The Moral Economy of Zalunci Corruption and the Colonial State in Northern Nigeria

This paper argues that although corrupt practices are deeply embedded in Nigerian political culture, the label corruption is less so. During fieldwork in the 1990s, farmers I encountered who had little western education did not tend to use the Hausa-language terminology of corruption to describe such practices, but rather described them as zalunci, oppression, which indexes a very different conceptual universe. Zalunci is bad, but it is also naturally to be expected of state officials. It also is a moral discourse, a means of describing the behavior of particular officials. Individuals tend to accuse an officeholder of zalunci when that person both misbehaves and declines to offer patronage. Officeholders are expected to behave in an upright way and also to be generous to their subordinates, even though this often requires diverting public monies to private hands. The proposed paper explores this paradoxical set of expectations by focusing on the moral economy of zalunci, the ways in which it serves as a method of critique, disciplining people’s comportment within a normative universe of patron-client ties. In this way, zalunci can help to reveal the ways in which appropriate conduct is also experienced as a species of sentiment—the affective end of emotions like “respect” or “kindliness.” It begins by describing the 1990s conceptual universe of which zalunci was a part, and it continues by looking at how historicizing this category elucidates the history of Nigerian corruption. A culturally specific moral economy of emotion and affect has been radically transformed across the past century as local political culture has been incorporated into successively larger political formations—northern Nigeria, and the contemporary federal republic.