THE CONSERVATION
Nigerians took to the streets in August 2024 to voice their frustration at a series of government policies. These policies had been ostensibly designed to make Nigeria more attractive for outside investment.
The removal of fuel subsidies and the removal of the economic peg between the Nigerian naira and the US dollar have sent the Nigerian economy into a tailspin.
Many Nigerians rely on government subsidies to make ends meet. The economic policy changes have resulted in a big rise in inflation, adding to the challenges for ordinary Nigerians.
As economic conditions have worsened, the prominence of government corruption has risen. Protests and riots have exploded in the streets across the country in the form of #EndBadGovernance protests that call out government graft and poor governance.
Does government corruption drive protests and social movements? While some scholars have argued that it does, others have argued that corruption is often a catch-all term for frustration over broad economic and democratic grievances. Others have noted that in some cases, increased perceptions of corruption correlate with less protest.
These contradictory results reveal an important puzzle: why does corruption only sometimes seem to generate mass uprisings? If, for example, corruption is enough to generate citizen uprisings, then why do we only rarely see unified anti-police protests in countries like Nigeria, where police corruption is rampant?
I argue that one key to this puzzle is the way different types of corruption are associated with increased or decreased protest mobilisation.
I am a political scientist whose work focuses in part on African social movements and issues of corruption. I approach this by merging large statistical models with political psychological approaches.
I conducted research in 2021 on different types of corruption shaping protests. I found that elite corruption had the power to mobilise protest. But that other forms of corruption – such as corruption in the police force – were less likely to lead people to take protest action.
The implication of my findings is that anti-corruption protests are an imperfect signal for understanding everyday corruption experiences. The fact that people aren’t protesting doesn’t mean there’s nothing to complain about.
Why elite corruption sparks protest
To explain why corruption sometimes corresponds with protest movements and other times does not, I think it is useful to consider two types of corruption. Elite corruption refers to forms of graft and venality performed by political elites who seek to either enrich themselves or reshape the political system to their advantage.
Police corruption refers to acts of self-enrichment or abuse perpetrated by police officers, often during traffic stops or in the process of police procedure.
My findings show that citizens are generally more likely to mobilise in response to elite corruption than police corruption. Why?
First, elite corruption tends to be intertwined with macro-level economic crises and scandals.
Second, elite corruption provides a universal point of focus for protesters across an entire nation, rather than the highly localised experiences of police and bureaucratic graft.
Finally, anger over police corruption may be suppressed by the safety concerns associated with demonstrating against armed security forces.
I tested this argument using two methods. First, drawing from a 2017 household survey experiment that I conducted in five Nigerian states, I examined whether exposure to vignettes describing either elite corruption or police corruption shaped a respondent’s self-reported willingness to participate in a protest.
The elite corruption vignettes included self-dealing and system-changing forms of corruption perpetrated by political elites. The police corruption vignette focused on the solicitation of bribes and unfair detention of citizens by the police. I then asked respondents:
Many Nigerians join groups that engage in protests, strikes, or demonstrations. Now I would like to ask you about how willing you would be to join a protest or demonstration.
Respondents were able to select a response between 1 (“not at all willing”) to 5 (“very willing / I already do”).
I found that individuals who received the elite corruption vignette were statistically more likely to state that they would join a protest or demonstration.
I then expanded this analysis via a statistical regression that measured whether perceptions of elite and police corruption (sourced from the Afrobarometer dataset) correlated with different levels of observed conflict (sourced from the Social Conflict Analysis Database).
I thought it was best to test whether the results of my survey experiment, which capture a moment in time, reflected a broader reality, or whether it was just a fluke.
Using the Afrobarometer data, I identified regions where citizens expressed particularly high or low perceptions of elite and police corruption. Then, using the social conflict analysis data, I measured the number of protest events in those regions.
I found that while elite corruption perceptions were positively correlated with an increased number of observed protest events, police corruption perceptions were not.
Together, these methods suggest that it is not enough to argue that citizens will rise up against corrupt governments. Rather, the ways in which a government is corrupt matter.
Turning back to the August 2024 protests, one might ask: why now? Why did Nigerians spend ten days protesting against corruption when there had been rampant corruption for so long?
My research suggests that the nature of the corruption claims – specifically, anger over large-scale government graft – is what counts.
Recent developments seem to support this.
What’s changed
First, corruption perceptions have spiked. In 2021, Afrobarometer polled 1,600 Nigerians, asking them whether levels of corruption had risen, stayed the same, or decreased in the past year. At the time, just over 35% stated that corruption had “increased a lot”. One year later, that number had nearly doubled, jumping to just under 65%.
This drastic increase in perceived corruption reveals a broader lack of faith in the government and concern over the future of the country.
Second, tipping points help with mobilisation. The protests in early August arose as the financial crisis crystallised and as a series of economic policies brought into sharp relief the economic disparities between the rich and the poor.
The removal of fuel subsidies is a particularly touchy subject in Nigerian politics. In 2012, Nigerians took to the streets over the same issue, leading to a week-long “occupation” of major Nigerian cities by protesters.
Implications
Protests are a highly visible signal that citizens are frustrated; however, it is easy to overlook the possibility that citizens may be widely upset about a broad array of issues, but only willing to speak out in response to some of those issues.
There is a knock-on consequence to this; namely, that police corruption has a more direct effect on the lives of Nigerians than elite corruption, but often goes unaddressed.
