Exiting From The State in Nigeria

Abstract

Recent literature on politics in Africa and the third world is replete with accounts of the rise of "mostly anti-system, mostly grassroots, movements with a variety of political social and economic goals ... which are often beyond the control of the state" (Haynes, 1997: vii, 3).' Another account refers to groups which interact with the state "by bypassing it ... by defining [themselves] in relation to economic, political or cultural systems which transcend the state, by submerging the state with its spectacular claims and mobilisations" (Bayart, 1991: 60; also Bayat,1997). The phenomenon described in these accounts is referred to in the literature as exit, defined as disengagement or retreat from the state by disaffected segments of the citizenry into alternative and parallel social, cultural, economic and political ' systems which are constructed in civil society and which compete with those of the state (cf Azarya, 1988, 1994; Azarya and Chazan, 1987; Bratton, 1989; Young, 1994).2 This is a deviation from the marriage between citizens and the state which is consumated in terms of reciprocal rights and duties. Exit is commonly regarded as a strategy for coping with "a domineering yet ineffective state" (cf du Toit, 1995: 31 ), but it also represents the resistance of weak and marginalised segments which in extreme cases can lead to separatist agitation or even secession. An analytical distinction can accordingly be made between exit from the polity and exit from the state.* The former involves bypassing or avoiding the organised civil order without necessarily disconnecting from the state. Such qualified exit which is more prevalent amongst the ordinary peoples, for whom exit is a matter of survival, results from the fact that however much they try to avoid the state, those organising the parallel systems continually need the state one way or another. Following the example of the "Black Market" in Ghana where two thirds of the annual cocoa export in the early 1980s was done illegally, it has been observed that