Technocracy as a Political Category

The word technocracy first appeared in a 1919 essay by William Henry Smyth, an American engineer. Writing after World War I, Smyth described a sweeping historical struggle between “raw strength and animal cunning” (1921:2). He suggested that a new force—“Organized Purposive Skill”—would displace both forms of power. Smyth outlined a new system of government: “the organizing, co-ordinating, and directing through industrial management on a nation-wide scale of the scientific knowledge and practical skill of all the people who could contribute to the accomplishment of a great national purpose” (1921:7).

Does technocracy have a particular ideological orientation? In post-World War II France, intellectuals debated the intensification and bureaucratization of the state’s economic role (Kuisel Reference Kuisel1981). In La Technocratie: mythe ou realité? (1964), Jean Meynaud argued that the expansion of technocracy favored conservatism. In Meynaud’s view, technocrats espoused the idea that the era of ideologies (i.e., socialism) had given way to an era of antipolitical expertise. This idea in itself, he continued, constituted a conservative ideological position (see also Bell Reference Bell1999 [1973]).

Since the 1980s, technocracy has been increasingly associated with neoliberalism, rather than with state-led efforts to manage the economy. For the developing world, this represents an irony but also, to a large degree, a continuity. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, state power has often been displayed through centrally planned, state-led, spectacular projects of technical transformation. Colonial governments showcased their power—and pursued ideals of “modernization”—through massive engineering projects such as India’s railway system (Aguiar Reference Aguiar2011) and Egypt’s Aswan Low Dam (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2002).

With the rise of neoliberalism, the focus of technical expertise has been narrowed; now technical expertise is meant not to help the state project tangible power over people and territory, but rather to help the state liberalize economic markets. Yet technocracy’s conceptualization of power remains top-down; in all of technocracy’s iterations, the idea of politics as popular debate only impedes the implementation of correct policies. William Easterly (2013:6) has denounced what he calls the “technocratic illusion,” or “the belief that poverty is a purely technical problem” rather than a result of “the unchecked power of the state against poor people without rights.”

Neoliberal technocracy has developed a specialized vocabulary to reinforce the fabrication that governing is a technical rather than a political exercise. This vocabulary is widely shared by international financial institutions, Western governments, and technocrats themselves. Notions such as “reform,” “transparency,” and “governance” present politics as a matter of applied expertise, rather than contentious, interest-based decision-making. The vocabulary of technocracy uses corporeal metaphors to discuss the state and the economy: bureaucracies are said to be either “bloated” or “trim,” images that position the technocrat as a doctor ministering to the health of the state and of the economy. In the vocabulary of technocracy, quantitative “evidence” is the criterion for decisions. The power to decide what counts as evidence is, however, ultimately political.

Neoliberal Technocracy in Africa

Thandika Mkandawire has recently called for more complex readings of African politics. Mkandawire critiques the “neopatrimonialist school” of analysis. Neopatrimonialists view African politics as an arena in which predatory “big men” and their clients and associates dominate both state and society, constraining economic growth and entrenching corruption. Mkandawire writes, “The analytical template forged by the neopatrimonialism school has had the effect of flattening the African political and economic landscape” (2015:602).

Any reconsideration of the African political landscape must include the technocrat, a figure often presented as the antithesis of the big man. The empowerment of technocrats has sometimes been taken as a barometer for Africa’s economic and democratic progress. In 2012 Harvard’s Calestous Juma celebrated the “technocrats’ rise,” writing about how new African heads of state with backgrounds in engineering might lead an infrastructural revolution. Three years later, a columnist for South Africa’s Mail & Guardian lamented a trend in Africa whereby elections seemed to be elevating populist strongmen at the expense of technocrats (Mwiti Reference Mwiti2015). The technocrat’s fortunes, we are told, correlate inversely with those of the big man. But the reality is more complex. To answer Mkandawire’s call, it is necessary to question not just the stereotype of the big man, but also the ideal of the technocrat.

The internal contradictions of the neoliberal technocratic ideal are acutely evident in Africa. African technocrats are often closely associated with international financial institutions (IFIs) like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), both of which champion anti-political understandings of decision-making. These institutions prefer to deal with technocrats, not only because of the presumed competence of these individuals but also in order to “promot[e] the notion of national ownership of [Structural Adjustment Programs].” Furthermore, the IFIs often prefer to interact with technocrats who have had experience working overseas, either for other institutions or directly with the IFIs themselves. This trend adds another layer of complexity to the politics of defining technocrats, with the result that some local experts lacking international credentials are excluded from the pool of acceptable “technocrats.” Not only local experts but also the voting public as a whole are excluded from decision-making roles: the IFIs believe that “since adjustment requires unpopular sacrifices, in-camera negotiations with technocrats are preferable to a participatory decision-making process by which popular demands can derail ‘necessary’ reforms” (Konings Reference Konings2011:134–35). Such relationships could be witnessed during the structural adjustments of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the late 1990s, when structural adjustment failed to spur growth and attract foreign investment, the World Bank and the IMF shifted from promoting “good policies” to also demanding “good institutions.” For the IFIs, this meant institutions dedicated to “serving the market,” for example by “reduc[ing] the functions of such institutions as the judiciary to the task of protecting private property” (Mkandawire Reference Mkandawire and Noman2012:89). When development practitioners have championed “inclusive” processes of building “good governance,” they have often conceptualized the relationship between democracy and growth, or the public and the policymakers, in a simplistic way. Neoliberal, managerial approaches to development ignore the stark trade-offs and collective action problems—in other words, the politics—that are necessarily involved in generating the kind of development that can supply essential public goods, rather than simply jobless growth (Booth & Cammack Reference Booth and Cammack2013).

Technocrats have retained their importance in the effort to promote institutional “reform.” Even as demands for “good governance” can limit the accountability of government institutions, the technocratic ideal is invoked to suggest that relationships between governments and the IFIs are not political. This image of apolitical, even anti-political expertise reinforces neoliberalism’s claim that economic decision-making should be the province of experts, rather than a matter of extended public debate. Yet the African technocrats’ perceived subservience to international financial institutions implicates them in the longstanding mistrust of such institutions among many African citizens—a viewpoint evident in the film Bamako, in which a surreal trial of the World Bank and the IMF takes place in the courtyard of a poor Malian family’s home (Sissako 2006).

Politics in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

Nigeria’s Fourth Republic began in 1999 when the country transitioned to civilian rule after sixteen years of nearly continuous military dictatorship. The 1999 Constitution re-instituted a presidential and federal system patterned after the American model. The Nigerian system vests considerable power in the president, who may serve a maximum of two four-year terms.

The People’s Democratic Party dominated politics from 1999 to 2015, winning the first four presidential elections along with a majority of state governorships and National Assembly seats. The PDP, at its peak, was a large coalition, consisting of 1990s-era democratic activists as well as several former military rulers and their networks. The PDP’s first presidential candidate was Olusegun Obasanjo, who had served as the military head of state from 1976 to 1979. The PDP represented itself as a big tent in ethnic and regional terms, addressing different communities’ aspirations and concerns with the promise that all would be represented in senior offices.

Ideologically, the PDP defined itself as center-right. Its founding manifesto committed the party to the “war against poverty,” “rapid industrial growth,” and “rebuilding and expanding basic infrastructure” (People’s Democratic Party 1998:10); it presented the market, rather than the state, as the primary vehicle for realizing economic development, with a promise to “provide the political environment that is conductive to economic growth and national development through private initiative and free enterprise” (11). While affirming that “the state will play a leading role in the economy,” the manifesto stated that “privatization in the Nigerian economy shall be encouraged and expanded” (14).

The PDP initially adhered to an internal party agreement to rotate the presidency between candidates from southern and northern Nigeria. In 2006–2007, however, Obasanjo sought to change the constitution to allow him to run for a third term. The National Assembly blocked his bid, and Obasanjo’s hand-picked successor, Umaru Yar’Adua, won the next election. In 2010, Yar’Adua, a northerner, died in office, leading to the accession of Vice President Goodluck Jonathan, a southerner, to the presidency. When Jonathan sought and won election to a full term in 2011, the rotational agreement was disrupted, to the unhappiness of many northern PDP elites. Northern discontent—as well as the PDP’s inability to address Nigeria’s security challenges and reduce widespread unemployment and poverty—contributed to Jonathan’s defeat by Muhammadu Buhari, a former military ruler, long-time opposition candidate, and northern politician, in 2015. Buhari ran as the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), a coalition consisting of opposition parties and disaffected PDP elites, especially northern politicians.

Technocrats under Obasanjo: The Politics of Privatization, Anti-Corruption, and Debt Relief

The careers of Fourth Republic technocrats in Nigeria should be understood in a historical context. Key developments include the weakening of Nigeria’s civil service from the 1970s onward and the bitter experience of structural adjustment and state predation under military rule. Civil servants enjoyed substantial power during the early phase of military rule (1966–1975), but in 1975 a new military government sacked some eleven thousand bureaucrats (Joseph Reference Joseph1987). This purge had the unanticipated effect of increasing corruption: “as the public sector continued to expand through the early 1980s, meritocratic criteria and organizational discipline weakened” (Lewis Reference Lewis2007:148). Some civil servants came to view their offices as short-term opportunities to reap personal gain, rather than as secure posts.

Structural adjustment intensified the politics surrounding Nigeria’s economic policy (Jega Reference Jega2000). When the oil boom ended in the early 1980s and the civilian-led Second Republic fell, military heads of state imposed an austerity regime. Ibrahim Babangida (in power from 1985 to 1993) presided over Nigeria’s structural adjustment program, which met with widespread public opposition (Lewis Reference Lewis1996). It was politically convenient for Babangida to blame the cabinet, including the technocrats, for economic setbacks (LeVan Reference LeVan2014), and indeed Babangida may not have fully understood the implications of the economic reforms implemented by technocrats such as his Minister of Finance, the internationally trained economist and World Bank alumnus Kalu Idika Kalu (Siollun Reference Siollun2013). As both the economic reforms and a promised political transition faltered in the early 1990s, Babangida appropriated increasing amounts of power for himself, paving the way for a highly predatory system of economic management under his eventual successor, General Sani Abacha, who ruled from 1993 to 1998 (Lewis Reference Lewis1996). These experiences left many Nigerians with a lasting antipathy toward the IFIs and the promises of neoliberal technocracy.

Under PDP rule, technocrats became politicized in a different way: PDP heads of state attached much of their political image to their governments’ abilities to carry out neoliberal macroeconomic reforms. The notion that these policies were advanced by expert technocrats, rather than by politicians, helped Obasanjo to successfully implement many significant reforms. In the process, however, individual technocrats were drawn deeply into the political machinery. Three actions of Obasanjo’s administration highlight this politicization of technocracy: the privatization of state-run enterprises, the effort to fight corruption, and the quest for debt relief.

The PDP partly fulfilled its commitment to privatization. Efforts to sell off state-owned enterprises had begun under military rule, but the Abacha regime halted the process (Okonjo-Iweala Reference Okonjo-Iweala2012). When Obasanjo took office in 1999, the federal government still controlled nearly six hundred businesses, most of them unprofitable (Iliffe Reference Iliffe2011). Obasanjo established the National Council on Privatisation and the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE). Inaugurating the Council, Obasanjo spoke in the language of technocracy, arguing that ideas of “sound economic policy” had shifted since the Nigerian state first created dozens of enterprises in the 1970s (including during his own tenure as military head of state). Privatization, Obasanjo continued, would “assist in restructuring the public sector in a manner that will affect [sic] a new synergy between a leaner and more efficient government and a revitalized, efficient and service-oriented private sector” (National Council on Privatisation 2001:3–4).

In practice, privatization was ultimately deeply politicized, creating not just acrimonious public debate over individual sales, but also mistrust between Obasanjo and key team members, especially Vice President Atiku Abubakar, who headed the Council and was suspected of manipulating sales to benefit himself and his allies (El-Rufai Reference El-Rufai2013). The technocratic appointee Nasir El-Rufai, who headed the BPE, experienced this tension during the sale of the state-owned Nigerian Telecommunications Limited. To one interested bidder, “I explained that we did what we could as technocrats, but the award of the contract was a decision reserved for our political masters” (2013:124). The contract in question went to Swedish-owned Ericsson, despite a technical commission’s recommendation that the contract go to U.S.-owned Motorola on multiple grounds, including price. According to El-Rufai, Abubakar not only swayed the decision to Ericsson, but also accused El-Rufai of exploiting a familial connection to Motorola (U.S. Embassy Abuja 2001; El-Rufai Reference El-Rufai2013). Both Abubakar and El-Rufai survived politically, but this episode highlights how a supposedly technocratic process became a minefield of political maneuvering. Technocrat-led privatization proceeded, but in a deeply politicized fashion.

If privatization was a hallmark of Obasanjo’s first term, his second term focused on broader economic reform. In the words of Okonjo-Iweala, who became Minister of Finance,

But the bid to balance technocracy and politics was subject to crippling contradictions, a trend that surfaced in the politics of fighting corruption.

Anti-corruption was key to the economic approach of Obasanjo’s second term. In 2001, the inter-governmental Financial Action Task Force placed Nigeria on its list of Non-Cooperative Countries and Territories, and in 2002, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a warning about the dangers of conducting financial transactions in Nigeria. These actions hampered Nigerian businesses, hurt prospects for foreign investment in Nigeria, and reduced Nigeria’s chances for obtaining debt relief for the USD30 billion it owed to the Paris Club, which was one of Obasanjo’s core aspirations (Ribadu Reference Ribadu2010). In response to the blacklisting, the administration created the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), headed by a technocrat, the police officer Nuhu Ribadu.

The EFCC’s work was meant to be mutually reinforcing with other economic reforms. Ribadu later wrote that “the EFCC was given a wide berth and top-level political cover” (2010:80). By 2005, the EFCC was investigating major politicians, including all of the state governors, some of whom became embroiled in impeachment proceedings over charges of corruption. The EFCC’s work did have a positive impact on lessening corruption in Nigeria, contributing to the downfall of politicians such as Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, governor of Bayelsa State from 1999 to 2005. But the process was nonetheless still politicized. When Obasanjo began maneuvering to seek a third term, “the battle against high-level corruption raised accusations that the EFCC was being used by Obasanjo to settle political scores” (Ribadu Reference Ribadu2010:126–27). Reflecting on this period, Ribadu concluded that it was impossible for a technocrat to duck politics:

Relatively few convictions of top politicians or bureaucrats were ever finalized. Ribadu’s courageous work won him hero status among many Nigerians and allowed him to shine a spotlight on corruption for both domestic and international audiences, but he was not able to sustain the image that he and his office were merely technocratic actors who stood outside of political influence and intrigue.

Privatization and anti-corruption were tied in with another key priority: debt relief. This goal required substantial interaction with the IFIs. The administration leveraged its technocrats’ relationships with those institutions and performed a certain technocratic sleight of hand. To qualify for the Highly Indebted Poor Countries Initiative, Nigeria needed a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP), a strategy document required by the IMF and the World Bank. Yet as Okonjo-Iweala noted, Nigeria’s experience of structural adjustment in the 1980s and 1990s was “a major hurdle . . . [Nigerians] had indicated, in what was tantamount to an informal national referendum, that they wanted no truck with IMF programs” (2012:99). Given this “hurdle,” Obasanjo’s economic team sought to present the PRSP as a “home-grown reform programme” under “national ownership” (National Planning Commission 2004:iii).^{Footnote 3} In 2004 the team issued the National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy (NEEDS). NEEDS, however, was vetted by the IMF and the World Bank, and the plan revolved largely around further privatization. This process exemplifies how the supposedly apolitical notion of “transparency” is “intended more to ensure the global legibility of local financial practices than to facilitate democratic oversight” (Mkandawire Reference Mkandawire and Noman2012:89).

Okonjo-Iweala admitted that the document required extensive “marketing” by the economic team: “There were many critics, including those who felt that the strategy had too much of what they termed a ‘neoliberal’ Western flavor” (2012:16). This “marketing” implicated the team more thoroughly in politics:

As NEEDS became politicized inside Nigeria, however, the document helped bring international praise for Nigeria’s economic management.

The administration secured its sought-after debt relief in 2005: the Paris Club wrote off 60 percent of Nigeria’s debt, or USD18 billion. Rather than functioning as an impersonal technocratic exercise, this process leaned on Okonjo-Iweala’s network of contacts through the IMF and the World Bank. She later recalled:

With debt relief secured, credit rating agencies assigned Nigeria a relatively favorable outlook, and foreign investment almost doubled, from USD2 billion to nearly USD4 billion (Okonjo-Iweala Reference Okonjo-Iweala2012).

The implementation of NEEDS corresponded with a period of 6 to 8 percent annual growth in Nigeria’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The top-line figures indicated that the reform had succeeded by its own measures. Yet the supposedly apolitical wisdom of privatizing state-owned enterprises and firing civil servants ran afoul of not only political but also economic realities. Okonjo-Iweala estimated that as of 2004, Nigeria had some 2.3 million government workers at the federal and state levels (2012:53). In a country with an extremely high rate of unemployment, mass firings would have been both politically and economically disastrous, and so the civil service remained largely untouched:

Meanwhile, NEEDS did not reduce unemployment. As the team worked on “accelerating economic growth” at the level of the economy as a whole,

This state of affairs would later expose the PDP, and Okonjo-Iweala herself, to devastating critiques during the 2014–2015 electoral campaign. Meanwhile, El-Rufai pointed to another feature of NEEDS’ success: “We also got very lucky that our hard work coincided with a period of galloping oil prices” (2013:157). This relationship between economic boom and oil prices would be another factor in increasing the PDP’s vulnerability in 2014–2015, when oil prices returned to former pre-boom levels.

Breaking with the PDP, and the Road to 2015

The start of the PDP’s long fall from power might be dated to Obasanjo’s bid to open the possibility of running for a third term. This bid can be explained in various ways—as an effort to preserve a legacy, as a self-interested power grab, as evidence of a profound mistrust of other political actors, or as an arrangement with sympathetic business interests. El-Rufai, adopting this last explanation, recalls how technocracy became politicized as a result of successful reforms:

Obasanjo’s third term bid created a division among technocrats in the administration. Some, like Okonjo-Iweala, allegedly preferred to allow the scheme to go forward. But El-Rufai, Ribadu, and others resolved to undermine the third term plans. Even as they helped line up legislators to defeat the proposed amendment, however, El-Rufai acknowledged the interpenetration of politics and technocracy:

The denial of Obasanjo’s third term came with a price: shifting his approach, Obasanjo sought to retain power by selecting a supposedly tractable (and at that time already likely physically ill) successor, Umaru Yar’Adua. Most of Obasanjo’s technocrats would find themselves horrified by Yar’Adua’s less energetic and more brazenly self-interested approach to running Nigeria’s economy.

The end of the Obasanjo administration saw an exodus of senior technocrats. For Ribadu and El-Rufai, both prominent northerners, the transition from Obasanjo to Yar’Adua proved rocky. Behind closed doors, both El-Rufai and Ribadu had been discussed as possible northern successors to Obasanjo (El-Rufai Reference El-Rufai2013). As Yar’Adua looked toward 2011, when the presidency would still be “zoned” to the north and southern politicians would theoretically be biding their time until 2015, he may have feared that either El-Rufai or Ribadu would challenge him.

Ribadu personally experienced marginalization and then danger. Yar’Adua neutered the EFCC in order to protect his associates, and muzzled Ribadu by flexing the control that the Attorney General wielded over the EFCC and the control that the National Police Force wielded over Ribadu, who was, administratively, an officer in the Force. In December 2007, Ribadu’s superior temporarily relieved him of his duties as EFCC chairman and ordered him to attend a one-year training course. Ribadu understood this reassignment as punishment for the EFCC’s actions against James Ibori, the impeached governor of Delta State and a political ally of Yar’Adua. Once the course began, Ribadu was demoted within the Force and formally dismissed as EFCC chairman. After experiencing two assassination attempts in 2008, he fled the country. In February 2008, Ibori was released from prison, and the Nigerian justice system dropped all charges against him in 2009 (Adeniyi Reference Adeniyi2011; Ribadu Reference Ribadu2010).

El-Rufai also experienced harassment from law enforcement, particularly concerning alleged improprieties connected to one of his houses in Abuja. A “smear campaign” followed, claiming that he had abused his position as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory—an assignment meant to transform Abuja into a laboratory for technocratic reform (El-Rufai Reference El-Rufai2013). Concerned for his personal safety, El-Rufai left Nigeria, first to finish his LL.B. at the University of London and then to complete a fellowship at Harvard University in 2008–2009. El-Rufai leveraged his image as a technocrat to discredit Yar’Adua in the international media and through appearances at Western think tanks. In 2009 El-Rufai penned an op-ed for the diaspora-run website Sahara Reporters, entitled “Umaru Yar’Adua: Great Expectations, Disappointing Outcome,” in which he claimed that Yar’Adua had reversed most of Obasanjo’s economic accomplishments (2009b). Significantly, El-Rufai partly attributed these reversals to the limitations of technocratic thinking by Obasanjo’s economic team:

When Yar’Adua died and Jonathan inherited the presidency, El-Rufai continued his opposition, supporting Buhari against Jonathan in 2011.

Ribadu’s image as a wrongfully persecuted technocrat presented another opposition party with an opportunity to run a northern candidate against Jonathan in 2011. Ribadu was selected as the candidate of the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), whose heartland was the southwest part of the country. Ribadu promised not just cleaner government but also a partial break with neoliberalism; he ran on his image as an anti-corruption reformer, also proposing a social security program and emphasizing state-led job creation for youth (see Ribadu Reference Ribadu2010). For various reasons, allegedly including a last-minute deal in which the ACN gave Jonathan the southwest’s presidential vote in exchange for the freedom to sweep several gubernatorial races (Odunsi Reference Odunsi2014), Ribadu lost badly, scoring an official 5.4 percent of the total votes (Independent National Electoral Commission 2011). Nevertheless, the 2011 elections foreshadowed the eventual winning coalition in 2015: a northern candidate backed by the southwest. Tellingly, though, that candidate would be Buhari, a long-time politician, rather than a technocrat with no prior electoral experience.

In 2011 Jonathan won handily—roughly 59 percent to Buhari’s 32 percent—but problems soon emerged. Riots in northern cities followed the announcement of Jonathan’s electoral victory. In a development largely unrelated to electoral politics, the Boko Haram sect accelerated and intensified its attacks. In summer 2011, Boko Haram bombed the headquarters of the National Police Force along with a United Nations building. The Nigerian president began to seem unequal to the multiple challenges related to security and the economy.

This dynamic reinforced the importance of projecting economic competence by invoking the technocratic ideal. Jonathan sought a break with the image of Yar’Adua, portraying him as an isolated figure surrounded by cronies who were willing to sacrifice the country’s stability for their personal interests. Jonathan hoped to show that he had capable economic managers in the cabinet assembled after his election. Okonjo-Iweala was brought back from the World Bank to become Finance Minister, now with the added title of Coordinating Minister of the Economy—a super-technocrat.

Before long, however, there was political pushback against the administration’s economic policies. On New Year’s Day, 2012, the administration removed a subsidy on fuel, causing prices at the pump—or, more often, at stands where roadside hawkers sold fuel out of jerry cans—to double. The administration presented the removal of the subsidy as economic common sense, a maneuver necessary to balance the budget and eliminate corruption. Yet many ordinary Nigerians experienced it as the loss of one of the few benefits they personally had experienced from Nigeria’s massive oil wealth. Labor unions, digital activists, and ordinary citizens mobilized protests that compelled Jonathan to back down and partially reinstate the subsidy.

Amid the protests, which some digital activists dubbed “Occupy Nigeria” in solidarity with the anti-neoliberal “Occupy Wall Street” movement in the United States, Nigerian technocrats and the IFIs were the focus of this anger. Many protesters viewed the technocrats as the lackeys of those suspect institutions. This perception was reinforced by IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde’s visit to Nigeria in December 2011, just before the removal of the oil subsidy. When I talked with protesters in Kano in January 2012, it was clear that massive public anger was directed not just at Jonathan, but at the technocrats around him as well, particularly Okonjo-Iweala and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. That the anger openly included Sanusi was notable in Kano, Sanusi’s home city, where he is a member of the hereditary ruling family. In the public’s eyes, the fuel subsidy removal exposed technocrats as being thoroughly politicized.

Ironically, the next major economic scandal involved Sanusi, whose break with Jonathan deeply undermined the administration’s claims to technocratic, transparent economic management. In September 2013 Sanusi wrote a letter to Jonathan stating that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) had failed to “repatriate” nearly USD50 billion in proceeds to the Federal Government, in effect charging that the prime mechanism by which Nigeria’s oil benefited its people was broken. Sanusi “expressed a strong view that while Government needs to continue its effort to combat oil thieves, vandals and illegal refineries in the Niger Delta, the major problem is transactions taking place under legal cover with huge revenue leakages embedded therein” (2013:2). With these words, Sanusi questioned the government’s rhetoric about the oil-rich Niger Delta, the site of a 2006–2009 antigovernment insurgency which resulted in an uneasy peace and amnesty program which is still in place. Sanusi’s letter, which implied that by blaming low-level thieves in the Delta for shortfalls, the administration was concealing massive white-collar corruption at the NNPC, was leaked to the press three months later.

The stakes were high for Jonathan’s administration, for Sanusi’s letter questioned its technocratic credibility. Jonathan’s team responded with a personalized attack. Okonjo-Iweala and others set about questioning Sanusi’s numbers, which soon led the banker to adopt a revised figure of USD20 billion in missing remittances (Channels Television 2014b). In February 2014 the president sacked Sanusi, asserting that “Sanusi’s tenure has been characterised by various acts of financial recklessness and misconduct, which are inconsistent with the administration’s vision of a Central Bank propelled by the core values of focused economic management, prudence, transparency and financial discipline” (Channels Television 2014a). Jonathan’s statement upheld the technocratic ideal while excluding Sanusi from it. Sanusi, however, landed on his feet: with the backing of Kano’s state governor, who had left the PDP in 2013, Sanusi succeeded his great-uncle as Emir of Kano, one of the north’s most important hereditary Muslim offices.

Seeking to restore confidence in the technocratic and transparent character of the administration, Okonjo-Iweala hired the global consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers to audit the NNPC. When that firm delivered its final report in February 2015, shortly before that year’s election, it provided a conservative estimate of the shortfall—USD1.48 billion—but added that “the NNPC model of operation must be urgently reviewed and restructured,” especially given that “forty-six percent of proceeds of domestic crude oil revenues for the review period was spent on operations and subsidies” (PriceWaterhouseCoopers 2015:12). Hiring outside consultants helped give the administration technocratic cover, but this maneuver could not permanently shield the administration from questions about its management of Nigeria’s resources.

At the same time, the administration politicized another technocratic exercise: rebasing Nigeria’s GDP. Rebasing involves replacing an older “base year” with a newer year when calculating GDP; the base year is used in calculations in order to have a set of baseline figures from which to estimate growth while capturing the complexities of the economy as accurately as possible. Rebasing is a normal, cyclical process in economic calculations around the world, and Nigerian economic policymakers needed an updated base year. Nevertheless, rebasing can also have political implications, especially for incumbent administrations defending their economic records in the year before an election (Sy Reference Sy2015). Nigeria’s rebasing nearly doubled its GDP figure from USD262 billion to USD510 billion and showed that Nigeria had displaced South Africa as the continent’s largest economy. Okonjo-Iweala presented rebasing, justifiably, as a technocratic process, but the new data had undeniable political value, and Jonathan did not hesitate to use the data to his political advantage. In November 2014, when Jonathan declared his intention to seek a new term, he said: “Our economy is heading in the right direction and our efforts are yielding positive results. . . . Our country is now the top investment destination and the largest economy in Africa” (Jonathan Reference Jonathan2014).

Yet there was a gap between the rebased GDP figure on the one hand, and the realities of massive unemployment and poverty on the other. This gap exposed the administration and its technocrats to damning criticism. In January 2015, another former Central Bank Governor, Charles Soludo, published an op-ed entitled “Buhari Versus Jonathan, Beyond the Election.” Soludo argued that no matter who won the election, neither man “will be able to deliver on the fantastic promises being made on the economy.” He focused his assault, however, on the PDP’s “mismanagement of our economy,” highlighting Nigeria’s decreasing foreign reserves and rising debt. Soludo criticized Jonathan’s economic advisors, implying that technocratic pretense masked cronyism:

Promises of technocratic change, he suggested, had become mired in Nigeria’s highly personalized politics as usual.

It was not hard to detect in this a personal criticism of Okonjo-Iweala, and she responded heatedly. Challenging Soludo’s presentation of himself as a neutral technocrat, she recalled his failure to win political office, savaged his performance at the CBN, and portrayed him as an appointment-seeking opportunist. Responding to the substance of Soludo’s charges, Okonjo-Iweala placed blame for falling foreign reserves on oil theft and declining oil production. She then embarked on what was probably the most detailed defense of the Jonathan administration’s economic record to appear in print throughout the entire 2015 campaign. She challenged Soludo’s statistics on poverty and unemployment, detailed the president’s job creation programs, defended the administration’s borrowing and debt approaches, and touted initiatives in agriculture and infrastructure (Okonjo-Iweala Reference Okonjo-Iweala2015). This list of programs was framed as technocratic accomplishments but, in the context of the campaign, it amounted to a political endorsement.

Soludo’s next op-ed went even further in questioning Okonjo-Iweala’s integrity, depicting her technocratic defenses of the Jonathan administration as political rhetoric. Soludo not only accused Okonjo-Iweala of ignoring other politicians’ wrong-doings on issues like oil theft, but he also wrote, “What worries me is that this government is the first in our history to attempt to manipulate our national statistics under Okonjo-Iweala.” Behind her technocratic façade, Soludo implied, was an operator as ruthless as any other Nigerian politician, and as reckless with public money (Soludo Reference Soludo2015b).

As Soludo and Okonjo-Iweala argued over whose technocratic credentials could be trusted, the debate highlighted the difficulty that advocates of technocratic neoliberalism encountered in explaining the PDP’s record on job creation. Okonjo-Iweala acknowledged that Jonathan’s administration was falling short of the job creation necessary to keep pace with population growth while at the same time reducing unemployment. The idea that government could directly create jobs was off the table, and so she could only speak of “driving quality growth in key sectors” and “promoting entrepreneurship” (2015).

The APC was keen to exploit the PDP’s vulnerability on the economic front. The APC promised a different approach to economic management, one that would give the state a more direct role in job creation while reversing the PDP’s austerity program. Bola Tinubu—a key architect of the merger that formed the APC out of the ACN and other parties—positioned the Nigerian election as part of a broader, global debate over how to run large economies:

Challenging Okonjo-Iweala’s claims that low oil prices demanded austerity, Tinubu argued that the government should decouple the Nigerian naira from the U.S. dollar, and then print more naira in order to finance large infrastructure projects that would create jobs. If the government relied on local labor and reduced “superfluous imports,” Tinubu continued, it could avoid spurring inflation.

Just as important as the policies Tinubu proposed was his maneuver to portray the supposed economic wisdom of the Jonathan administration as outdated. Accusing the administration of “blindly impos[ing] last century’s policies in a modern setting inappropriate to the old strictures,” Tinubu relativized and questioned the administration’s claim to be enacting economic common sense. As discussed above, the APC won the presidential election for multiple reasons. But one key factor was that the image of technocratic competency, intended to shield the PDP from criticism, broke down, providing opportunities for disaffected technocrats like Soludo and opposition politicians like Tinubu to criticize the PDP’s economic management.

In closing, it is worth examining how those technocrats who entered electoral politics fared. Ribadu, as discussed above, placed third in the presidential election of 2011. He was recruited back to the PDP to run for governor in his home state of Adamawa where he again placed a distant third (Anwar 2015), unable to counter the APC’s networks and grassroots popularity in Adamawa, or to neutralize a third-party candidate who cast himself as the Christian alternative to both Ribadu and the PDP candidate (Muhammad 2015). Similarly, Charles Soludo failed in two attempts to become the governor of Anambra State: first in 2010, when he was the PDP candidate but lost to the incumbent governor; and again in 2013, when the All Progressives Grand Alliance party disqualified him from seeking its nomination. El-Rufai, meanwhile, remained with Buhari after the latter’s defeat in 2011. He became the APC candidate for the gubernatorial election in Kaduna, where he defeated the incumbent PDP governor in a landslide. These three examples show how difficult it is to turn technocratic capital into electoral success; El-Rufai’s victory and the losses of Ribadu and Soludo suggest that the technocrat-turned-politician must secure the solid backing of a political network in order to win elections, and cannot rely solely on personal reputation.

Other technocrats have sought to position themselves above the fray. After Boko Haram’s kidnapping of over 250 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno State, in April 2014, Ezekwesili became a co-founder and spokesperson for the “Bring Back Our Girls” campaign (Abdullahi Reference Abdullahi2014). The campaign’s heavy Twitter presence and sustained protests in Abuja became an embarrassment to the Jonathan administration. The campaign expanded its focus beyond the safe recovery of the girls, transitioning to a broader call for “good governance” (Bring Back Our Girls 2015). Yet Ezekwesili distanced herself from the APC, even as her co-founder Hadiza Bala-Usman joined Buhari’s campaign and subsequently became chief of staff to El-Rufai. Repositioning herself as a non-partisan critic of the system to which she had once belonged allowed Ezekwesili to claim continued status as a technocrat.