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extraction while maintaining order at minimal expense, the British encouraged, even created,
ethnic and regional loyalty and consciousness (Diamond 1988). With the failure of British
colonialism to develop institutions able to integrate Nigerians around common cultural, social,
and political symbols and structures, Nigerian politics centered around the ability of educated
elites to transform “latent ethnicity into manifest nationalism” (Young 1976, in Diamond 1988,
44).
Having roots in the autocratic indirect rule of the British colonial system, two
fundamental elements of the Nigerian socio-political system are (were?) clientelism (same as
patronage? Neo-patrimonialism? Footnote needed?) and prebendalism. These two political
phenomena are closely connected: prebendalism refers to the pervasive societal belief that
political offices can be captured and used for the personal benefit of the officeholders and their
supporters; clientelism describes the network of reciprocal relationships established along
regional, ethnic, and religious lines in order to acquire and maintain power. Often, the official
public purpose of the office is of secondary concern (Joseph 1987). Oil wealth centralized in the
state intensified the scramble to acquire office and accrue the personal and patrimonial benefits
that follow. In such a system politics became a zero-sum game that promotes an inherently
unstable political system as evolving networks of region, ethnicity, and religion continuously
realign according to perceived opportunities to attain access to strategic offices (Joseph 1988;
Chabal and Daloz 1999). Consequently, oil has exacerbated fundamental fissures in society,
promulgated instability, and encouraged patronage and corruption (Birdsall and Subramanian
(2004).
Convention