By John Amuda
DEMOCRACY has therefore not been the project of any Nigerian electoral or military government. In what sense then was Nigerian politics of the Second Republic prebendal? How did Richard Joseph coin the adjective prebendal?

Why was he dissatisfied with the adjective much in vogue in the usage of his teachers and mine, patrimonial, when in fact his coinage was still describing the same content of the “politics of societies in transition” between the modern and the traditional?

I will argue that Richard Joseph’s usage of prebendal is no improvement on the term patrimonial. He would have been saying the same thing with a title like the following: “Democracy and Patrimonial Politics in Nigeria”, for his intent in the usage of prebendal is in my view logically conveyed by the adjective “patrimonial”.

Why? Because both prebendal and patrimonial explain how office and service come to become “fiefs”, that is become means of accumulations. Patrimony according to Webster is:

*Property inheritance from one’s father or ancestors;

*Property endowed to an institution, as a church;

*Anything inherited, as a trait of character.

Prebend on the other hand is defined by Webster as:

*The part of the revenue of a cathedral or collegiate church paid as a clergyman’s salary;

*The property or tax yielding such a revenue;

*A prebendary or his benefice. Prebendal, the adjective is defined as pertaining to a prebend or prebendary.

Prebendary refers to a person receiving a prebend.

-Prebendaryship defines the office of a prebendary.

Applied to Nigerian politics, one who thinks that office-holding should be a public trust but sees officeholders treating elective or appointive offices as prebend, can say that officeholders politics is prebendal, for they regard their offices as prebends and compete for office for prebendal purposes.

Nigerian politicians so characterised would be said from Richard Joseph’s idealistic viewpoint as transforming government into a prebendaryship. The connotations of prebendaryship, linking officeholding with entitlements transforming electoral office into “benefice” is but a small conceptual step to the patrimonialisation of officeholding, implying inherent and inherited privileges linked to officeholding, and in this way transforming elected office into aristocratic office.

The purpose of such prebendalisation of elected office is therefore that which is also served by the patrimonialisation of elected office. If the above is Richard Joseph’s reading of politics in Nigeria’s Second Republic, his description of politics in Nigeria should be the “Prebendalisation of Electoral Politics in Nigeria” and not “Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria”.

Since no anti-colonial and post-colonial electoral political parties has sought to institute a government of the people by the people for the people; since for none is democracy thus defined a political objective or manifesto ideals, the matter of Nigerian politics, then and now, can be said to be that of the prebendalisation or patrimonialisation of politics in Nigeria.

This conceptualization of politics in Nigeria seems more descriptive of what politics in Nigeria is rather than what it should be. Democracy as popularly conceptualized is thus the polar opposite of prebendal politics and can only be instituted through the displacement of prebendal politics by democratic politics.

When so constructed, the rise and fall of the Second Republic cannot be explained by Nigeria’s political history of prebendal politics if that which is called corruption is no other than prebendal politics.

For those interested in democracy as a project of Nigerian politicians two things have to be explained namely: How and why electoral politics has mutated into prebendal politics in post-colonial Nigeria; and arising out of this problematique how, the challenges of prebendal politics in Nigeria are to be confronted and mastered by democracy-interest groups.

What in summary has been the import of our critique of the conceptual building blocks of Joseph’s Democracy and Prebendal Politics in Nigeria? It is that offices can be transformed into prebends and as in cases like those of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Somalia and Togo into patrimonies.

The politics of such polities can be described as prebendal only because there has been prebendalisation of electoral politics and office-holding. Thus defined, prebendal politics is not to be equated with corruption politics.

There can be prebendal relations between an American elected official and the constituency he or she represents. This can explain why a Senator Byrd was elected for over nine times of six years term in the United States Senate. Mario Cuomo’s son is now a governor of New York State like his father before him.

The relationship between Lee Kuan Yew and the Singaporean electorate by the mutual wish of both parties was prebendal and patrimonial. In Singapore, prebendalisation of elections in favour of Lee Kuan Yew’s party was based on results of the ruling party- they had earned the trust of the electorates, they did not buy the electorate or subsumed them under the ruling party.

“Dynasticisation” of office-holding as in the case with the Kennedys in America is, thus, a form of useful and legitimate patrimonialisation of electoral office. The relationship between the Republican Party and America’s rich and conservative elites can be said to be prebendal through trust.

There is therefore some form of prebendal politics that is approved as instance of democracy and some form of prebendalisation of electoral politics that is viewed as anti-democracy.

Therefore, we must still address 25 years after the publication of Richard Joseph’s Democracy and Prebendal Politics, the issues of the prebendalisation of politics, electoral or despotic. We must still deal with the issues of rise and falls of republics in Nigeria. These tasks lie ahead, for there is yet no democracy corpse upon which an autopsy is to be performed.