Authority Stealing Anti-Corruption War and Democratic Politics in Post-Military Nigeria

The post-Cold War world has produced a global consensus on the devastation caused by corruption in society. However, in spite of the growing awareness of the danger that corruption constitutes to democracy and development, and the growing number of anti-corruption agencies in Africa in the last decade, there is yet no elaborate scholarly focus on these agencies, most of which were created in the wake of the recent expansion of multi-party democracy in Africa. As a corrective to this, Authority Stealing chronicles the story of Nuhu Ribadu, arguably Africa’s most courageous and most successful anti-corruption Czar and former head of Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The book places the anti-graft exploits of Ribadu in post-military Nigeria on a larger canvass of the crisis of nationhood in a country in which public office is regarded as an ‘eatery.’

This revealing and riveting narrative of one of Africa’s biggest cesspools of graft explains how the systemic or structural crisis which reproduces a thieving ruling class in a typical postcolonial state has pushed a country with an abundance of human and material resources to the bottom of the global human development index. This crisis has also led to the phenomenon of the advance-fee fraud, otherwise known globally as ‘Nigerian 419’ or ‘Nigerian Scam.’ While focusing on the era of democracy in Nigeria, the book uses biographical, structural and historical perspectives covering fifty years of Nigeria’s existence, illuminating the paradoxes of anti-corruption campaign in Africa.