Corruption and the Crisis of Values

Abstract While corruption exists in all polities, the form it takes, its extent, and its political and socio-economic functions vary enormously across time and place. This chapter takes a wide and close look at corruption. As wide, the chapter locates corruption within the “gray zones” between the legal and the illegal, and shows how corruption is shaped by the complex and shifting interactions between state and nonstate actors in mobile settings. The chapter challenges the essentialism, cultural determinism, and functionalist explanation that characterizes and constrains dominant approaches to corruption in contemporary Africa, showing how they tend to obscure corruption’s social, historical, and moral underpinnings and logics. As close, the chapter examines elite corruption and profiteering in Nigeria since independence in October 1960, especially the systematic plundering of Nigeria’s oil-dominated national economy and the consequent emergence of a crisis of values in everyday, urban life. The analysis in this chapter extends to the checkered story of post-1999 institutionalist efforts to combat political corruption.