Government In Zazzau

Originally published in 1960, this is a details study of the successive forms of government in the Hausa chiefdom of Zaria in Northern Nigeria. It presents a comparative analysis of the political organization and development of Zaria under successive Habe, Fulani and British suzerains. The book tackles the problems of political history and theory from an anthropological point of view, distinguishing governmental forms, functions and modes, as well as elucidating necessary regularities within the processes of political change.

This history of the African kingdom that included the famous trans-Saharan trading city of Kano is the third in the late M. G. Smiths series of histories of the Hausa-Fulani kingdoms in West Africa. Combining the approaches of social anthropology and history, Smith provides a fascinating account of this kingdoms complex political and administrative organization from medieval times to the threshold of Nigerian independence. The book relies on written sources in Arabic, Hausa, and English, but it is supplemented by in-depth interviews with Fulani rulers and councilors who were intimately familiar with the organization of the Muslim emirate of Kano before the British arrived in 1903. In the final chapter, Smith continues his analytical inquiry, begun in his earlier books, into the processes of change in political units.

Nigeria is famous for "419" e-mails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official interactions, from traffic control to university admissions. In Moral Economies of Corruption Steven Pierce provides a cultural history of the last 150 years of corruption in Nigeria as a case study for considering how corruption plays an important role in the processes of political change in all states. He suggests that corruption is best understood in Nigeria, as well as in all other nations, as a culturally contingent set of political discourses and historically embedded practices. The best solution to combatting Nigerian government corruption, Pierce contends, is not through attempts to prevent officials from diverting public revenue to self-interested ends, but to ask how public ends can be served by accommodating Nigeria's history of patronage as a fundamental political principle.

First Published in 1968. In retrospect it now seems clear that the federal elections of December 1964 and the constitutional crisis which followed mark the apogee of the civilian government headed by Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa. The ‘broadbased’ government which emerged from the crisis represented, at best, a shaky compromise. A decisive jolt came when in the early hours of January 15, 1966, a group of young army officers, mainly Ibo, led some soldiers in a coup which ended in the death of the Federal Prime Minister of Nigeria, Sir Abubakar. The regional Premiers of the North and the West were also killed, as were a number of high-ranking Hausa and Yoruba officers. This volume asks what went wrong and ledto Nigeria’s slow decline into civil chaos and the possibility of political disintegration.

Moses E. Ochonu explores a rare system of colonialism in Middle Belt Nigeria, where the British outsourced the business of the empire to Hausa-Fulani subcolonials because they considered the area too uncivilized for Indirect Rule. Ochonu reveals that the outsiders ruled with an iron fist and imagined themselves as bearers of Muslim civilization rather than carriers of the white man's burden. Stressing that this type of Indirect Rule violated its primary rationale, Colonialism by Proxy traces contemporary violent struggles to the legacy of the dynamics of power and the charged atmosphere of religious difference.