PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] – Nigeria is the wealthiest nation in Africa. Yet provision of basic services is often lacking, and Nigerians can be heard saying that “every household is its own local government.” What they mean is that politicians and government institutions have not delivered—and cannot be trusted to ensure—even the most basic services that people expect as citizens of Africa’s most populous nation. Individuals, households, and communities must, therefore, fend for themselves.

Professor of Anthropology Daniel Jordan Smith’s current research examines the ways that Nigerians develop technologies, businesses, social networks, political ties, and other cultural strategies to cope with the many infrastructural challenges in the domains of water, power, transportation, security, communication, and education.

“Over the past 30 years, I have lived and worked in Nigeria for about eight years in total. During that time, I have constantly observed both Nigerians’ struggles and frustrations with the state’s failure to provide basic infrastructure and social services and the imaginative, entrepreneurial ways that people adapt to these circumstances,” Smith said. “I decided to do a research project on the topic because I think it is impossible to understand the experience of everyday life in Nigeria without attending to how people address problems of infrastructure. I also came to think that the very nature of the state and citizenship are bound up with these problems.”

With recently awarded seed funding from the PSTC, Smith is using ethnographic methods to compare informal economic and entrepreneurial strategies and processes across multiple arenas of infrastructure. His study is investigating—and aims to explain—not only the consequences for human welfare, but also the effects on political culture, state-society relations, and government capacity.

“Whether it is individuals, households, or whole communities, Nigerians are constantly engaged in efforts to address infrastructural uncertainties and deficiencies,” Smith said. “Communities create voluntary vigilante groups to make up for police failure to provide security, parents pay tutors to fill in for what schools don’t teach, households buy water from wealthier neighbors who turn boreholes into businesses, and motorcycles are deployed as taxis to address a deficit in public transportation.”   

Smith noted that in his research thus far it is already clear that “the state only appears to be absent in this world of woeful infrastructure. Most of the entrepreneurial activities through which Nigerians create and maintain basic infrastructure require engagement with the state.” This has sparked his interest in “how all this sheds light on the nature of state power and the meaning and experience of citizenship.”