The idea of the social contract, which first appeared in the writings of Plato but developed by Thomas Hobbes, and later, John Locke, J. J. Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and John Rawls amongst others, seeks to answer the questions of the origin of the society and the legitimacy of the authority of the state over the individual. In its current form, it assumes a sort of reciprocity between the rights provided by the state and the duties expected of citizens for a harmonious functioning of society. Failure on the part of either party to perform its duties leads to a breaking of the contract and in the case of government failures, it often leads to agitations, protests, strikes, and even revolutions. Although this concept is well established in political discourse, its use in Africa has been quite problematic because of the prevalence of weak/failing states that are incapable of performing the functions of a ‘real’ state on their own without external support.
Unlike in Europe and America where states emerged through a long and complex process of wars, invasions, conquests, cultural interactions, rampant migration; and where the need to raise taxes in order to finance wars led to the development of strong representative institutions, the typical African state developed differently. It is, according to Peter Ekeh, an imported institution consisting mainly of “migrated social structures and constructs which were almost literally parcelled from metropolitan centres of the imperial west…and engrafted onto the new colonial situation”. This externality and artificiality of the African state, according to many political analysts, have made it difficult for African states to develop a European-type civic culture.
To be sure, the social contract in the European-American sense always involves both duties/responsibilities of citizens to the state and corresponding rights and or privileges of citizens which the state must guarantee. As I stated above however, the starting point of this relationship is with duties. Duties precede rights and citizens must first empower the state before they can expect to draw from its abundance.
However, in Nigeria, the opposite appears to be the case. The conception of the social contract is mainly in terms of rights and privileges or what the government can and should do for the people and not the other way round. It has always been so since the colonial days.
In colonial Nigeria, the social contract was shaped by the nature of colonial rule. Upon capturing northern Nigeria and discovering that the Fulani emirate system of administration was highly organized and centralized with a system of direct taxation in place, the British established the ‘native administration’ and virtually left the emirs intact to run their kingdoms and interfered only minimally, if at all. The situation in the South was however different as there were no prior system of direct taxation or tribute paying. What existed was a form of trade tax, which the disparate kingdoms relied on for their revenues. It did not change during colonialism as the administrators came to rely heavily on duties from spirits and gins imported chiefly from Germany and Holland. These revenues were enough to run the government of the south and subsidise the government of Northern Protectorate that had difficulty in raising enough revenues from direct taxation.
On becoming Governor General of an amalgamated Nigeria in 1914, Lord Lugard, despite the counsel of British administrators in the South, forcefully introduced the system of ‘native administration’ and later the direct taxation system to Southern Nigeria. While the people of the Western region grudgingly accepted the tax regime, with few cases of revolt (notably the disturbances at Iseyin in 1916 and Abeokuta in 1918), the introduction of direct taxation to the largely stateless and disparate societies of Eastern Nigeria led to social upheavals culminating in the Aba Women’s Revolt of 1929. Despite the bitterness and resistance, direct taxation only accounted for a small proportion of government revenue – 17% in 1938/39 – with the majority of revenue coming from trade tariffs/duties.
The nationalist leaders quickly cashed in on the discontent to rally the people against colonial rule often promising freedom from obnoxious taxation. But it did not take long before the nationalist leaders began to feel the heat themselves, because, upon taking over control of government, they found it difficult to raise revenues through taxes. They had to regionalise the marketing boards and divert its revenues to fund state developmental projects.
The case of the Western Regional Government is quite revealing. Upon gaining political control of the Western Regional government in Nigeria in 1952, the Action Group – which had won the elections on a promise of lavish development expenditures, mostly on education and health – discovered that whereas the capital costs of their programme would be £10 million, the total revenues available came to less than half that amount. Desperate for money to fulfil its electoral promises, the AG government imposed a series of fees and taxes, but the result was politically disastrous. As Awolowo himself acknowledged, the opposition “seized the opportunity to din it into the people’s ears that they had been led up the garden path.”
Consequently, in the federal elections that followed, the opposition campaigned on an anti-tax platform and captured a majority of the Western Region’s seats in the Federal Parliament.” Hemmed in on all parts, the Action Group government became desperate to secure other sources of revenue aside direct taxation. Since the opposition too needed funds badly to execute its programme in the East, the AG formed a coalition with them to seize control of the marketing boards from the federal governments.
(Continues next week)
Chris Akor
Akor is a member of BusinessDay Editorial Board.
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