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In today's world, entrepreneurialism is frequently promoted for its potential to address major global social problems. Entrepreneurs are often celebrated for their ability to achieve what governments and development programs commonly fail to do: deliver sustainable economic and social benefits to poor people in the Global South. Typically, entrepreneurship is seen as bypassing the state. This essay offers a different perspective, showing how, in Nigeria, entrepreneurial enterprises geared to provide access to potable water because the government fails to do so paradoxically serve the interests of those who control the state. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research in southeastern Nigeria, and using examples of private borehole vendors and "pure water" sachet manufacturers, I argue that ordinary people's infrastructural entrepreneurialism not only requires regular engagement with government officials. It also contributes significantly to the experience of citizenship and the exercise and consolidation of state power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The book "Pastoral Power, Clerical State: Pentecostalism, Gender, and Sexuality in Nigeria" by Ebenezer Obadare explores the rise of Pentecostal pastors to positions of political influence in Nigeria. The author argues that pastors have gained political prominence by appealing to both political elites and ordinary people through the belief that the spiritual world is more real and consequential than the visible world. The book also examines the impact of military rule on the ascendancy of pastors and the decline of the intellectual class in Nigeria. Additionally, it explores the role of gender and sexuality in pastors' political power. The book raises questions about the beliefs and interests of pastors and politicians in the power of the spiritual realm. Overall, the book provides original insights and a thought-provoking analysis of the political power of Pentecostalism in Nigeria. [Extracted from the article]

"Good Governance in Nigeria: Rethinking Accountability and Transparency in the Twenty-First Century" by Portia Roelofs explores the concept of good governance in Nigeria, challenging the prevailing notion that Nigeria is not a suitable case study for this topic. The author argues for the importance of socially embedded good governance, using the Lagos Model as a focal point. Roelofs deconstructs the concept of neo-patrimonialism and highlights the desire of Nigerian citizens for socially accountable politicians. The book incorporates a wide range of research, including ethnographic fieldwork and archival study, and engages with political theory to examine the implications of socially embedded good governance. The book is well-written and incorporates scholarship from Nigerian researchers, providing a comprehensive understanding of the topic. The author's findings may have practical implications, as Nigeria's new president, Bola Tinubu, was involved in implementing the Lagos Model and may apply its lessons at the national level. [Extracted from the article]

Preachers of the prosperity gospel in Nigeria criticise politicians' greed and government corruption, even as many church leaders amass great wealth themselves. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article explores the relationship between Pentecostalism's prosperity gospel and political culture in Nigeria, especially as it pertains to problems of inequality and corruption. The analysis builds on a case study of one particular prosperity church in the city of Umuahia. It addresses the paradox that this brand of Pentecostalism articulates widespread discontent with the venality plaguing national political culture, while at the same time offering divine justification for the pursuit and accumulation of wealth. Examining not only Pentecostals' interpretations of corruption, but also people's responses to scandals within these churches, the paper attempts to understand why Nigerians who are so aggrieved about corruption and inequality are at the same time drawn to churches that appear to reproduce many of the same dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In southeastern Nigeria, several interconnected processes of social change are combining to delay parenthood. Most of the demographic and social sciences literature examining the postponement of parenthood has paid primary attention to women. To address this gap, this article foregrounds the changing social landscape of masculinity as a significant context within which to situate these demographic changes. At the core of Nigerian men's perceptions, decisions, and behaviors with regard to delaying fatherhood is a fundamental contradiction, one that seems to be common in many settings—at least many African settings—of contemporary demographic transition. The contradiction is that while the postponement of parenthood is associated historically with positive social and economic indicators, when Nigerian men articulate their rationales for delaying fatherhood (and marriage) they commonly describe feelings of uncertainty connected to a sense of struggle and deprivation. This article connects men's anxieties about—and delays embarking on—marriage and parenthood to their experiences of economic uncertainty, and specifically to the perceived need for money as the foundation for successful reproduction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the publication and reception of my book about corruption in Nigeria as a form of ethnographic evidence that is useful to interrogate the fraught relationship between the concepts of culture and corruption. The evidence points to multiple misunderstandings--but also to the powerful political purposes for which accusations of corruption (and, more specifically, notions of corruption as a cultural problem) can be wielded. This essay builds on work in anthropology that takes seriously the reality that the people we study may read what we write, and it uses local reactions to a monograph about corruption as analytical leverage to illuminate the anthropology of corruption. But this article takes the examination of local responses to a book about corruption one step further, comparing them with the reception and critiques generated within anthropology. I argue that, in juxtaposing these reactions, we can see the many ways that concepts of corruption and culture--and the understanding of the relationship between the two--can be mobilized for different purposes and with different effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on anthropological field work in southeastern Nigeria, this paper explores the public concerns and everyday experience of corruption in a society still living with the legacies of the Biafran secession attempt. The paper shows how the revival of Igbo nationalism and resentment over perceived marginalisation is fuelled by perceptions that the corrupt machinery of the federal government runs against the interests of the Igbo people, and funnels resources away from the southeast as punishment for the failed separatist struggle more than 40 years ago. Hence, complaints about corruption are used to critique the Nigerian state and other regional or ethnic groups, but they also figure in an internally focused critique by Igbos of their own complicity in Nigeria’s endemic corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Using two ethnographic case studies, the intersecting dynamics of inequality, morality, and corruption are examined as they play out in Nigerian AIDS NGOs. To the Nigerian public, local AIDS organizations are widely seen as conduits for corruption. But local opinions of particular NGOs and their leaders turn less on whether donor resources were misused and more on the ways that people who accumulate the benefits of corruption use them socially. Nevertheless, discontent swirls about corruption in general, a fact that suggests a gradual change in people''s understandings of the processes that produce inequality in Nigeria. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Like many African rural-to-urban migrants, Igbo-speaking migrants to cities in Nigeria maintain close ties to their places of origin. 'Home people' constitute a vital core of most migrants' social networks. The institution of kinship enables migrants to negotiate Nigeria's clientelistic political economy. In this context, dichotomous distinctions between rural and urban can be inappropriate analytical concepts because kinship obligations and community ties that extend across rural and urban space create a continuous social field. This paper presents ethnographic data to suggest that fertility behavior in contemporary Igbo-speaking Nigeria cannot be understood without taking into account the ways in which rural and urban social and demographic regimes are mutually implicated and dialectically constituted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: As millions of people infected with HIV in Africa are increasingly able to live longer and healthier lives because of access to antiretroviral therapy, concerns have emerged that people might eschew protective practices after their health improves. Extending beyond the notion of sexual “disinhibition,” researchers have begun to analyze the sexual behavior of people in treatment through the perspective of their marital and childbearing aspirations. This article explores the reproductive life projects of HIV-positive men and women in southeastern Nigeria, showing how actions that contradict medical advice are understandable in the context of patients’ socially normative desires for marriage and children. Based on in-depth interviews and observations (June–December 2004; June–July 2006; June–July 2007) of people enrolled in the region’s oldest treatment program, we argue that broadly held social expectations with regard to reproduction are experienced even more acutely by HIV-positive people. This is because in Nigeria the stigma associated with AIDS is closely tied to widespread perceptions of social and moral crisis, such that AIDS itself is seen as both a cause and a symptom of anxiety-producing forms of social change. Specifically, in an era of rapid societal transformation, Nigerians see sexual promiscuity and the alienation of young people from traditional obligations to kin and community as indicative of threatened social reproduction. For people who are HIV-positive, marrying and having children offer not only the opportunity to lead normal lives, but also a means to mitigate the stigma associated with the disease. Four ethnographic case studies are provided to exemplify how and why social and personal life projects can trump or complicate medical and public health priorities. These examples suggest that treatment programs must openly address and proactively support the life projects of people on antiretroviral therapy if the full benefits of expanded access to treatment are to be realized. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article examines corruption in Nigeria's development sector, particularly in the vastly growing arena of local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Grounded in ethnographic case studies, the analysis explores why local NGOs in Nigeria have proliferated so widely, what they do in practice, what effects they have beyond their stated aims, and how they are perceived and experienced by ordinary Nigerians. It shows that even faux NGOs and disingenuous political rhetoric about civil society, democracy, and development are contributing to changing ideals and rising expectations in these same domains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For women in Nigeria, as in many settings, simply being married can contribute to the risk of contracting HIV. I studied men's extramarital sexual behavior in the context of modern marriage in southeastern Nigeria. The results indicate that the social organization of infidelity is shaped by economic inequality, aspirations for modern lifestyles, gender disparities, and contradictory moralities. It is men's anxieties and ambivalence about masculinity, sexual morality, and social reputation in the context of seeking modern lifestyles— rather than immoral sexual behavior and traditional culture—that exacerbate the risks of HIV/AIDS. (Am J Public Health. 2007;97:997-1005. doi:10.2105/AJPH. 2006.088583) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Nigeria, research has documented a significant disparity between people's knowledge of HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they act to protect themselves. Data from a survey of 863 adolescent and unmarried young adults, in-depth interviews, and participant observation are combined in this study to explain some of this discrepancy. Young migrants appear to make sexual and contraceptive decisions in relation to gender norms and attitudes concerning procreation at least as much as in relation to fear of disease. Assessments of current and potential partners, choices about whether or not to have sex, and decisions about whether or not to use condoms are influenced by shared cultural values regarding the importance of parenthood. These cultural conceptions of parenthood are gender-specific and put men and women in different negotiating positions with regard to sex and contraception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In sub-Saharan Africa, rural-urban relationships are primary arenas in which social change is shaped, expressed, and contested. Like people in many contemporary African societies, rural-urban migrants of the lgbo ethnic group in Nigeria face powerful expectations to be buried "at home" in their ancestral villages and to perform elaborate and expensive funeral ceremonies for their dead relatives. This article argues that lgbo funerals crystallize many of the structural paradoxes associated with inequality in Nigerian society particularly as they are manifest in kin-based patron-client relations between rural communities and their migrant kin. The tensions that coalesce around burials illustrate how rituals are not only socially integrative but also can reflect, reveal, and contribute to discontents regarding transformations in the organization and extent of social inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Nigeria, popular understandings of HIV/AIDS and individual risk assessment and behaviour unfold within an interpretative grid that draws on a religious moral framework. This paper reports results from a two-year study of HIV/AIDS-related beliefs and behaviour among adolescent and young adult rural-urban migrants in two Nigerian cities. The young people in the study originate from south-eastern Nigeria; they almost uniformly identify themselves as Christian; and they commonly situate their understandings and explain their behaviours in response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic in terms of religion, especially in relation to the increasingly popular and dominant religious discourses of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. Findings suggest that popular religious interpretations of HIV risk pose real dangers, leading many young migrants to imagine themselves as at little or no risk, and contributing to inconsistent protective practices. The study highlights the limitations of intervention strategies that ignore the extent to which religion, health, sexuality and morality intersect in people's everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The disparity between people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS and the extent to which they take measures to protect themselves is one of the most vexing issues for public health workers and social science analysts. This paper aims to explain some of this discrepancy, using survey and ethnographic data collected among young rural-urban migrants in Aba and Kano, two cities in Nigeria. The paper argues that many young Nigerian migrants do not perceive significant personal risk because they construct the risk of AIDS in ethical and moral terms, projecting immorality and danger onto imaginary others. To understand the way young Nigerians interpret risk, the paper focuses on four related issues: (1) the organization and meaning of sexual relationships; (2) the intersection of gender and ideas about reproduction; (3) the perception of AIDS as a disease without hope; and (4) the importance of religion in young people's framing of moralities and ethical choices about sexuality and HIV/AIDS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the ways in which family planning program personnel in Nigeria appropriate population program resources and models of social change to suit local priorities. The family planning project discussed here was manipulated by local officials as an instrument of patronage in a manner that exemplified the benefits of having strong and reliable kinship networks. The article explains the “corruption” that characterizes donor-funded projects by situating the actions of project personnel in the context of local political economy and culture. The phenomenon of training workshops is examined to show how these workshops satisfy simultaneously the competing priorities of donors and local participants. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Examines the relationship between gender and extramarital sex in southeastern Nigeria. Types of extramarital sexual relationships; Rules of infidelity; Negotiation of contraception in extramarital sex.

Reports the case of ritual killing in Nigeria. Emphasis on the issues of wealth, power, and inequality; Focus on the stories of occult; Awareness of the role of the people in maintaining patron-clientism.

Young Igbo men and women in Nigeria increasingly insist on choosing their marriage partners, and ideas about love are shaping Igbo constructions of marriage. But the viability of marriage still depends on fertility. This article examines the divergent consequences for men and women as they negotiate the transition from the role of romantic lover that now commonly characterizes courtship to the roles of mother and father, embedded in webs of kinship, that characterize marriage. (Igbo, Nigeria, marriage, courtship, gender, fertility, love) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the social context of premarital sexual relations among young people in south-eastern Nigeria. Conflicts between contemporary sexual identities and traditional models of gender and family; Increasing prevalence of premarital sexual relations in Nigeria; Moral implications of premarital sexual activity in Nigeria.

The article presents the author's response to Eric Uslaner's review of his book "A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria." He agrees with Uslaner's claim that his book refers relatively little to a vast political science literature on corruption. He explains why he considered corruption in Nigeria as different from other countries.