Suberu on Nigerian Politics at International Conference
Political science faculty member Rotimi Suberu presented a paper on "Prebendal Politics and Federal Governance in Nigeria" at an international conference on Nigerian politics last month.
Prebendalism, a longstanding problem in Nigeria, refers to a culture of corruption involving the use of public resources for individual or organizational gain. A leading scholar on the subject, Suberu said the aim of his paper was “to highlight prebendalism’s permeation, degradation, and emasculation of the formal institutions and informal practices of contemporary Nigerian federalism; to analyze the largely shallow and weak effects on this institutional distortion of ongoing efforts and struggles to reform the country’s federalism; and to evaluate the prospects for a genuinely reformed federal governance in the country.”
The conference was held in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of Richard Joseph‘s landmark study of Nigerian politics, Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria: The Rise and Fall of the Second Republic.