Social contracts in transformation: Tax reform in Nigeria

This application seeks to develop work on the evolution and impacts of new forms of direct and indirect taxation in Nigeria, an African federal polity hitherto heavily reliant on natural resource rents, which is now undergoing an emergent transformation towards direct taxation in many of its constituent states. By looking at how citizens and state actors perceive and interact with new revenue-raising initiatives by sub-national bodies, I seek to critically examine expectations of new forms of social contract between citizens and state, and to identify the emergent implications for modes of governance, using political anthropology as the central methodology.

The Nigerian state has been heavily fiscally reliant on oil revenues for the past four decades, producing a situation which has led to a mutual disconnect in accountability between citizens and state. Now, many of the Federal Republic of Nigeria's 36 constituent states are looking beyond their limited share of national oil resources to raise more money from direct taxes on the economic activities of people and businesses. Classical social theory on taxation and accountability suggests that as governments introduce direct taxation, publics will make more demands on government to show what is done with 'their' money, leading to a social contract in which taxation and representation are mutually productive.

Contemporary Nigeria is an ideal place to see this process in action and to test its assumptions. Ideas of social contract, or of the roles of government and public, and of state and political power more broadly, are strongly conditioned by historical experiences and cultural framings which mean that we cannot simply assume a normative idea of social contract. Current tax reforms are situated atop an accumulation of past practices and meanings, which implicate our consideration of precolonial, colonial and post-colonial administrative and coercive practices, communal identities, political loyalties and ideas of governmental authority and legitimacy, or the lack of it.

The research will build upon my previous research on policing in Nigeria, by adopting a similar perspective, working as participant observer not just with the public as they interact with revenue officials and become subject to new forms of taxation demands, but also working 'inside' the state with revenue officials themselves, to ascertain with what meanings they imbue their work, and what practices they evolve in pursuit of its goals, as an emergent transition in political economy gathers pace.

There are a number of potential audiences for the outputs of this research. Academic direct beneficiaries in the UK and Nigeria have been recounted above. In addition, throughout this study, related teaching within my Department and elsewhere in the university (for instance supervising students considering dissertations in directly-related fields) will add some indirect academic impact in anthropology, African studies, African politics and development studies.

In the UK, there is a policymaker audience which has a direct interest in this field, building on the interest expressed by the Parliamentary International Development Committee cited above. As with my previous research on policing, I will actively follow up interested parties within the UK's Department for International Development (DfID) and Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) and present findings to them at in-house round-tables. I will also make use of my existing linkages to the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham House) to convene a policymaker and stakeholder discussion there on the themes raised by this research, and build on existing linkages with research staff supporting the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Nigeria, with a view to presenting selected research outputs to interested MPs who have a voice in policy processes affecting UK support for governance reforms in Nigeria.

Within Nigeria, the DfID country office in Abuja, having previously supported a South-West Nigeria Forum on Internally-Generated Revenue, now runs a number of projects related to sub-national revenue and to accountability, such as the £31 million State Accountability and Voice Initiative (SAVI), whose project and supervisory staff would have a direct interest in the findings where they inform the nature of their engagements. National civil society organisations working on fiscal governance and citizen participation may also be interested. But the most significant potential audience for these research outputs are the growing number of states engaged in internal revenue reforms, some of whom have already expressed interest in my proposed research. The core stakeholders to prioritise in dissemination are participating state authorities and their peers, mainly the Ministries of Finance in the states concerned and outside, who can use findings of my research to inform their ongoing policy work.

I have made preliminary enquiries of a number of states from my selected shortlist, and after discussion with the Commissioner for Finance, Ekiti State Government, I have a letter in support of my research expressing their willingness to collaborate and their interest in making use of relevant findings (see uploaded attachments). In designing this research I am also building on a successful record of collaboration between Oxford University and Lagos State Government, which has already made use of previous survey findings on attitudes towards taxation by the African Studies Centre/Centre for the Study of African Economies. I will also explore ways to reach other interested states via the influential Governors' Forum, a non-governmental public policy discussion body which brings together sub-national government executives.

In order to be as widely accessible as possible, working papers - accessibly-worded in-progress drafts of outputs - will be posted to the web. Although a dedicated website is not necessary for a project of this size, I envisage making use of the existing Nigeria Research Network sub-site hosted by Oxford Department of International Development, with its established specialist traffic. As web access in Nigeria is often limited by smaller bandwidth, the same materials and links will also be shared with a wider network of researchers in and on Nigeria by posting to the (separate) informal Nigeria research network Yahoo group, a frequently-used information- and data- sharing resource for researchers which this investigator was instrumental in setting up.