Nigeria: Trust Your Patron, not the Institutions

Abstract

AbstractIn Nigeria, trust and mistrust remain a permanent and sensitive issue. This obviously concerns elite-population relationships or rather – when considering the personalized and particularistic aspects of political life- between patrons and their dependants. This issue of trust is also crucial when it comes to relations among "Big Men" leading factions cutting across communities. Emphasizing the lack of confidence in the institutions and the difficult question of reliance within informal clientelistic networks, this article proposes interpretations based on the study of socio-political relations in a long-term perspective.