 Well, good evening everyone and welcome to CSIS here in Washington. I'm Jennifer Cook, I'm director of the Africa program here and just want to welcome you all on a Monday night. I'm here today with Carl LeVan. Carl is assistant professor with American University School of International Service. He's a professor of comparative politics with a focus on African politics and political theory. Carl has been a very good friend to CSIS over the years, particularly with his insights on Nigeria. And I have to say, and this year is no exception, it's very easy when you're talking about Nigeria to kind of get pinballed around from development to development and personality to personality. And one thing I've always really appreciated about Carl is kind of the ability to step back a little bit from that. Look at some of the deeper patterns that are playing out and driving those political developments and those political personalities. So I'm delighted that he's written this book about how public policy is made in Nigeria. I said, if you can answer that, you can make a million and retire right there. But maybe this book raises some of those questions. Carl has a fairly long experience in Nigeria, going back to 2000. He was NDI's first director of the legislative training affairs program. He had a Fulbright at the University of Babadan, and prior to that he had about a decade working in the U.S. public policymaking arena, working for John Conyers. Today we're going to be talking about his new book, Dictators in Democracy and African Development, The Political Economy of Good Governance in Nigeria. And Carl's going to open up a little bit with some of the big themes of the book. And then we'd really like this to be an informal interactive discussion. We're heading right now into what could be a really contentious moment in Nigeria's political trajectory. I think all of us are looking to these elections and the possibility of real political upheaval. Carl is looking again, stepping back a little bit, and looking at kind of what has accounted for Nigeria's governance patterns, whether for good or bad in public policy arenas. And I think he talks a little bit about, rather than we generally attribute it to whether poor state capacity, or it's such a diverse country, it's impossible to govern many other theories. I think Carl is looking a little beyond that to what drives these. So Carl, I want to turn to you, 15 minutes or so, as you wish. And then we're going to open up for questions. And I'll warn you, they may come from all over. As I say, everyone's looking at February right now, but you're very able to answer them all. So why don't we turn to you now? Okay, great. And thanks so much for the invitation to CSAS. It's great to be back here. And it's my school outside of school, so I come here as often as I can and supplement my education. So Nigeria is disproportionately represented perhaps in a lot of the literature on Africa. It has produced a lot of scholarship over the years and a lot of really good scholarship. And so following my introductions to the country, as you pointed out, and so clearly I'm perhaps less young than I look if I've done all those things. And what I wanted to do in this book was to get past the idea of political analysis as history and to get past history as simply a summary of events. And so there are a number of ways that African scholars have tried to do that over the years. And so one common explanation that emerges for government performance, which is the overall thing that I'm trying to explain in the book, has to do with resources and oil in particular. So the paradox of plenty and the idea that if you have a lot, that this can create reckless spending and be a pathway to corruption. And Adam Jaworski and a number of scholars have flipped that around and also said, well, sometimes states don't perform well when states are poor. So that sounds like bad news for Africa, for countries that have resources because either you're too rich or you're too poor to succeed. So that's confounding. Another common explanation just simply looks at regime type. Is it a democracy? Is it a dictatorship? Is it somewhere in between? And I think that there's a lot of reasons why democracy is better for people, but I think that democracy by itself as that second possible explanation really is an incomplete explanation for what explains variation performance. Under some circumstances, dictators do have incentives to provide public goods to the people. And one thing that I think many scholars agree on is that they do this under circumstances where they believe they have a long time horizon. That is that they can look into the future and they feel relatively secure in office. And that seems to be a situation where dictators are perhaps willing to provide public goods and good policy performance. And I'm going to talk in a few minutes about what I mean by policy performance. Another very common explanation, especially in Nigeria, has to do with ethnicity. And so there are some important cross-national studies that, for example, look at the overall level of ethnic diversity in a country and economic performance and economic growth per capita or other metrics. And in that cross-national research, the inferential assumption is that if there's a lot of diversity, then people have difficulty disagreeing on good national policies or that they are too focused on serving their own narrow groups' interests. So something like Kenya, perhaps, under Moai. And so that makes a lot of sense and that has certainly been part of Nigeria's story. But I wanted to look at ethnicity in one country over time and to try to think about it in the way that it shapes political bargaining at the center. So I'm really only looking at politics at the national level and at policy performance at the national level. And so to look at how ethnicity informs that policymaking at the national level and to not go into those details that other scholars of Nigeria have done very effectively, which is who gets what? That's not actually a question that I attempt to answer directly in the book. Another favorite explanation, I think, in research on Africa and especially in Nigeria, is the idea of leadership. And this is because Nigeria's late, great novelist Chinua Achebe began one of his short classic books by saying the trouble with Nigeria is squarely a problem of leadership. And so I talk about that a little bit in the introduction. I talk about all of these ideas. And one of the things that I point out is that a younger generation, a slightly younger generation of scholars like Egosa Osage look at leadership in the way Nigerians, his compatriots think of leadership and he says this is a little bit of a hangover from the nationalist era and that there's something going on here where we're allowing authority to be legitimated based on charisma. And he says the dangerous thing about this is then we're just trusting in fate. We're trusting in fate that we've chosen a leader of virtue and you're in sort of a Platonic philosopher-king type situation where you're just hoping that you've got someone of noble virtue. And so what's interesting about that is I think the critique of that perspective has also come into the mainstream discussion outside of the Ivory Tower. And so this is very much what Ellen Sirleaf Johnson said when she wrote four years ago in a book that Center for Global Development Down the Street published where she said, you know, what's more important than institutions, what's more important than leaders is how leaders are chosen and this is how we get into institutions. And of course Barack Obama when he was in Ghana a few years ago said much the same thing that, you know, Africa needs strong men, strong institutions. So I really wanted to say, I wanted to grapple with those conventional explanations, the conventional ways that we think about Africa and also to throw in a fifth one which is also really a classic in the research which is debt and Nigeria through the course of my research over the years turned into a really interesting case on the question of debt because in 2006 President Obasanjo of course paid off and renegotiated virtually all of the country's foreign debt. So you really have, you know, five potential explanations that I think are characteristic of the conventional wisdom, if you will. And so I wanted to think about what's another way, if we're not simply looking at the level of wealth, if we're not simply looking at the level of ethnic diversity, if we're not simply looking at democracy or dictatorship, what's another way of structuring the policy process? What's another way of thinking about where political leverage is located? And this is an important question I think because this helps us get past being stuck in simply talking about elections. It helps us get past the issue du jour. I mean I remember when I was working in Nigeria in the National Assembly in 2000 it seemed like every month or two someone was getting impeached. And so everybody was on edge but at first we took all of the threats quite seriously and then I think we started to realize that the threats were really just threats as people were trying to figure out how to be believable and how to get the other interests and the other institutions to bend and to compromise. So that's what I'm trying to get past and what I'm trying to do a little bit differently. And so we can talk about what I try to do I suppose. Well if it's none of those things... Right, so this is where if I guess if we were on crossfire you'd be setting me up to say that ethnicity doesn't matter which is of course not what I'm saying. So what I turn to is an idea from political science and an idea from comparative politics. I'm a political scientist and I look at the idea of veto players. And so veto players is an idea that builds on James Madison's classic insights about the separation of powers and about the aggregation of interests into those separate institutional manifestations. And so one of the reasons why we say veto players and not just vetoes is to get past the idea that vetoes are simply grounded in presidential systems and that they're simply grounded in the American political history and in fact the scholar who made this popular isn't American at all. And so what I mean by this is an individual, an institutional or a collective policy actor that has the ability to prevent a policy change. So one way to think about this is simply a center of power that I'm trying to look at what are the centers of power at any given moment that policy is being made. Sometimes those centers of power are very much centered within the government and sometimes they are centered outside the government. If there's a coordinated, expansive enough collective effort that can really advocate a coherent demand on the government and perhaps have some allies within the government, then I end up counting that as a veto player. And I'm very explicit about the kind of criteria that I lay out. So, you know, an example of this, a good example of this, I think, is what I describe as the June 12th movement after 1993. So dictated Bob and Gita steps aside in August 1993 and Abacha comes in. And very few Nigerians I think these days have any affectionate memories for Abacha's government. But one of the things that veto players as a comparative concept has argued and taught us is that to understand dictatorships we have to understand more than the dictator. We have to understand political economy. We have to understand different interests and interest groups that don't simply go away. And that's what I think happened after August 1993 in Nigeria. So Abacha comes in and I argue that it took him a few years, about two and a half, maybe three years, before he could really center power around himself and an inner click. That doesn't mean that it wasn't difficult and brutal to start with or that he didn't have ambitions to stay in power. But what it means is that there was a movement of June 12th sympathizers, people who wanted to honor the 1993 presidential election outside government and also inside government. And so I try to tell those stories and I identify both formal institutions as we would in democracy as veto players and also those kinds of informal institutions as veto players. And so again, just to repeat, I want you to think about these as centers of power within the government and across state society divides. And so by looking at these centers of power and when they expand and when they contract over time within the Nigeria policymaking space, I argue that this has a pattern of effects on two different categories of public policy. So maybe I should pause there in case something needs clarification. I'm following. You're already going to tell us the two areas of public policy. So two areas of public policy. So I look at national collective goods and local collective goods. And so for national collective goods, what I mean by this are public policies where it's very difficult to deny someone from enjoying them. And that becomes very important in economy and in political economy research because what that means is that if people aren't compelled to pay for them or to provide for those goods, those public goods, then they're under provided. So my favorite example of this might be the vaccine for Ebola right now but we can talk about that perhaps during Q&A. Infrastructure. Typically we're talking about education, health systems, things like that. So I use four variables, common variables from the political development to the economics literature to measure national level collective goods. So again, only looking at government performance, public policy performance at the national aggregate level. So I look at budget surpluses or deficits. So that's one variable. I look at inflation. And Nigeria's inflation is just all over the place over half a century. It's really something else. And then I also look at classroom size. And that took me a couple of months to pull together because at the time I started doing research, very little of that information was even online. Some of it, more of it is online, but I spent plenty of days and weeks in dusty archives in Abad and in Abuja and elsewhere, Lagos. And then the fourth variable is a really neat one. And I look at the clearance rate for property rights cases in the courts. So I was able to hire a law student who over four or five months gathered information on 550 property rights cases. And so we're able to look at over a period of about 35 years or so of the rate at which property rights cases are resolved. And the reason why this is a national level collective good is because there's a vast body of research that says that you have to have secure property rights to have economic development. So a visual for this is slums when you're driving into Abuja. And I've done research recently in some of those slums. And the reason why many of those slums are slums is not because people are necessarily poor, it's because their rights to those property don't exist or they're not protected. So in order for people to have an incentive to make their life better, to make their home better, to make their business more productive and so forth, they need secure property rights. So I take those four measures of national collective goods and if these variables don't actually measure the concept, the thing that I'm claiming that they measure, then we would expect them to perform differently. That once I run the statistical tests and I do, is that they would perform differently. But across all four variables, they perform very, very similarly. So I spared you the PowerPoint presentation tonight. So that's just the national collective goods and then the other is the local collective goods. And so again, the difference between these two categories of public policy is how they are consumed. And so with local collective goods, you are thinking about public policies that can be targeted, either to a constituency or to an economic sector or the easiest way to understand it would be to a particular area. So you build a school, but you decide to build a school here instead of here. You build it in Quarta State instead of in Kaduna. And so that opens up the possibility that those goods can be targeted on a political logic rather than on a needs-based logic. So again, this gets a little bit tricky because since I'm only looking at the aggregate level and at the national level, I don't break down who gets what for the most part. I do have some pretty detailed qualitative stories and I did pretty extensive field research to document some of that. But essentially what that means is that if spending really goes up, if capital spending, if recurrent spending, i.e. spending on salaries, if it really goes up, if it spikes, then something is amiss. And so I infer from that that that is patronage, either in ghost employees in the case of recurrent expenditures or in incomplete capital projects, which are famous in Abuja. Everybody knows about mobilization fees where something is mobilized but never completed. So anyway, I take the causal story that veto players, my causal variable, sets up and I run statistical tests against these two different categories of public policy. And what I find is that what's good for one category of policy is less good for the other category of public policy. And so this I characterize as a dilemma and it's a dilemma because obviously a good government and a good public policy performance needs both. You need to build stuff, you need to pay people on the local collective good side, but you also need relatively low inflation. You want fiscal budgetary discipline. You want courts that are resolving cases as quickly as they are receiving them and you want classroom sizes that are manageable for teachers. So I suggest that this is a dilemma and that Nigeria is not alone in confronting this difficult dilemma about again the expansion and contraction of the policy process and how it affects these two different categories of outputs. Okay, well we're on the hook now. For what you talked about the role of veto players within that. So what is their specific role in terms of policies focused on collective public goods versus localized goods and kind of what accounts for the difference and why are they two opposing forces let's say. Maybe some concrete examples of how that plays out in education. Sure, sure. So the Gowan regime was a puzzle in a way. I talked a little bit about the early years of the Abacha regime and the Gowan regime is a tricky one to get around, but I was fortunate to interview him for quite a while for this book and he was extremely helpful as were some of his officers and some of the other former military state administrators. So in the Gowan regime he had a ruler who had to get the country through a very difficult civil war and once they came out of the civil war they soon thereafter entered into an oil boom. And so Gowan very explicitly knew, he was a very young man when he came to office. I often joke with my students that you look at the pictures of the military coups from the 60s and 70s and you will immediately feel unambitious. And so he did what a lot of Latin America rulers did in the 1970s which is they turned to technocrats and they knew that because these rulers knew that they didn't have the training to actually make policy and implement policy and evaluate policy. And so something very interesting happened with Gowan which is those technocrats became very powerful and they became known in the Nigerian historical literature as super permanent secretaries because they weren't just implementing policy, they were making policy and that's not the way it's supposed to work and that's not quite what our colloquial vision for a dictatorship is. So they acquired a great deal of power and they were operating within his collective institution, the Supreme Military Council and also within the Supreme Military Council and this is the only dictatorship in Nigeria's numerous dictatorships that has sat the governors and the governors in the 1970s as that oil money really started picking up and really became hugely, hugely important in the economy. The governors, the military administrators got more and more corrupt and more and more unpopular and interestingly, Yakuubu Gowan couldn't get rid of them. There were numerous instances where he tried to do that and so I tried to tell some of those stories and so I say, you know, on the one hand we have this military dictator on the other hand we have this collective ruling body and they bargain with each other and they argue with each other and they can't quite always come to agreement and so that kind of regime operates differently than say Obasanjo's first term from 1989 to 2003 where you have a larger policy space so again I use this characterization of expansion and contraction and if Gowan's regime is inclusive but within a fairly narrow range of institutions in the Obasanjo government in the first couple of years you have policy dispersed across these institutions and a lot of bickering and so that ends up reflecting in the kinds of public policies that you get. Does that help? I think so. How did it play out then in terms of policy outcomes and how is it different from how things say today? I mean, how would you characterize Obasanjo and post Obasanjo, for example? So you're saying that the governors were the veto players? Within the Supreme Military Council that his inability to reign in these governors that he didn't like and that everybody knew were problems is evidence of the limits of his authority. And isn't that true for any federal leader in Nigeria also? One would hope or one would expect to see that and so this is important because I think we have very notable slippage. I know we have a number of guests from the State Department here and plenty of expertise in the room where there's no shortage of examples where we have rulers that are backsliding on democracy and still a few quite sincere autocrats in Africa and so while I'm also telling this public policy story I'm also trying to experiment with new ways of thinking about what restrains that guy at the center. Where do those interests come from? How are they sustained? What raises the costs for that ruler to act arbitrarily? So when the policy space is more constrained the advantage is that the interests that are negotiating with each other the coordination of veto players is easier that there's fewer people around the table arguing effectively and that statistically I show that this ends up being better generally for the national public goods but worse for the local public goods. That's actually where you get more patronage, more pork more of that stuff that schools being built, hospitals being built roads being built or not being built at all but the money is out there. And so on the one hand you can have easy coordination with a narrow policy process or you can have a broader policy process that enhances accountability and that was slightly different from what I expected to find but I come back to James Madison in the book's conclusion because I think that a core insight of Madisonian thinking has to do with accountability and has to do with not just accountability but institutions being responsible to the people. I think that Madison's image has been a little bit I don't want to say hijacked but it's been glossed over a little bit too much in that he did have a genuine respect for authority being grounded in the people and that's what I think has been happening in Nigeria for the last 10 or 15 years is that there have been these great political struggles but there are also struggles over institutions and there are struggles over institutions as people have tried to value them and to use them as tools for letting their voice be heard. Well that's kind of interesting because I mean as we head into elections and did you have a question? Just one of the complaints about Nigeria is that there is often no electoral accountability or it's certainly not based on performance and so the veto power may lie with governors or it may lie with godfathers or it may lie with people with deep pockets but the last place it resides is with the people and I wonder do you think that's changing or are there institutions within Nigeria, within the government that can play that role of countervailing power and veto power have they played that, a legislature, a judiciary or genuinely national institutions? Yeah that's a really great question and that is the million dollar question I think for Nigeria over the next year or two and one of the people who I interviewed for the book is Emeka Hidiyoha who's the deputy speaker of the House of Representatives and in June of 2000 the Senate President and President Obisando were in a bitter fight over the Niger Delta commission bill and in a very heated incident the President surrounded the Senate President's house with tanks and armored vehicles and Hidiyoha at that point was a staff person for the Senate President and now he's the deputy speaker and I asked him about that incident and I said looking back what does that mean to you now and this is where I'm getting to your question coming around to your question and he said the President still tries to do stuff like that but now he's met with civilized resistance the phrase that he uses is civilized resistance and that to me was his own translation what I was hearing in my political science hat of veto authority and so as imperfect as democracy might be we also need to just think about bargaining over policy and where those centers of power are located now looking outside the government and beyond the government looking to people and to citizens and to civil society there are a few key incidents I think in the last ten years where that's really mattered and where we've seen popular pressures inform the government one was the 2006 outcry against President Obasanjo changing the constitution to stay in office a second was in 2010 when Yardua disappeared from public view for five and a half months a rather extraordinary moment prolonged moment certainly the strike on the fuel subsidy in early 2012 and then most recently with bring back our girls movement so what you have there is four incidents where there was grassroots pressure there was some interaction with formal institutions and so what I think there is still some struggle about is exactly what the civil society disposition should be with the government and that's obviously something that Nigerians will resolve on their own and that Nigerian civil society will resolve on their own but it's very interesting I just got back from the African Studies Association sorry I missed your panel I think we were running in opposite directions but there was a great conversation there about the state of research in African political parties and one of the Cambridge University Press my publisher has published five books in the last two years on African political parties so after you buy my book please buy one of these books and they had all five authors on the panel and they said so what should we do what sort of actionable ideas should be taken away from this one of the things they said was that it's more important to support the organizations and the interests and the interest groups around political parties right now than to support political parties themselves but if you want internal democracy if you want parties that are actually responsive to people if you want parties that have decent primaries then support the chambers of commerce support the human rights organizations support the unions that are trying to get their voices heard within that party platform and so that's obviously an ongoing struggle and I think there's been a long period of reorientation for a lot of the human rights community in Nigeria after the years of the dictatorship wound down so we'll see I'm going to open it up for questions it does strike me that those four or was it four or five examples that you cited I mean the pushback by the legislature and public opinion on the third term and the party extension was a real example of institutions working and national public will working through the institutions the fuel subsidy removal which was at the same time as the Wall Street Occupy Nigeria movement and the investigations were actually launched I don't know that anyone they were ever followed through but there was a series of big movement and the retraction or the reintroduction of half the subsidy so kind of a compromise there to bring back your girls issue and so forth problem with some of those is that they weren't sustained they were kind of moments of crises and I guess in terms of policy implication for Nigerian people and for partners of Nigeria how is it that you begin to sustain those platforms over time I know there have been countless efforts to kind of mobilize a national constituency around corruption and how to organize that to have any kind of effect these elections I know civil society is very much trying to and others are very much trying to build kind of a platform of kind of consensus and common ground and violence mitigation and Nigeria is too important for violence in the aftermath and so forth but the challenge is how do you those are very promising moments in a way that I don't know if they come faster and faster as each movement like that emboldens the next one and kind of the power of the street you know people begin to discover that actually occupying Nigeria can have an impact and so forth and they were all different in small but important ways I mean one of the things that I think was interesting about the 2010 protests against the invisible presidency as it was known that it was the same Nigeria group and other organizations that were involved were overwhelmingly indigenous I mean these were really local growths within Nigerian civil society but the other interesting thing is that the demands were pretty clear and straightforward fire the electoral commissioner give us electoral reform swear in the vice president so that this country has president and the cabinet should do its job in making that happen but those are good short term demands and they didn't speak to sort of the longer term demands so after they effectively won there wasn't any question of what's next you know people forget in the United States that the move on organization started with Bill Clinton's impeachment nobody even remembers that now and so sometimes you have organizations that are really able to translate the one issue where they first get attention, get momentum into something more sustained and I'll leave it to the sociologists and the experts on social movements to maybe and technology to maybe answer that don't let anybody over 30 do your website Deirdre Hi, Deirdre Lupin I just wanted to inject a comment about these sort of burst flashes in the pan as you've described them they actually are carrying on all of them I mean all of these movements are still very much alive in Nigeria from the experiences that I've had over the last few years for example the 2010 the Yardua disappearance I mean the issue of the north getting its rotation as a presidency is still very much alive and that was fundamental to that the strike over the fuel subsidy and the Occupy Nigeria movement it is very much alive among the youth there are youth meetings all over the country all the time discussing that issue and to bring back our girls is an ongoing event so I really do think that these actually do continue as an undercurrent Thanks Richard America Georgetown Business School you're concerned about corruption there's a group of economists at the Ando State University and at the University of Abaddon who created the West African Society on Business Ethics and I'm on their board of trustees we're setting up business ethics programs all over ECOWAS at business schools about 50 ultimately and we're hoping that the World Bank USAID major corporations will sponsor these we believe that the long term or part of the solution long term is to change management culture through education including in the public sector at all levels senior and middle levels as well as people studying for degrees so that's a concrete project that will last for the next 40 years and so we hope but that's maybe another thought is kind of the growing cadre of private sector players who have come to their wealth fairly independent of the state and patronage networks and so forth do they become does that business sector become a much more powerful kind of veto power going forward you can imagine a whole lot of kind of new pockets of centers of power as you call it that get us beyond kind of the godfathers and the old style and then we'll answer that and we'll come back to that I will also expect the conversation about corruption to be very different with oil at $60 a barrel than at $110 a barrel because what that's going to do is it's going to create a conversation about scarcity and when you have scarcity of financial resources scarcity of money then people politicians are much more careful about what how many people they can pay off and what they're able to spend money on and citizens are going to be in a position to demand more as well but I wanted to tie back to Richard Lepin's point as well and you know I think I think that's absolutely right about you know these movements sustaining themselves and reinventing themselves and so forth you know one of the groups that I think is doing really interesting work right now is the doing democracy movement and on the US side Act for Accountability has popped up and one of the things that they're talking about right now to sort of create a solidarity with the anti-corruption work going on in Ando and at University of Abad and places like that is you know let's get the Ministry of Finance back to publishing the revenue transfers to the states which they used to do and sometimes they do it but just get it up on the web and yeah so so I mean I think it's a matter of simplifying things so that you can bring new people in sustaining it and also that the issues become coalition building tools I mean in other work that I've done on NYCERIA you know one of the things that I found was a really important transformation point for civil society organizations when they built alliances when the common denominator around the issues that they worked on shifted so that they built alliances and this is in fact what's happening in the housing rights movement in Nigeria right now in the slums is that organizations that were working simply on providing water into Lugbe or into Chike or the slums in the FCT you know suddenly become much more interested in titling and so they're working with lawyers all of a sudden because there's lots and lots of people who need help in that regard so a few narrow responses and hopefully a broader one Howard Jeter I was a former US ambassador to Nigeria and one of the things that I think that your paradigm is one way of looking in Nigeria the other paradigm would be up until very recently a political economy that's been predominantly dominated by the military and the real politics of the country took place within that military one can argue one of the things that President Obosajo did that doesn't get a lot of attention but he purged the military particularly at the level of colonels because these were the people who formed their own center of power and who could carry out coups and he eliminated that and I'm interested I will be interested in seeing whether your analysis in your book deals with the governor's forum which has emerged as a as a real you talk about the ardua and the succession and all of that it was the governor's forum that played a large large role in that and as a collective governors in their own right very powerful but as a collective that power is magnified so you have these new centers of power that are emerging all the time why don't you go to that and then we'll oh yes here and then there we'll take two Hi I'm Barbara Simmons I'm Dean of International Education at William V.S. Tubman University in Liberia and one of the things that we work towards is students who what we call a self-transcendant because we're looking at the leadership we had had the ambassador from South Africa to talk about Nelson Mandela as a transcendent leader are we being Polly Anish to think that by producing students I mean is that too far in the future to really address the issue of dictatorships now? Hi thanks for a great talk Belinda O'Donnell University of Oxford I'd like to ask you what were some of the other things for you researching this book that were really counterintuitive I think for me studying Nigerian politics as somebody that hasn't been in the game for that long I admit go on and he is now 80 and has a global health focus so I'm sure there was a lot of things in this book that are pretty counterintuitive of the military you kind of dismissed leadership at the beginning so maybe as a factor so maybe you could talk a little bit about that because it's still important and then this question of Yeah, Basantra's handling of the military during your term as ambassador and in those initial years was really important and it's not something that I think subsequent presidents could handle quite as well. One person who has also written about that in interesting ways because he actually documented who went into the private sector once they retired in 1999 at the transition and there's also a fair amount written about the PDP the ruling party during those early years and the disproportionate share of military officers on the board and part of that was to smooth over the transition but I think part of it also was just they weren't quite sure where to go and so fortunately what you have now in the country I think a much richer set of opportunities in public life and in the private sector where people can go and be active and be visible and be intellectually stimulated in all of these things. Again if the economy starts contracting those opportunities will become more limited. The Nigerian governor's form is also a really important part of the story because one of the things that I argue in the book and that forms the basis for an essay I just finished is the bargain of course between the north and the south which is 100 years old this year and the basis but it's awkward identity as a country that is the British brought the northern protectorate and the southern protectorate together 100 years ago and so if one of those units feels like the other unit is violating that bargain then it's not just a question of presidential elections it's a question of deeper historical politics and cultural antipathy and the governor's forms and the various governor's organizations become I believe tools for coordinating those interests across the states and across the zones and across the sociocultural units in the country. So there's one or two incidents for example in the core historical chapter where I say this might have happened around 2002 when there was a fight over but it didn't happen in the way that I talk about veto players because the geographical presence of this the geographical spread of this interest wasn't broad enough and sustained enough to meet that need. I also leave some of that to future research and there have been great waves of research from scholars in Africa on comparative federalism and I think that that's one of the next directions is when are states able to come together and when do they fail to come together when they need to speak to the federal government. So the question of leadership yes you know I'm fairly careful about this I think and and James Madison is careful about this too so let me say a couple of things about how I deal with this one is that so Echebe in this book has this great quote that everybody quotes the problem is a problem of leadership then he also has this passage later on where he talks about corruption and he says corruption will cease to exist in Nigeria when corruption becomes inconvenient so let's make corruption inconvenient and how do you do that and that I think we learn from and from others who are anti-corruption officials that you need more than a person having said that from one educator to another you know what James Madison says everyone in college learns this great quote where he says if men were angels no government would be necessary right what they don't teach you in college is this quote at the Virginia convention in 1788 where he says is there no virtue among us if not then we are a wretched lot indeed so there is no extreme position having said that you know I think that the and I have to be very careful because some of my students are in the audience you know I think teaching is capacity for self-judgment I think you want to teach autonomy you want to teach self-sufficiency you want to teach the tools of good citizenship I mean this is what John Dewey tried to instill on the American education system 100 years ago we're still trying to figure that out and I think that that's more than just teaching virtue I think teaching judgment teaching critical thinking skills and all of these things is I think that's hard and I think that I think that's really the way I see the direction to go in the classroom so the last question surprise counterintuitive developments in the course of the book hmm well first of all I never thought it was going to take me this long I mean that's the first counterintuitive thing is that I I presented my findings as if in my discussions just now as if everything came out as I expected and my findings on the local collective goods were actually the opposite of what my hypothesis predicted and that's why I told an accountability story that's how I came to the accountability story that if you've got this many veto players who are arguing with each other and they can't keep inflation down that also means they're checking each other that also means they're watching who's getting what and so that's the accountability story and sort of the big theoretical frames I mean that's certainly the part that I completely didn't expect to find I mean the other thing that I would say is that it has been an extraordinary journey to come back to people again and again and again so if you're at the early stages of a long dissertation journey hopefully it won't be as long as mine and keep thanking those people and being good to the people who open their homes to you and give you rides and give you food and explain how to pronounce names to you because it's amazing where they'll be 10 years from now I think we're going to one question will always give me prerogative Thank you very much I'm not sure I got the definition of what makes a group a veto player so my question is would Boko Haram qualify or not qualify and then you mentioned the north south 100 year bargain I was thinking you know we were in Nigeria at the same time although we didn't meet then and I'm wondering one of the things that Jonathan just did is the national conference which was always an issue around 2000 do you see it having any impact on the tug of war between the north and the south Yeah two good questions I mean I didn't have to treat Boko Haram in the book because it was more recent although I do touch on it in conclusion and if you're interested in my views on Boko Haram I published a piece in 2013 in the Journal of Intervention and State Building where I talk about Boko Haram in particular and compare it to the Niger Delta movements and so forth I would say no and one of the reasons why I would say that I wouldn't treat it as a veto player is because their preferences are so indecipherable that it's hard to say they're sustained across issues and they really are parochial in a sense that what they say and what they actually do and the areas that they are really decisive players remains fairly narrow I mean there's a risk of violence in many many parts of the country but if I was writing it today I would talk about them more and I would grapple with that but ultimately I would say no unless this other thing happens you know if there's some sort of and I'm not proposing that this would ever happen but if there was some sort of bizarre alliance between say traditional elites in Sokoto and traditional elites sympathetic to Boko Harama in northeast maybe and I don't think that will happen I don't mean to predict that but that's the kind of thing I would look for what was the other National Conference National Conference you know the National Conference it's striking how under relevant it has become and how quickly that happened I don't mean I'm not entirely surprised but it also from what I understand from some of the people that I spoke to involved in the conference and those who should have been involved in the conference but were not formally invited that the whole subtext of the conference was north south and so so now that it's over that message has been delivered and the coalition that Jonathan hoped to build across the north maybe has been built we'll see it kind of leads me and I just I think we do have to wrap up but it does kind of lead me to can you orchestrate those veto players the things that you mentioned the fuel subsidy protest the the third term thing were kind of organic responses in a way that grew up and they were powerful enough seen you know you wonder what accounts for those issues rising up to that level of actual influence bring back our girls had that kind of that spread but did it have the political influence the policy influence in the end I'm not sure it's not totally clear what bring back our girls the drive was because it's not just a question of bringing back the girls that's not a policy choice so you do wonder and maybe this gets back to the question of leadership does it take a savvy political leader to capture identify capture and orchestrate that kind of a national kind of veto movement if you will so you know what I take away from this is why do those happen the way they do and also kind of how do you sustain them over time on kind of the more enduring questions versus response to crises and then as you just say they remain but they lose their sustaining political influence over time maybe questions for the next book but it does raise the whole argument does raise some interesting questions of where the openings for real genuine change might be I think if you're thinking about when regimes change and if we think about each regime as a configuration of veto players or centers of power or whatever we don't want it to be too frequent and if it's too frequent then something's wrong in the way you're studying this question you know and I think as far as bring back or our girls or any other movement is concerned it's not simply being captured by a politician I don't think that's what you're suggesting it's more like an alliance and if it's an alliance that means that those social movements those civil society coalitions or organizations maintain some measure of independence so here's a quick story from field research I was interviewing a senator from the southwest a uruba center and I said to him you know you're trying to do these different things you're trying to build a constituency you're trying to increase your profile did you ever think about going to hometown associations that is these community based organizations that work in the villages and use repatriated money from the cities to build the villages he said you know I know the hometown associations I'm a member of one but I won't go to them for politics and I said why he said because they scare me and they scared him because they were so fiercely independent and tried to stay out of politics and USAID just a couple of days ago had a really thoughtful exchange down at the national press club about those kinds of organizations and thinking about foreign policy strategy and what do we do with the groups that are just focused on development and should we push them harder into democratization and just thinking this through and that senator's story always struck with me and I think there's a larger lesson there for the larger social movements like bring back our girls that you're talking about that politicians do need them actually but they're only going to be valuable to the extent that they're also independent. Great listen Carl thank you so much for this I certainly learned a lot we have copies of your book in the lobby and a swiper if you have a credit card so please join me and welcome to another glass of wine and a couple of cards. Thanks Carl.