Thread by @whowhywherewhen

Bola Tinubu has just been declared Nigeria's President-elect. Here's my pick of academic readings for understanding who he is and what his record as former Governor of Lagos State might mean for Africa's biggest democracy:
[thread]

#NigerianElections #NigeriaDecides2023

Tinubu ran on his record of 'transforming' Lagos whilst he was governor from 1999-2007. This agenda was continued by his protegé, Babatunde Fashola, who took over from 2007-2011.

Michael O. Filani describes this in his @CitiesAlliance report from 2012:
citiesalliance.org/sites/default/…

Crucially, the literature on the 'Lagos Model' raises three key contradictions.

i) The tension between reformist, often technocratic policy making, and the use of state power to build new business and patronage networks.
hal-sciencespo.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-03473785v1…

I say tension, but really these were mutually supporting: savvy/shady political maneuvering created the conditions for pockets of donor-friendly technocratic governance, and vice versa.

See also: academic.oup.com/oxrep/article-… [paywalled]

In my work I try to unpick this corruption vs. good governance binary. Indeed, a lot of Nigerian politics involves contestation between people with rival definitions of what good governance should look like:
cambridge.org/core/journals/…

OA preprint here: eprints.lse.ac.uk/100250/1/Roelo…

Here I think about what this means for ambivalent public perceptions of Tinubu, in terms of transparency and (mis)trust: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…

@ndukaorjinmo 's profile of Tinubu sets out these issues well: bbc.co.uk/news/world-afr…

ii) The second tension is around inequality. Tinubu's crowning - and oft-repeated - achievement is the expansion of the tax base and thus internally generated revenue in Lagos. This is key to reducing reliance on oil revenues + improved public services.
carnegieendowment.org/files/Brief-de…

Yet, the improvements in state capacity enabled Lagos to pursue what many see as an exclusive and exclusionary vision of the mega-city and urban development.
See @DanielAgbiboa's 2022 They eat our sweat
books.google.co.uk/books?id=qnhXE…

iii) The third tension is around the role of political ideology and regional politics.

Wale Adebanwi's 2014 "Yoruba Elites and Ethnic Politics in Nigeria" gives insights into the politics of Tinubu's home region, the southwest, since independence.

Link:books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q6BcA…

The origins of the ruling APC can only be understood in the context Yoruba Progressivism and the sense of a shared political project in Lagos and neighbouring states, which seeks to 'follow in the footsteps' of Obafemi Awolowo.

For example, these ideas shaped the implementation of urban renewal policies in Ibadan in the southwest.
academic.oup.com/afraf/article/…

Contrary to conventional wisdom, as @SaeeduH shows, ideas and ideology do play a role in Nigerian politics.
ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.d…

That said, Adebanwi's book makes the point that Tinubu's position within the Yoruba progressive project is complicated. He's a pragmatist and his most decisive alliances have been w/ figures outside of the southwest (i.e. forming the APC with Buhari and the northern CPC in 2013).

What all this means for the next four years is unclear. A caveat is that most of this literature speaks to a specific moment in Nigeria's democratic history and stops around 2015. Would be great to hear from anyone doing more recent research that sheds light on the Buhari/APC era

Sorry - typo - Fashola was of course Governor for two terms 2007-2015.