Representation without Taxation: An Essay on Democracy in Rural Nigeria, 1952-1990

The theme of democratization in Africa is being raised more urgently now than at any time since independence. The nature of new political activity and the terms of new political debate, however, are bound to reflect the widely differing configuration of conditions in those two periods, a generation apart. A main thrust of recent literature implies that, whereas the anti-colonial struggles united “the people,” the organizations of “civil society,” and the leadership under a banner of freedom, these same segments of the body politic are now in “a precarious balance” with one another (Rothchild and Chazan 1988), either because social dynamics have penetrated the state (Joseph 1987), because they escape the state's control altogether, and/or because there is active antagonism between social classes (Graf 1988), the rulers and the ruled. My argument here is not that any of these observations is mistaken. Rather I want to draw attention to an institutional element of the current dynamic that appears extremely rarely in the current analyses but whose relative absence from both the social processes and the intellectual debates forms, when seen from a comparative perspective, the negative space that alone makes these other dynamics intelligible, namely public revenue. Completely contrary to the historical sequence in Europe, and even differing quite profoundly from the processes in place at the time of independence, the present African leadership has to seek consent first and enforce taxation afterwards. The history, social dynamics and implications of this conjuncture in rural Nigeria are the subject of this article.