ISTR Sixth International Conference Toronto, Canada / July 11-14, 2004 Contesting Citizenship and Civil Society in a Divided World

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	Abstracts

Contesting Exclusion: The Dilemmas of Citizenship in Nigeria
by
Wale Adebanwi
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

The emergence of the idea of citizenship and the development and consolidation of citizenship rights were tied to specific developments in Western thought/society. They were not merely evolutionary but actively so. Citizenship is struggle; it is (struggle for) community, it is (struggle for) belongingness, it is (struggle for) participation, citizenship is also reciprocity (Held: 1989). But there are various degrees of struggle, reciprocity and community embedded in different contexts of citizenship. What are the events that have affected and shaped the contours of citizenship rights in Nigeria beyond the received(western) conceptual and legal notions of citizenship? The question of who should participate - at what level and how - has been an ancient question (Held, Ibid), both as an inclusive and exclusive organizing principle (Yuval-Davis, 1997). While the Marshallian conception of citizenship emphasizes the relationship between the state and the community and how this affects people's citizenship, the liberal conception constructs all citizens as equal and therefore makes differences of ethnicity, gender and class inconsequential to their status as citizens (Yuval-Davis, 1997). Is this so in Africa and in Nigeria specifically? Citizenship in the context examined in this paper has been a tool of political mobilization (and participation) in the bid to demobilise the state as presently constituted and reconstitute it. This paper argues that the constricting of citizenship rights, in their political, civil and social manifestations, in Nigeria was a consequence of the seizure of the state by an autocratic politico-military establishment, the resultant weakening of the capacity of the state to perform its duties and the consequent reliance on brute force to ensure and compel obedience. These helped to sharpen the questions of the relationship of the state to political subjects and to direct attention to the need to redefine this relationship and possibly re-codify it. This was 'initially vague but eventually became definite and precise' in such a way that ethnicity, inversely, helped the process by sharpening the questions not merely of the direct relationship of the individual to the state but the relationship as mediated by the community ethnic group. The post-military era in Nigeria has had to confront the dilemmas of the peculiar history of Nigeria, particularly in terms of the state-civil society-citizenship interface. Citizenship issues have come to be defined largely, and only rarely, around communal claims, in the 'open Sesame'of democratic public sphere. The paper concludes by challenging the manifestations of communal trappings of citizenship while stating that without enabling social conditions, political and civil rights can be vacuous.

Date received: September 10, 2003

Copyright © 2003 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # call-38.