, and there are different motivations for doing it. And sometimes it's just about rewriting it in a more accessible language, and sometimes it's about kind of really kind of adding to it. And I think for me, it was that with the PhD thesis, I was about halfway there. I had these things I wanted to say, and a lot of it came down to this idea that the thesis was clearly a study of a single state in Nigeria. It was about a single central figure, the governor of Oyo State during this time, Governor Abiola Ajimobi. And it was only ever going to be read by, kind of Nigerian or Development Studies audience. And yet there was something in it that I was just convinced had lessons for people more broadly. And so I really wanted the opportunity to take this kind of empirical case study, which is interesting, but maybe not kind of, difficult to convince people of its kind of general interest and draw out from that: hey, I think there's actually something going on here that is more fundamentally destabilising about wider ideas of good governance. Or has something to kind of tell us what kind of feedback to these, like very dominant, very hegemonic narratives. Also, when, PhD writing tends to be quite bad, we tend to be in a position of really trying to work things through. I think a lot of the ideas in that are often implicit rather than explicit. So you're writing a lot about the most boring stuff, and there are tiny glimpses of the most interesting stuff. But yeah, I think there was also this sense that when you're trying to speak to different audiences, you need a bit more time to do it. So it would have been possible to carve out of the PhD maybe something to put into a political science journal or something to write about Oyo state as a kind of case study. But I mean, if you're going to try and write a book which speaks to maybe 3 or 4 different audiences at once, you need much more space to do it. And that was also I had this sense that there was something kind of interconnected going on that there was a story to be told about what was going on in southwest Nigeria that told us something about how we could maybe kind of start to rethink accountability and transparency. And then also something about this kind of theoretical, empirical story tied together to help us maybe understand what kind of politics of populism or what happens whencertain conceptions of good governance aren't met politically. Okay. Well, that creates a vacuum. It allows certain players to kind of step in with certain offers. So I think there's also a sense of interconnectedness is the book that would really benefit from being read all in one go or read in the kind of same document, which made it a lot to balance, but also really, really satisfying to then try and kind of see it to fruition. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:11:50] Yeah, I think for people, I mean, PhD research or an early career researcher, I think it seems like a really daunting task. So beginning, you know, conceiving it as a book, was there anything particularly challenging you found about that process? 

Portia Roelofs [00:12:05] Yeah. So first of all, I should say I there are a lot of really excellently written PhD theses, and it's not reflected on my own. And I go back and read it mine was was not great. But I think it's also, I think there are a couple of things. So I'm not talking about this specific kind of topic or good governance in Nigeria, but kind of in general, I think there are certain pathologies of PhD writing that are forced on you. So first of all, you're writing defensively, like, and then you literally do a defence where people try and critique what you're doing. And that leads to a certain sort of kind of way that you have to position yourself in relationship to the literature and other arguments, that that tends to be quite unsatisfying to read because it's kind of self-justification, really. A bit paranoid in style. And then also you're writing for a really, really specific audience, which is, number one, people who are being paid to read your thesis, which will then never happen again. You know, the examiner's and your PhD supervisor, but you're also writing in for the few people in the world who are currently more expert in your field than you are, which is a really hard position to write from. And then I think one of the biggest shifts when you're then writing a book, even if you're writing for, you know, a well-established literature in your field and a specific subdiscipline, you have to like entirely change your position and write from a position of authority, because it's really, that's what we expect from authors. We expect them to be a little bit omniscient and omnipotent and so kind of thinking about, like, even in sentence structure, like, you know, it has been argued versus just saying the thing you want to say. I think that's quite a big kind of shift. And some people get the PhD thesis in a supremely confident and write like, glorious prose. And, I think the kind of incentives that you're faced with when you're finishing your PhD are ones that actually encouraged slightly, kind of a hobbled writing style. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:14:19] That's definitely one of, like, my consistent feedbackis that I write too tentatively. 

Portia Roelofs [00:14:24] I mean, the politics behind that, of you writes tentatively and how are people judged if they don't write tentatively? And maybe you've spent your whole career being knocked back because you write too boldly and then and you're told its a problem, and so and without necessarily having to go into the kind of gendered and racialized history of the Academy as a whole, it's clearly not just an individualised experience. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:14:48] Okay, well, maybe we should get on to the specifics of the book. I mean, maybe broad brush. How do you focus on this concept of socially embedded governance? What is socially equivalent? 

Portia Roelofs [00:14:59] Yeah. So I guess I got there first through accountability. So in the kind of wider political science literature, really one of the innovations of the last 15, 20 years is a new approach to accountability that borrows a lot of the kind of theoretical infrastructure from the field of economics with like very kind of esteemed political economists, people like Kim Beazley using what's called the principal agent model to think about accountability outside of economics, looking to management theory and applying it to politics. So essentially saying, in any relationship of accountability, you have a principal who has certain interests that they want to kind of pursue now unable to pursue it themselves because they don't have the the mandate. And so they have an agent who acts on their behalf. And then you're looking at what's the gap between the interests of the principal and what the agent actually does. And then it's kind of delegation costs when you delegate that power and and they don't deliver. That's a very, very kind of skeletal summary of that model. But some version of that had really gone on through scholars like Stefan Lindbergh and Robin Harding and (inaudible) to kind of to build up what became, I think, the common sense in political science and development studies in public administration about what accountability was, and it was about principle as being able to sanction agents. And so if you if you are thinking about a democracy or a political system, typically the agent is the politician or the civil servant, depending on how you can conceive of that. And then the writer is the principal of that kind of a lecturer's principal. So it's really about kind of, the electric sanctioning, like looking at the kind of objective performance of the agent and sanctioning them to be their votes or whatever other mechanisms in response to, to kind of an evaluation performance. And then so I had that in mind. And that's a key part of the good governance agenda is to improve and enhance capability to different institutional reforms. And then when I was kind of on the ground in Ibadan doing my fieldwork in 2013 and 2015, I was kind of exposed to this, this hugely rich local landscape of how politics happened. And some of that was through the local government. Some of that was through how people thought about the state government. And sometimes that was through community associations, this kind of really like rich kind of public life, of which the state was just a part. And one of the events I went to was run by the Community Development Association, which is a kind of semi formalised branch of a local government which is then staffed by people from the community and local leaders. And I went to a couple of their meetings and they first of all, they were long. They were like really long and they were the room was packed and there were the kind of lots just going on. They were planning development projects. They were asking what the local government had been up to. And at various moments in in these meetings, local politicians would either ask to come and visit or be told that they should come and visit. And they were kind of put on the spot and they had questions asked of them, and they interacted with the kind of leader of the group. And there's a phrase that kind of sometimes people use, but you kind of you get this sense of like, oh, this is what democracy looks like. Like, I think it's I think the stuff of democracy is happening in front of me. And what what seemed to be the kind of core of this was a way through which, first of all the politicians and local kind of community figures did not get an easy ride in these sessions. So I'm sure there were lots of different kind of connections. Like, none of this is kind of from a complete blank slate. People were there because they knew people there, whatever. But no one was getting an easy ride. And you kind of look at them and you sometimes think, I wonder if this guy regrets coming today, but he just didn't. He just thought he could get, you know, he thought he'd be able to, like, tell his story, get a round of applause and leave. And actually, he's been facing these questions. And there seemed to be something going on that that seemed to be like, paradigmatic of what accountability is. These leaders were being held to account by people in that constituency. And so I guess what started me off on thinking about socially embedded good governance was, okay, how can I theorise the gap between what I've been told, which is principles holding agents to account largely through the ballot box and what's going on here, which largely seemed to be that the crucial things here seem to be being face to face with an audience or face to face with your constituents. It wasn't something that could be replaced via an email system or an online message board or an app where you submit questions, like there seemed to be something really integral to the process of being face to face that the politicians sort of much preferred to be online, and the people would much prefer that to be in person. And so that kind of, that sent me down the path of how do we, is there any way of kind of putting back into the theory some of this kind of more lived experience or, embodied experience of what accountability is? And then I guess, as you would have read in the book, I kind of elaborate this out and I start, exploring the possibility that actually what was happening in that room in Ibadan is not in any way specific to Ibadan. So there are maybe certain vocabularies of kind of inflections through which, accessibility is articulated or kind of, certain processes through which it flows in Nigeria. But actually it kind of it got me thinking  this is something much more widely applicable. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:21:17] And then because you also position this idea socially about embodied good governance, again the good governance agenda as well, there's sort of this difference in terms of the separation from the environment, which is something discussed quite a lot in the book. 

Portia Roelofs [00:21:30] Yeah. So my jumping off point so that in terms of critiquing the kind of more dominant theory and just to say so, when I talk about the kind of dominant theory of good governance, I'm thinking about this approach that emerged first in kind of the world of the world Bank and the kind of, the early 90s as the report on governance and development, I think in 1992. But from that emerges what really becomes a very, very strong common sense that there is something called good governance, it can be done by any government, regardless of your commitments, regardless of left or right wing, regardless of developing country, rich country, regardless of your place in the international system. Everyone can adopt this kind of universalisable principle of governance and transparency and accountability part of them, but also this idea of the separation of the public and private realm. And so to kind of, the starting point of some of my thinking about and critiquing this comes from the work of a lot of African and Nigerian scholars in response to the kind of double whammy of first structural adjustment, which kind of kicks off in the 80s and then runs into the 90s, and the good governance agenda that was kind of interwoven with that. So there was a very, in practice, close relationship between market reforms, liberalisation, privatisation and good governance. And good governance is often reduced down to, kind of new public managements ideas of public administration. But, (inaudible) comes up with a kind of term to describe the style of politics, or the style of governance that good governance agenda kind of gives rise to. And he calls it the politics of insulation. And so for (inaudible) that's about this idea that, good policy, good governance, good decision making originates in enclaves of experts who are well-trained largely in the discipline of economics, essentially kind of people who have some sort of technical expertise and them being allowed to just make the right decisions free of the kind of contaminating, effects of having to engage with kind of society or voters at large. So we're already seeing a kind of interesting tension here. Right? Is it about voter sanctioning principles, or it is about kind of cutting off decision makers? And I think there's lots of interesting ways of trying to square that. But yeah, so in terms of practically, we see this politics of insulation through repeated waves of civil service reform in African countries where the idea is that you cleave off key areas of the civil service to make kind of, I don't know, like economic reform agendas, for example, cut off from all of the kind of possible confusions and connections to kind of wider society and politics. And this is often in kind of World Bank funded executive agencies, which have different hiring models, different, renumeration rates, different levels of kind of resourcing to the rest of the civil services. It's partly a story about kind of the changes of public administration guided by donors in the 1990s and 2000. But more widely, what comes out of is a kind of endorsement of what is essentially a technocratic, and in the  book I use the word epistochratic, which I can explain in a moment, in the kind of technocratic way of doing government, which is really the people should leave the experts to do it. And then politics is there to kind of hold experts to account or hold people in if you have the best answer that the best policy, the best solutions to account. And so that job is to perform and that performance can be evaluated kind of at the end of a four year term. But there shouldn't really be any kind... it's risky or is a liability to ongoing connections between people and decision makers. And so just to explain that kind of epistochratic. So that's often more widely used in political theory and epist, meaning the same as where we say epistemic or epistemology. So based on knowledge. So those with the correct knowledge should rule. And I think this is just like one, technocracy is one wider, which is like people with a PhD in economics, people with an MBA in law, and then in the book I kind of explore how does this coincide with longer ideas. But yeah, so that's the that's a kind of major point of contrast between technocracy and more socially embedded governance, where in socially embedded governance, it's really emphasising the benefits you get from connection. And this is in a context of kind of literature. African politics, at least, the kind of 2 or 3 decades, has been saying that connection is the source of corruption, the risk of (inaudible), that these guys can't be trusted. Ironically, at the same time as democratisation. So there's a lot of a schizophrenic view of the African voter here, like, do you trust them to talk to their leaders, or is that a source of, contamination of what would otherwise be a high quality, expert made policy? 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:26:44] Well, because I know in the book as well you referr to data taken from the UK where people talk about not seeing their MP or their local elected official. And then is this something that translates outside of Nigeria? 

Portia Roelofs [00:26:59]  Yeah, yeah. So in the book I define accessibility, or I argue that accessibility is an alternative conception of accountability. And I define it as the maintenance of spaces for direct communication between rulers and the ruled, either by face to face or by telephone, some form of direct communication. And by contrast, I found that was a really kind of ubiquitous critique of politicians when people said they were elitist. They often then joined up to the idea that they were inaccessible. So they were cut off. You couldn't communicate with them. They were shut behind. They got elected, and moved to a big house behind big gates and dogs, they moved to a richer part o ftown. They spent four years on a beach and just came back to collect your vote at the end of it. And so, this kind of speaks to a wider idea, but what does it mean for politicians to be accessible? And then I started. Yeah. Thinking actually, I think this can apply elsewhere. There's some work by Steven Coleman on what he calls conversational democracy. And he talks to, he surveys people about their local MP. And he asks them their evaluation of them. And often they would come out with things in Nigeria would be called criticisms based on inaccessibility. So it's like we don't even have that kind of concept in kind of Western political science to really kind of put this onto. And maybe there are some proximate ones, but I don't think they're a perfect fit. So yeah, people complaining about like, I never see him, like I've lived here four years and like, he's never around. Which in terms of if we're thinking that good governance is about delivering performance and you should be able to kind of objectively assess the performance and then, you know, give your evaluation on it and vote accordingly, there's no reason why you'd ever need to see them. And yet there does seem to be something kind of quite intuitive here and instinctive about some sort of human connection at the heart of that kind of representational relationship.  And maybe that's something we've lost sight of. But in terms of the kind of comparison between African case studies and Western case studies, what I found really interesting was the way that when this idea shows up in the literature in different times, a different kind of, people call it different things, but when it shows up, people interpret it really differently depending on whether it's happening in a Western country. So, Lisa Muller does otherwise I think really excellent work using Afrobarometer survey data and interviews in Niger, looking at how often do people call or go and directly talk to local representatives or politicians more broadly. And what do they ask for when they're there? And her argument is it's personal politics are not clientelism. So people go and they talk about kind of substantive issues in some form or another, and then you've got Simon Coleman's work and kind of other people. I believe that's the Sue et al. Paper. I can't remember the exact title of it, unfortunately. But it's basically a recent piece which looks at local constituents again, directly interfacing with MPs, whether by a phone or email or in person. And so in Niger, the conclusion is, well, people want this kind of more direct interaction because it's a second grade democracy, because it's under institutionalised, because it hasn't yet reached the kind of fulfillment of democratic ideals. And then when you talk about it in the UK, it's almost taken as a kind of sign of the maturity or the richness of UK democracy is that, you know, now that like, in the kind of era of digitalisation and you know that the final frontier of democracy, for us to really self-select might be this kind of additional, more kind of interpersonal level of direct interaction. And so I just thought it was interesting that in African case studies, it's kind of taken as a deficiency in in Western ones, it's taken like we're perfecting democracy. And I guess my argument is it's neither it's just an important component of what accountability is. And we don't really have the vocabulary to talk about it in kind of Western based political science. But actually there are whole societies that this is quite obvious to people, that this is one of the elements that we need in terms of kind of politics. So the politics, it's relational. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:31:28] Yeah, it shouldn't be such a sort of shocking, you know, thing. I mean, within social donors and development organisations have also promoted some social accountability initiatives. I mean, how do they differ from how you can see socially embedded governance? Because do you see them still as promoting some kind of separation, or do you think they do bring people closer to their elected? 

Portia Roelofs [00:31:52] Yeah. So, first of all, I think the word social accountability is used to mean a couple of different things so it might be that my response only kind of can speak to a couple of them. But my sense was that this is a way of kind of adding back on or kind of retrofitting this wider idea of kind of technocracy. Technocracy is a kind of ideal that if only we could get African political systems  towards that, then they'd kind of deliver public goods more efficiently and we would achieve development, which I think is like embedded in the kind of broader donor consensus towards governance and my understanding, again, this may not be perfectly kind of paraphrasing all of the social accountability projects, but it's about kind of pulling specific groups of societal actors who are normally excluded from formal sector politics back into that. But I think often the premise is still the same. So, for example, some social accountability projects focus on things like trying to better render kind of objective information about performance and then render that available to kind of people on the ground or people who would otherwise be kind of marginalised. So one of the things that I've seen governance interventions do is they try and come up with things like score cards. So they'll say for each state in a country, we're going to rank that performance on, all of these different indicators. And all of them are kind of quantitative. And then we're going to traffic light it, and then we're going to go to people and we're going to deliver them this is kind of pre made like traffic light ranking system. And then they can use this incredibly technocratic in its underpinnings kind of resource to do some sort of local engagement project where they can better kind of shape their voting decisions. Or maybe they'll go and visit their local representative. But on the basis of this kind of quite reified or stylised understanding of like, how do you make sense of performance? So I think it's in addition to and and I'm sure there's a diversity of approaches, but I think it doesn't kind of challenge this more fundamental idea of like is it a liability for democracy for voters to speak to representatives, or is it the core of what democracy is. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:34:13] And I think as well, I think this is something that was raised in the book by you. But you allude at the end to this question of scale and I mean  do you see different conceptualisations of the difference in scale, you know, is it necessary for President Tinubu to be accessible to his people, or do you see this as something that local (inaudible), just does Tinubu up to meet people for him to be seen as accountable? 

Portia Roelofs [00:34:39] Yeah. So, this is probably like the one most tangible bit where I'm like, I definitely actually could have written a bit more on that. And it's a kind of critique I get quite a lot. And I think that's really fair. So I guess the argument is, well, if accessibility is one route to accountability or is one version of accountability that involves meeting with your constituency face to face, well, that's just not scalable. You can do that if you got 100 constituents or a thousand constituents or maybe 10,000. But but how can you do it if you're in a country of 200 million? And so from that critique, I think there are kind of two options. So you could say, well, maybe it's just something that kind of characterises small scale democracies or small scale politics and something that's achievable at the local level, but not at national level. And then relatedly, you could say, well, in theory, maybe that tells us something about democracy. And so thinking of, scholars like Maxwell (inaudible) you wrote 'Democracy from the Village' and again, a kind of Afrocentric account of democracy. There is there are some arguments and this is kind of in terms of like classical notions of democracy. There are ways of thinking that say, you know, it is a kind of small scale enterprise and that once you start to need technologies and by technologies like a vote as a technology, it's a means of aggregation. When you start to need technology to expand the scale of it, you've already kind of gone beyond the limits of where, like high quality democracy is going to happen. And actually maybe we look at accessibility and it's an argument for localisation. So that's one route. But I actually think a more appropriate response is to say that the way  there's almost like, we have this, binary in mind between personalistic politics on the one hand, which is about like, social relations or social factors and identities, and then universal politics on the other hand, which is like absolutely impersonal and anonymous. And and if you have this binary, you look at accessibility and you say, well, it falls into the kind of personalistic category and maybe it works if you are in a small scale community where everyone knows each other, but in general then that in this impossible. What you need is is like impersonal, anonymous, large scale politics. And that's what for so many people, the definition of modernity is a shift to these impersonal kind of anonymous abstract systems. But I think if you ,theoretically, african political theorists often push back on this. I think in people like Peter Ekeh in colonialism and the two publics, his paper from 1976 is this argument that actually this, like, liberal idea of a kind of binary of public and private misses something called the social or, he calls it the primordial public. I think that has a lot of baggage behind it, which wasn't what he was getting at. So I think the social is probably a better way of describing this kind of third realm. And in terms of how this then links back to accessibility. So what I noticed actually, was that when people were talking about was a leader accessible or not, it wasn't required necessarily for them to have had that direct experience. And not saying I met my local government chairman - how did he treat me when I met him? How did I feel from that interaction? Often what people were referring to were videos of watching direct interactions between politicians and voters or reported stories of other people's engagements. And so if you think of this more socially, it's not about how did my politican treat me? It's more about how does he or she treat people? And I think, do you see examples of that? So a lot of the book is I mean, a lot of the book talks about Southwest Nigeria, but I also, a lot of the kind of key examples are trying to make sense of national level politics. And so in the 2023 election, there was a candidate who people often described as one of his strengths is that he was accessible, and this is Peter Obi, the kind of wild card third candidate. And what was kind of instrumental in his public persona and how people understood him and kind of evaluated him, was on the basis of seeing videos of him interact with other people. So he sat in an airport waiting for a flight, and he doesn't have loads of, minders around him, or he's carrying his own bag in the queue. And then people come up and they take selfies with him and have a chat, and, or it would be kind of similar stories, of really quite high level politicians. So, the governors in Nigeria, often governors of states are kind of like five, 10 million people. And again, people trying to make sense of of how how trustworthy, how reliable, what the kind of key characteristics of this ruler are by how do they interact, by kind of hearing about them through anecdotes, how they treat other people. So I guess that would be my answer, that what is scalable is an understanding of what is the nature of this person's social relations, as opposed to 'I need a personal relationship with them'. And, kind of kind of weird individualistic empiricism. I suppose I know Peter Obi and his supporters are very prominent on Twitter, and social media as well, and in the modern political era, that's one way in which people feel more connected with them. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:40:12] Yeah, yeah, there's definitely there's definitely questions to be asked there on whats (inaudible). 

Portia Roelofs [00:40:17] And Trump was the same I mean that's a completely different context. But he was seen as a wild card on Twitter and people seem to relate to that as well which helped with his popularity. And I think this really links the question of accessibility, to the question of populism. And so typically you're kind of in the academic literature, one of the, one of the kind of leading definitions of populism is that it's about an unmediated connection. And so when people say unmediated in that context, they normally mean like the typical institutions that would mediate political relationships at political party, then local level political party, then world level political party, those are stripped away. And there's often this idea of politicians speaking directly to the voter. And we did see that in specific cases in southwest Nigeria during the time that I'm looking at and they were often In response to this more technocratic angle that I kind of approach, I call the Lagos model, like major criticisms of the Lagos model were often articulated through politicians who conform to this model of an unmediated populist. So thinking of people like (inaudible) in Ekiti State, and there's even a kind of line from one of his promotional press releases in advance of an election campaign where he says, what is the most common prime number in all of Ekiti state, it's my number. I have my say. You can call at any time and I will pick it up myself, so I'll pick it up myself. You won't be picked up by some kind of secretary who'll kind of flip you off. And you can speak directly into the ear of the governor, which seems to be taking accessibility and then kind of amplifying it to pantomime proportions. And again, there are different conclusions you could take from that. So you could say, well, again, that shows a riskiness of accessibility is so liable to be manipulated. There seems to be a kind of affinity between populists and accessibility. Surely that means we need to steer it back into this kind of more technocratic, kind of elitist way of doing politics. And my conclusion is different, it's to say, you know, there are things that people want from their leaders and if they're not offered by the incumbent, it creates a vacuum into which people who can offer a much more exaggerated version of them can kind of capitalise on that sense of neglect. And so if you have very elitist, kind of technocratic managerial leaders who are seen as fully inaccessible, it lays the groundwork for an appetite kind of among the public for this hyper accessible form of leadership. And then in the final chapter, I elaborate how I think that can maybe be used to understand some of this kind of recent turn to populism in Western countries in the kind of 2015 switch that actually is largely prefigured in some of these debates that are playing out kind of five years earlier in Nigeria. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:43:26] One of the main empirical contributions to the book is that you trace out how this Lagos model was then reinterpreted or contested in the different states that you look at. Just quickly do you want to provide a summary of what you mean by the Lagos model?

Portia Roelofs [00:43:42] Yeah, sure. Yeah. And so the the story for that starts in 1999. Nigeria has just returned to democracy from an especially brutal dictatorship under Sani Abacha and Lagos in particular faces very, very high hopes that the return to democracy and, and this idea that might be a token democratic dividends to the people at large. And yes, it's also faced with huge kind of urban dysfunction. So it's got encroachment by the sea. It has got population growth. That's totally kind of, understood to be a complete threat to this kind of city. It's got traffic that means it takes hours to get anywhere. And it's also got real problem with insecurity. And so the governor Bola Tinubu, his name might be familiar because he we are in, you know, 2023, he gets elected as president of Nigeria. But at the time, he's the newly elected governor of Lagos, for a party that is in opposition to the party that's controlling the centre. So not only does he have to try and in some way manage this kind of urban dysfunction, but he can't do it by relying on the oil wealth that is channelled from the PDP at the centre to to its kind of supportive states are run by PDP governors. And so, around the early 2000s, Lagos has receipts of statutory allocations. So that kind of oil money delivered by the centre is very, very hit and miss. And so this challenge is maybe unremarkable. Sounds like you've got to juggle a lot of things at once. But Tinubu manages to put together a response to it that is hugely electorally successful and enables him and then other people from within his party to build a kind of political alternative that is able to kind of build state capacity. So he entirely changes the urban governance structure of Lagos, creates all these kind of city wide agencies. Is able to build up the inancial capacity of the state by establishing tax revenues far in excess of any of the other states are doing at the time. So Lagos in its internally generated revenue, at one point is making more than all of the other 35 states put together. And through this he's also building kind of a new political offering, which is that, you know, Lagos is a state that can deliver and we need certain things back from the citizenry. We need you to pay taxes. We need you to abide by these kind of transformations of urban space. So very aggressive urban renewal, for example. But you'll get the payoff, which is kind of visible development. And so this enables Tinubu to offer kind of electoral alternatives, which is not dependent on the central PDP in the centre or on oil revenues. And then he hands over the baton to Babatunde Fashola. And in 2011, he's in a position to kind of sponsor the spread of the Lagos model to surrounding states, in the South-West zone and does this very, very successfully. So in 2011, what was then the ACN wins at five out of the six states in this zone. All kind of Lagos model affiliated governors. And so as I said before, you got this longer idea of Yoruba progressivism. So it is not just that language is doing something and it looks like it's winning votes and they copy it. But there's also a kind of ideological thread that weaves together a certain vision of what governments should be largely built on the model of Obafemi Awolowo, often described as the greatest president Nigerian ever had, who founded the kind of originator political party of the kind of Yoruba progressives. So the action group in the 1950s. And is kind of present throughout up until the 1980s in kind of southwestern politics. So, yeah, the Lagos model, I'd say, is an ideologically coherent or inspired package of reforms and policies that is then replicated across southwestern states. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:48:06] Yeah, in the book you go on to each of the states that you talk about and you talk about how they contest it. I mean did you see that primarily being contested in electoral outcomes or were there other channels through which you saw people resist that approach? 

Portia Roelofs [00:48:19] Yeah. So first of all I always had a vague sense of insecurity around kind of critiquing the Lagos model, because for a lot of people, this is Nigeria's best bet. So Tinubu was seen as being kind of, he got his hand dirty. But his successor in Lagos, Babatunde Fashola, so many people you ask them who's your favourite politician in Nigeria? And they say Fashola. And he's kind of well regarded by many of the donors. He's seen as someone who can get something done in contexts where no one else can, like he's putting Nigeria on the road to development. And so I definitely had kind of misgivings about writing a whole book on the weaknesses of the Lagos model. When for many people, it's seen as a kind of solution and the future of Nigeria and some people have interpreted the book that way,they think it's some kind of 80,000 word advertisement for Bola Tinubu, which is not its intention. What was really so fascinating about the way that politics was happening in the South-West at this time, is that on the one hand, you had this transformative political project that was able to achieve things that seemed like no other governments in Nigeria could do. But on the other hand, you show up and you talk to people on the ground and they say, he's in Oyo State with Abiola Ajimobi. He's the most unpopular governor we've ever had. And so there did seem to be something missing from this more internationally accepted idea of good governance as technocracy is, as you know, delivering certain visions of development that lacked something in terms of kind of popular reception to it. And so through the book, I'd argue that it was unable to deliver on a certain idea of socially embedded good governance.  And so yeah, I'm looking at and I guess your question is kind of was that contested through elections? I think elections pose this moment of possible destabilisation of that otherwise very successful projects. So for for me the and and for the book as a whole, I zoom in especially on 2015, which is where in Oyo State, Abiola Ajimobi has had a four year term, has implemented a number of policies in terms of increasing internally generated revenue, kind of very brutal urban renewal programs, use of kind of public private partnerships. And then there's this test point where he comes up in a really competitive election in 2015 against a number of other viable candidates. And a lot of this, kind of this Lagos model is put to the test. And so that, I think, gives you the the kind of empirical moment to look at these kind of wider theoretical questions. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:51:08] Soobviously one of the main arguments the book is you want to incorporate a social dimension alongside material and episodic conventions of governance, you know, and that offers a useful framework for understanding how certain political problems in Nigeria and beyond can be understood. And it could even challenge some dominant Western ideas of governance. You know, there's been obviously a lot of discourse and efforts raised around decolonising university curriculums and research agendas as well. And that's been prominent for quite some time. Where do you see this work sitting within those avenues? Well, I mean, do you want to talk about bringing in sort of indigenous political ideas and traditionn? 

Portia Roelofs [00:51:46] Yeah. Sure. So the book as a whole was kind of inspired by the desire or is motivated by the desire to push back against the impression I got through kind of pursuing the study of African politics through various prestigious Western institutions and what are already very well established critiques from global South scholars or African scholars or Nigerian scholars, that the dominant approach of kind of Western political science to Africa is to say, well, there's this thing called democracy that we invented and maybe like the, you know, Treaty of Westphalia or the French Revolution or the British Social democratic state, whatever it is, we invented it. And how well did these guys match up? And mostly if you doa degree or course in African politics, it'll just be like a kind of ten week list of the ways that it doesn't match up. It's too ethnic, it's too violent, it's too patronage based. You know, they are tstimmied by the resource curse. And I guess the kind of point of the kind of major point of the kind of post-colonial critique of that is that, well, this major thing happened called colonialism. So the states that you were saying functioned excellently in all of these great democracies are in a very specific, historical and ongoing relationship with these states that you say are totally dysfunctional. And maybe rather than just having like kind of erendipitously different internal characteristics, maybe it's something about the relationship that facilitates, like a bonanza of social democracy in Europe and kind of immiseration in many, many African countries. And so that's the kind of literature that I'm kind of broadly building on. And then there's also, I was really inspired by a lot of the scholars who were critiquing structural adjustment in particular. And so structural adjustment, it's hard to kind of underplay. It's hard to really capture like what a massive effect structural adjustment had or sought to have on these countries. So like there's, you know, there's work by people like Nicholas (inaudible) saying, well, Zambia promised to cut half of its public servants and it didn't. Naughty Zambia. But under what other situation would countries be making these sort of kind of huge scale promises? And maybe im misrepresenting Nicholas (inaudible). Well who knows? But yeah. So that's again a broad, as I think of people like Yusuf Bangura and (inaudible), a lot of work coming out of (inaudible) as I said before. So there's this whole generation of scholars who are critiquing structural adjustment and also living it. So I think another kind of element of the kind of decolonial critique is to say, let's look at the infrastructures of knowledge production as well. And so I think if you were to read a lot of I guess, when I was kind of doing my master's in like 2012, to read the reading this, it would look like there are no scholars, no universities in Africa. And again, yeah, there are huge issues around funding and their structures and their dependence. And, you know, (inaudible) writes about this incredibly well about the dependence, even within knowledge production, let alone the rest of kind of the world of governance of African universities on donors and kind of the international system. But I guess just trying to kind of draw from that body of work, which is sometimes, I guess, underplayed a little bit in terms of what you get sitting in a Western university. Of thinking like that  there are many things that you can learn ffrom African political experience, in the sense that you can learn things from any political experience and that, there are insights you can get from studying Western democracy and looking at how it kind of operates in all of its different forms. But you can kind of go anywhere. And and if you've got an open mind, you can expect to kind of learn new stuff. No one has a monopoly on how to do democracy. So I guess that's a kind of background. And, one phrase I always had in mind was, from (inaudible) as well says the challenge is how to study politics in Africa and places you're not personally kind of from or familiar with, in a way that neither exoticizes or banalises it and neither reduce it down to, oh, everywhere is essentially the same. Everyone is driven by the same underlying kind of mechanical operations. But also not to say, oh, well, it's you know, Heart of Darkness, it's just totally beyond the scope that we could understand. So, yeah, I guess the book is my kind of contribution to this ongoing literature saying, well, this is this is what it might look like to kind of immerse yourself in the political thought and practice of one particular place and then, kind of see what you can draw out of that, but it is only kind of one version of that. And I try to kind of emphasise in the book that, I'm not capturing the Nigerian approach to good governance. I'm not capturing the Yoruba approach. Even within Ibadan politics there are longstanding and deeply conflicting approaches to how you should do this. But kind of yeah, I guess looking at this is a source of of material for theorising in a place where theorising is already ongoing and that's a conversation that you can kind of tap into and kind of learn from. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:57:29] Yeah, kind of a springboard from which you could take this approach of applying indigenous political tradition to your context. 

Portia Roelofs [00:57:38] Yeah. So I actually I don't think I use the word indigenous at all in that whole book. I have, I think, I think it functions in a certain way, like I guess all terminology any point in time has a certain sort of location within debates andthings it carries with it. And I think at the moment, often this is used to mean something like ways of being or thinking or living that are alternative to or pre-exist or kind of predate colonial ways of operating or kind of like capitalist modernity or however you want to conceive of it. And that's not what I feel like I'm capturing in this work. I think the people I'm studying are deeply engaged with and see themselves often as kind of like agents of modernity. And that's both if you look at the kind of like early 20th century in places like Ibadan and that kind of incorporation of new political classes into the state and into the bureaucracy and what people understood themselves as doing in that space, and then also in the kind of, the Lagos model, like they're not saying, oh, we're going to retreat from the glories of neoliberal growth and development like that comes in many forms of its leading figures are drawn from international oil companies. You know, like you go on their LinkedIn and thei Linkedin are saying Kennedy School MBA training programs same as everyone else. Like they see themselves as like at the vanguard or the frontier of a certain form of kind of internationalised, like, yet neoliberal modernity, I guess. And in the book, I explore this a little bit through the word exposure. And what is it, that if exposure is a good thing and exposure means like spending time in other climes or other places. Like, what are the kind of, how should we understand that? So for me, I wouldn't locate this as being a work of kind of indigenous political thought, even though great work is being done on that, it's not a word that I myself would use to describe this particular rendering of kind of one slice of Nigerian political practice. 

Anna Thurlbeck [00:59:53] Well, thank you so much for speaking with me today, it was really interesting and I hope everyone else finds it as interesting as I did it. 

Portia Roelofs [00:59:59] Thanks so much for having me. It's been a great conversation.