Preamble
In the age of networks, the relationship of the citizens to the body politic is in competition with the infinity of connections they establish outside it. (Guehenno 1995, p. 19)
In an era of increasingly transnational loyalties, regional politics and global economic regimes …, diasporic affiliations and mobile, media-linked communities of migrants are redrawing the relationship of location and affiliation. Sri Lankan Tamils, Kurds, Chinese emigrants, Indian techno-coolies, each in their own way, owe their allegiance to multiple forms of citizenship. Their mental geography is surely no longer Westphalian. (Appadurai 2002 , p. 43)
Like that of Barber, such questions have, for the most part, arisen out of a totally understandable fascination with matters surrounding autochthony and citizenship (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000, Ceuppens and Geschiere 2005) in Western European societies. They have been echoed amid intellectual, cultural and political anxiety about the fate of Western societies apparently chafing under the weight of immigration, mostly from the former colonies, but also from the not-so privileged Eastern margins of Europe. Klusmeyer admits that ‘one of the main reasons for current debates about citizenship is a growing concern over finding new frameworks for integration amid our increasingly ethnically and racially diverse societies’ (2001. p. 11, emphasis added). Clearly, then, issues of citizenship and belonging are never far away when (transnational) migration is at issue, and in the case of a cross-section of Western societies, it is not far-fetched to suggest that concerns about the possibility of being overwhelmed by what is invariably labelled a ‘wave’ of immigrants is one factor behind many individuals' sudden rediscovery of their long lost sense of ‘ethnic identity.’
However, while the interest in this exploratory article is also on transnational migration as it relates to citizenship, the target is not the destination societies of transnational migrants, or ‘those who leave’, but rather the societies that migrants have ‘left behind’. The key question put forward in this article concerns the politico-civic implications of the dependence on remittances by an increasing segment of the population in recipient countries,2 and while this and corollary questions are proposed in the immediate context of Nigeria (Africa's most populous country and its largest recipient of workers' remittances), the reverberations for many African countries cannot be overemphasised. One aim is to facilitate a coincidence among three categories of literature: on transnational migration, on workers' financial remittances and on citizenship. This, it is assumed, will deepen scholarly understanding of the motivation for transnational migration, the effects of financial remittances, the paradoxes and contradictions of belonging in receiving societies, and the pressures on the nation-state as the supreme form of human solidarity.
These concerns are particularly exigent in contemporary Africa, a continent still associated with severe socio-political dysfunctionalities, including the so-called ‘sovereignty gap’ (Ghani and Lockhart 2008) and massive disaffection between the ‘state’ and ‘citizens’ (Taiwo 2004). While these problems have attracted growing scholarly interest, the role of transnational migration (especially the implications of the dependence on ‘external grants’ by a rising proportion of the population) is absent from most analyses.
One explanation for this is that although migration is a profoundly ‘social act’ (Castells 2000), research on it, especially in the African context, has been historically dominated by demographers, statisticians and economists (Borjas 1995, Afolayan 2002) for whom state–society relations are not always of primary research interest. Second, although research into emigration from Africa has grown within the past decade, the research landscape appears predictable in terms of the areas of interest and the types of questions to which scholars are seeking answers. One example is the growing development-focused literature on financial remittances in recipient countries, which continues to be dominated by issues such as the relationship between senders and receivers (Suro 2003); remittances and expenditure (Taylor and Mora 2006); remittances and ‘poverty alleviation’ (Sumata 2002, Adams 2006, Bracking and Sachikonye 2006); remittances and fair financial access (Orozco and Millis 2007); the role of remittances during crises (Lindley 2006, Savage and Harvey 2007); the ‘economic impact’ of remittances (Kabki et al. 2004, Ghosh 2006); ‘tracking flows’ of remittances (Suro 2003); remittances and ‘community development’ (de la Garza and Lowell 2002); ‘evaluations, performance and implications of remittances’ (Keely and Tran 1989); and remittances and housing investments (Osili 2004).
Although there is nothing wrong in speculating on the ‘development’ potential of remittances, the article wishes to highlight the obvious failure to take the next logical step as far as the implications of continued reliance on remittances is concerned. The failure to make the ‘economic’ speak to the ‘political’ is itself apparently a legacy of the dualist imagination evident in early literature on the causes of (African) migration (Castells 1972, Baker and Aina 1995), a problem Oritz (2000) summarises thus:
Many academics tend to take into consideration either the economic forces of migration or the social. The economic theories focus solely on the economic motives of why people migrate; ignoring completely social forces that may play a role as well. On the other hand, the socially oriented theories focus only on the transnational connections, leaving the economic forces out altogether. (Ortiz 2000 , p. 10)
These, among other vital questions, have been overlooked by a literature seemingly obsessed with establishing correlations between remittances and development – itself an irony, given that the same literature admits routinely that remittances finance the reconstruction of urban neighbourhoods (in addition, it could be added, to transforming local power relations). What does this dynamic suggest about what Jean and John Comaroff (2006a) describe as the dwindling capacity of the nation-state to sustain its infrastructure?
Suffice to say then that the object in this article is political, and is predicated on the logic that while a focus on development may very well be inescapable, given Africa's well documented throes, this might actually be redundant in societies where commentators legitimately fear the disappearance of both the state and citizenship as we have come to know and/or understand them.3 What type of development should we be talking about in contexts where the state has become little more than a shell, and its citizens may be resident but are, arguably, not actually present? Two decades ago, Ayoade (1988) speculated on what he saw at the time as an emergent phenomenon: the possibility of ‘states without citizens’ in Africa. His argument rested on what he called the ‘congenital dichotomy’ (1988, p. 104) between ‘the government’ and ‘the people’ in Africa, one that intensified as the majority of African states languished in the grip of ‘postcolonial bureaupathology’ (1988, p. 107). More recently, and writing about Nigeria in particular (but no doubt with the rest of Africa in mind), Daniel Bach (2006) had cause to fear the possible emergence of a related phenomenon: a country without a state. Bach's thesis is that ‘decades of institutional decay and the erosion of territorial control point to the steady transformation of Nigeria into a country without a state’ (2006, p. 85).
As critical milestones, these analyses give a good indication of how deeply embedded the crisis in Africa is. This article seeks to build on their insight by introducing a dimension which these and similar literatures have largely ignored – the way in which transnational migration (specifically the reliance on remittances) complicates the socio-political reality in Nigeria and a growing number of African countries, particularly with regard to its implication for state-citizen relations. The analysis can be located within the rubric of transformations in citizenship in the era of transnationalism, globalisation and increasing cosmopolitanism (McKinley 2009).
In what follows, the article first discusses the rising importance of financial remittances in the context of the discourse on transnational migration. This part of the article is crucial as it provides a setting for the subsequent discussion on the connection between remittances and citizenship. It is shown how remittances are part and parcel of the contemporary migration complex, and how they are implicated in what Sassen (2004) describes as the ‘migra-exuberance’ of people from societies of the global South. Since this is ultimately meaningful against the background of an existing pattern of intercourse between state and citizens, the subsequent section puts state–citizen relations in Nigeria in socio-historical context. While situating the characteristics, contradictions and circumstances of social and political citizenship in Nigeria within the broader genealogy of the formation of the postcolonial state, it is argued that the steady dissipation of governmental influence across all levels of society (Sassen 2004) has given rise to a situation in which people have learnt to live simultaneously ‘within’ the state and ‘outside’ it. Reliance on foreign financial grants appears to deepen this antinomy. In endorsing Taiwo's formulation that there are no citizens in Nigeria, but only citizens of Nigeria (Taiwo 2004, p. 58; see also Taiwo 1991; emphases added), it is shown here how the relationship between the ‘petro-state’ and citizens in Nigeria has led to a progressive devaluation of citizenship. The article concludes by summarising the argument and reflecting critically on the place of citizenship in the current transnational era.
Finally, a caveat on the nature and intention of this article. As a way of setting a concrete intellectual agenda for further research, the chief goal is to pose the critical, sociologically interesting questions which, it is argued, have been largely marginalised from the literatures on transnational migration, remittances and citizenship. It is suggested that these questions are critical for apprehending the changing forms of belonging across African society.
Transnational resource flow and transnational migration: refocusing the debate
Interest in worker remittances to migrants' countries of origin has intensified due to at least two sets of reasons. One is the phenomenal increase in the amount of money that migrants are known to be sending to their dependants (families, relatives and friends) in their countries of origin.4 This has made such monies hard to ignore as a determinant factor in the lives of millions of individuals across the global South. Second, because of their volume, the fact that a growing number of households all over the world now appear to depend entirely on them for basic private provisioning, and the fact that in most of those countries remittances are indeed several times larger than both development aid and foreign direct investment, a debate has erupted over how or whether they might be the long sought-for solution to the conundrum of underdevelopment in these societies.
Fajnzylber and Lopez's overview of the situation in Latin America neatly captures this scenario:
Workers' remittances have become extremely important for many Latin American economies. Indeed, Latin America was the region that received the largest volume of remittances in 2006: more than US$50 billion. This amount multiplied by 25 over the past 25 years, and today represents about 70 per cent of foreign direct investment flows and is almost eight times larger than official development assistance flows to the region. The largest absolute amount goes to Mexico, where annual remittance flows are above US$20 billion, and the highest as a percentage of GDP goes to Haiti, where remittances represent about 50 per cent of GDP. In El Salvador, remittances are equivalent to US$400 per capita, and in the Dominican Republic, more than 20 per cent of the families report receiving remittances. (Fajnzylber and Lopez, 2008 , p. xix)
These figures have not only heightened academic and policy interest in remittances as a possible tool of economic development; they have also encouraged the tendency to reduce the entire process of transnational migration to workers' remittances, something evident in official statements by political leaders in different African countries. For example, the Nigerian Government, hardly renowned for its attention to Nigerian ‘citizens’ within Nigeria, has suddenly become enamoured of Nigerians outside the borders of Nigeria, presumably because of the perceived potential benefits of the remittances that they send back home. The outbreak of official infatuation with ‘Nigerians in the diaspora’ has led to a range of rash pledges, such as a promise to regularly consult with them on political matters, and a commitment by the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr Dimeji Bankole, to speed up the process by which Nigerians abroad will finally be able to vote in future elections,5 a ritual, it must be pointed out, that is nothing more than symbolic as far as respect for the sanctity of elections and the reality of its relationship with the enactment of actual citizenship are concerned. Arguably the most improbable of the proposals is the pledge by the government to build a ‘diaspora village’ in Abuja, the federal capital. Addressing the first Nigerians in Diaspora Organisation (NIDO) conference in Toronto in January 2007, the Minister then in charge of the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Mallam Nasir El-Rufai, revealed the Nigerian Government's plans to build a village that would serve as what the Minister ambiguously referred to as a ‘social development corridor’.
Development at all costs
The tendency to reduce the totality of transnational migration to remittance flows, and the largely unproven belief in their developmental impact, has led to the emergence of remittances as what Kapur (2003) calls ‘the new development mantra’. This has led to a quest to establish causal relationship between remittances and ‘development’ and to show how remittance flows enable development. The World Bank is one of the leading proponents of the remittance–poverty alleviation–development thinking, producing books, working papers and briefs, all of which fit broadly into this framework. There are several problems with this approach, most having to do with fairly well-established critiques of the development paradigm in general.
The search for ‘development through remittances’ is not limited to the World Bank. As is seen in the Nigerian example, much national state focus these days is on the assumed development impact of remittances. Another example, this time at the global policy level, is the Regional Consultation on Migration, Remittances and Development in Africa held in Accra, Ghana in September 2007. This consultation took place under the aegis of the (Sixth) Coordination Meeting on International Migration, organised by the Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. In a statement which encapsulates the point the article has been trying to articulate, the Consultation declared as its main objective the creation of ‘an intra-Africa dialogue including with the Diaspora to explore strategic options to maximise the developmental impact of remittances’. In seeking to ‘maximise’ the developmental impact of remittances, the Consultation basically assumed a consensus on the (positive) impact of remittances on development. This explains its subsequent focus on issues such as ‘how to channel remittances for investment and development’ (emphasis added); providing financial education for remittance users; generating gender-specific data on women-headed households and their investment choices; making the regulatory environment more favourable to senders and receivers; and reducing transaction costs of sending and receiving remittances.
How can this determination to see remittances as a development tool be explained, even when evidence on the relationship between the two remains inconclusive? Part of the explanation is that knowledge of the massive scale of migrant worker remittances has coincided with the exact moment in global history when the urge to find ‘a lasting cure’ for the malaise of underdevelopment in the so-called ‘Third World’ is arguably at its most intense. In addition, focusing on remittances has helped many African states to deflect attention from their own failings as far as intelligent and prudent management of their economies is concerned. Again, Nigeria is a good example. Much has been made of the fact that, with an official influx of over US$3 billion annually, Nigeria is the top recipient of remittances in sub-Saharan Africa. However, this ought to be set against the fact that in the 30-year period between 1970 and 2000, the Nigerian state earned more than US$400 billion, mostly from oil revenues, while, within the same period, the number of Nigerian ‘citizens’ subsisting on less than US$1 a day grew from 36 per cent to over 70 per cent, from 19 million people to a staggering 90 million (Watts 2004). Therefore, for states like Nigeria it is more beneficial for a kleptocratic political elite to focus on the US$3 billion worker remittances, rather than on the criminally mismanaged US$400 billion.
Third, speculations on the development capacity of remittances tend to ignore or downplay one of their salient characteristics: they are often ‘unbundled’ and distributed among several apparently ‘unrelated’ individuals (with contrasting pressing needs) in the recipient country, a feature which makes them difficult to ‘aggregate’ or pool for strategic goals. Finally, the failure to see remittances outside this narrow tunnel of assumed economic ‘benefits’ is symptomatic of a failure to imagine and explore how apparently economic acts are situated within larger socio-political ambiances, how economic acts can and often produce political consequences, and how they are often direct and indirect products of political action.
From economics to politics
It is by no means being suggested that remittances have no economic consequences, whether for individuals or households, or even for the local economy, or that these are not important enough to arrest academic/policy attention. The argument is that in their seeming obsession with ‘trees’ – macroeconomic effects of remittances, tracking remittance volumes and flows, etc. – scholars appear to be neglecting the ‘forest’; that is, the political matrix within which the ‘remittance class’ is produced and reproduced, and the types of civic reflexes observable in dependants on remittances. The guiltiest in this regard are those who glibly promote remittances as a motor of development, seemingly oblivious of the fact that
… an archaeology of development demands a full grasp of location, situating it historically (in tracing its complex genealogy and meanings, particularly to the eighteenth century), geographically (in relation to sites of productions, routes of movement and patterns of reception), and culturally (in relation to the West's self-representation, of reason and the Enlightenment). (Watts 2003 , p. 8)
There is therefore no doubt that remittances can impact on politics in different ways. However, in this article the focus is on citizenship because, as is argued, the civic arena is the logical and most important one to explore, given the emergent patterns of being and belonging produced by the dependence on remittances. In the case of African societies, a veritable ‘playground of citizenship’ (Ratna Kapur 2007), this task is especially pertinent for three related reasons.
A first reason is the history of remittances themselves. While current transnational resource flows may be distinguished by their sheer size and scale, they have antecedents in those parts of Africa where remittances of some sort have always been integral to socio-economic negotiations between rural and urban households. Hyden (2006) describes that process as follows:
Rural households across Africa have always struggled to make ends meet working the land alone. Relying on a rudimentary manual technology and unpredictable climate, having someone earning an income from other sources is important … this orientation prevails to this day. With agriculture increasingly failing to generate income for rural households, off-farm sources of income have in fact grown in significance. Urban migrants may try to negotiate ways of ensuring that their burden of transferring money back home to family and community does not become too heavy, but they have great difficulty escaping these expectations and social pressures without losing their status in the eyes of those at home. For urban residents, therefore, life in town is very much tied to demands, both specific and general, from relatives and friends in the countryside who see themselves as having an entitlement to claim part of the money that their urban-based kin generate while away from the farm. (p. 75)
A second reason why a focus on the civic arena is important is that ‘modern’ citizenship in post-colonial Africa was built on a socio-cultural foundation in which ethnic cum kinship networks provide(d) the all-important axis for social relations (Okonta 2008, see in particular discussion in the conclusion; also Lonsdale 1997, Bah 2005, and the collection of essays in Berman et al. 2004; for a critique of the politics of cultural identity in general, see Bayart 2005). A fall-out of this is that, even today, ‘effective network based on identification with community’ rather than ‘impersonal and informal institutions’ (Hyden 2006, p. 77; see also Clapham 1982, and Geschiere and Gugler 1998) continue to shape individual and collective identities.
There is no suggestion here that only Africans struggle to balance family, ethnic, religious and civic identifications, or, as John and Jean Comaroff have argued, that ‘cultures of heterodoxy bear within them the seeds of criminality, difference, disorder’ (2006b, p. 32). As Bridges (1997) reminds us, in every human society
… the earliest and strongest identifications are shaped by family life and the broader, ethnic, class and religious community within which the family in turn gains its identification. These identifications are woven into the very fabric of human desire and only with great difficulty can distance from them be achieved. (p. 15)
But just how well is this glue holding? The question is urgent given the severe economic stress that Africa has experienced for the greater part of political independence, and particularly so in the aftermath of World Bank-championed structural adjustment in the 1980s (Olukoshi 1993, Beckman and Sachikonye 2001). A tentative answer is that, amid pervasive economic gloom, ‘people's capacity to support others is diminishing to a point where affective networks break down’ (Morris MacLean 2003, p. 30). Given that such affective networks have ironically become more important to individual and collective survival as a result of the withdrawal of the state from people's lives, what are the immediate and long-term consequences of their diminution? If trafficking between informal institutions and kinship structures constitutes evidence that large numbers of people in Africa have always functioned in ‘multi-local spaces’, how is reliance on remittances (the trans-local) helping to redraw the social landscape across Africa?
The ways these questions are answered will ultimately rest on the comparative strength of the state in different formations, as that basically determines the character of social relations, especially the relative importance of kinship networks. There is thus a good opportunity to rigorously discuss state–society relations using evidence from a phenomenon which is still in a process of unfolding. First, there is an obvious conundrum: conventional citizenship scholarship presupposes a loyal relationship between the individual and his ancestral state, in return for which the state is supposed to provide for the citizen's basic needs. When that contractual relationship is broken, a new type of citizenship can be said to have emerged. What, then, are the forms and parameters of this new type of citizenship in a situation where more Africans are showing a greater inclination to ‘seek benefits from increasingly distant sources’? (Hyden 2006, p. 89). How are remittances, to borrow the Durkheimian locution, ‘ruffling the social matter’ in Africa? What are the implications of this new type of citizenship for existing theoretical formulations on citizenship in Africa? To respond appropriately to these questions, some historical background is essential.
State and citizenship in Nigeria: the challenges and paradoxes of belonging
If the nation needs a state to become a democracy, where is the state in Africa? In addition, sub-Saharan Africa is, on this level, only an extreme case of a situation that is becoming the rule in many of the Third World's countries in crisis. The legitimacy of the struggle for independence has disappeared and nothing has taken its place. All that survives in this landscape, devastated by economic crisis, is a plethora of governmental apparatuses, which function according to a patrimonial model of power that is increasingly being liberated from its national dimension. (Guehenno 1995, p. 3)
Bayart (2007) has noted the seeming irony that the expiration of the nation-state is often celebrated at the very moment of its triumph. However, it should be added that although talk of the ‘end of the nation-state’ may sometimes border on dramatisation, there is a genuine feeling of disappointment at this state's scandalous score-sheet in the areas of social welfare, political legitimacy, social security and economic prosperity in Africa. This is the context for most of the ‘narratives of mortality’ about Africa (see Guehenno above). But the focus here is on a different aspect of the problem. Bayart's argument has been that rather than diminishing, globalisation has strengthened the position of the state. This strengthening is what he calls the state's ‘triumph’.
Therefore, the aim of this section is twofold: first, the focus is on the process through which the state has ‘triumphed’ in a place like Nigeria; second, there is a look at the social cost of this apparent triumph which, it is suggested, is the diminution of state ‘reach’ and the steady unravelling of the social compact. The section concludes by noting the possible effects of transnational migration and the emergence of a ‘remittance class’ on the situation. Although the focus is on the nation-state and the narrative of its progressive loss of autonomy/authority, the account is of necessity an abbreviated one. It deliberately highlights what are considered to be the significant milestones in the process that has resulted in both the state and its ‘citizens’ no longer seeing eye to eye. It is shown that even though events associated with economic globalisation have played a role in the shrivelling of state influence over the past two decades, they have merely deepened, rather than instigated, the crisis of the state.
First, there is a note about the identity of the state in Africa as a product of Western colonialism. There is a reasonable consensus among African/ist scholars that this pedigree is to be blamed for many of the harsher features of the postcolonial state, including but not limited to its extractive predatoriness, its predilection for zero-sum politics, and virtual capture by a rapacious political elite. These features, it is argued, are by no means coincidental, but a powerful testament to the careful design of colonial powers to keep African countries permanently susceptible to international capitalist penetration and exploitation (Zack-Williams and Mohan 2002). However, while this thesis retains some currency despite critical rebuttals, calls for its revision have grown.
Mbembe (2006), for example, has argued for seeing the postcolonial state both as a legacy of Western colonialism, as well as a creation of the African political elite. He argues that while the state may have been ‘handed down’ to African societies by colonial diktat, the subsequent process of its ‘indigenisation’ and/or ‘appropriation’ has involved and been executed by Africans. More important, this process has resulted in a transformation of social relations to such an extent that even those who otherwise reject its ethics are forced to find some sort of accommodation with the state – thus effectively becoming part of its everyday reinvention. The overall effect is that while Africans have arguably ended up with the type of state they did not bargain for, it is one whose transformation appears to continually elude them.
The fact that the state was ‘set up’ this way also has implications for its relationship with its ‘citizens’. As noted earlier, modern nation-states in Africa have rather treacherous primordial foundations, but this cannot totally explain the quite sensational way in which they have collectively foundered in the post-independence era. A probable explanation is the way in which the state itself has been managed, mostly as what Jean and John Comaroff call a ‘governance-by-franchise, and an institutional nexus for the distribution of public assets into private hands’ (2006b, p. x), in short, like colonial entities (Mbembe 2001, Quayson 2001). The consequence is that the state has continued to exist, largely, above society, estranged from the same ‘citizens’ whose interest, in theory at least, necessitated its creation.
Saddled with baggage right from inception, global developments in the post-independence period have been less than kind to many African states. For example, while still finding their feet in a new and Western-centric international environment, African states were soon caught in a strategic bind as far as the Cold War between the East and the West was concerned. Efforts targeted at satisfying both the United States and the former Soviet Union only ensured that the state was distracted from the more urgent task of providing for its citizens. The chasm that has opened up since the dawn of independence widened in the 1980s with the coming of the Washington Consensus and the introduction of Structural Adjustment Programmes which sapped the foundation of the state and further alienated it from the people. The imposition of an unpopular economic regime (trade liberalisation, state withdrawal from health and education, trimming of the public sector, resulting in increased unemployment rates) stiffened public resistance and led to mass protests. In its effort to contain these protests, the state resorted to repression which further alienated it from the people. Nor has the apparent upsurge of democratisation resulted in any discernible change in this logic. More form than substance, democratisation has hardly dented Africa's well-known carapace of authoritarianism, and it comes as no surprise that many African countries (Nigeria is on the list) have been implicated in the democratic roll-back which has been observed globally (Diamond 2008). In the specific case of Nigeria, as retired soldiers hijack the ‘democratic’ structures, elections (almost always rigged) have become ‘coups d'état’ by other means.
Despite apparent democratic reforms, therefore, the gulf between the state and society has continued to widen, further whetting the ‘appetite for Elsewhere’ seen especially among the younger aspect of the population. As a clear example of the ‘exit’ option, emigration is therefore one increasingly favoured response to declining state capacity, especially by university graduates who, relative to the rest of the population, possess significant human capital, and thus an attendant enhanced sense of entitlement. Furthermore, this aspect of the total population also appears to feel more acutely the pangs of socio-economic exclusion (the decline in job opportunities, for example) and are most likely to ‘vote with their feet’ because of the perception that ‘the state is not responsible’. A sense of civic disappointment cum betrayal is therefore an important driver of transnational migration.
Part of what is manifested here is the inherent exclusionary potential of citizenship in many postcolonial states. Mamdani (1996), to give a well-known example, has eloquently described how modern citizenship in Africa was effectively forged on the anvil of despotic colonialism and its rough demarcations between ‘rural subjects’ and ‘urban citizens’. This article wishes to go beyond this by posing questions about the inherent worth of the same citizenship, both rural and urban – a dichotomy which does not appear to mean much these days, given the nature of the crisis in the post-colony. While not necessarily rupturing the linkage between modern African citizenship and the colonial encounter, in which, as Kapur (2007, p. 567) reminds us, ‘gender, culture, race, and civilisational maturity determined who was entitled to benefits and recognition and who was not’, it is equally important to focus on its contemporary vagaries and explore how transnational migration dynamics may instruct us about its changing forms and instabilities.
Nigeria offers a perfect laboratory for this sort of inquiry. Nearly five decades after political independence in 1960, a genuine civic culture is yet to emerge in Africa's most populous country, and the political culture continues to lack the fundamentals of actual citizenship. Thus, ‘loyalty to the nation is pitted against sectional loyalties such that it is a zero-sum game: every gain by each type of loyalty is purchased at the expense of the other type’ (Taiwo 2004, p. 64). Furthermore, the state, which is expected to foster a feeling of belonging, is held hostage by ethnically oriented neo-clientelist elite networks (Clapham 1982, Obadare 2007). In its current formation, the state is thus an impediment to, rather than a facilitator of, a genuine sense of citizenship and civic culture. Paradoxically, the overall effect of policy measures (for example, the establishment of a Federal Character Commission) taken to ensure ‘ethnic balancing’ has been to reinforce sectional loyalties. This results from ‘the seizure of the state by an autocratic politico-military establishment, the resultant weakening of the capacity of the state to perform its duties and the consequent reliance on brute force to ensure and compel obedience’ (Adebanwi 2005, p. 23).
All this has, ironically, ‘helped to sharpen the questions of the relationship between the state and citizens and to direct attention to the need to redefine this relationship and possibly re-codify it’ (ibid, p. 25).
The Nigerian state's overwhelming dependence on oil revenues deepens and complicates this dynamic: it is a classic rentier state, defined by Terry Lynn Karl (2007, p. 2) as ‘a state that lives from externally generated rents rather than the surplus production of the population’. This happens in at least two ways. First, reliance on oil revenue strengthens the state against the people in that the state sees itself as accountable to transnational oil corporations at the expense of its citizens (Karl 2007, Okonta 2008). A good illustration is the obvious severity and distinct lack of regard with which the Nigerian federal government treats ‘citizens’ in the oil ‘producing’ communities in the Nigerian Delta. Second, reliance on oil revenues (the state's own ‘remittance’) means that the state can afford not to pursue or collect tax revenues from the people (a very important element in the state–citizen compact, on the basis of which citizens can make demands on the state). The state can actually afford to violate the human and socio-economic rights of its ‘citizens’ (including those in the oil ‘producing’ areas) with impunity (Gary and Karl 2003, Watts 2004, Karl 2005, 2007) without anticipating any serious fiscal consequences. For Watts (2003), in this sense oil is ‘a source of unearned income that detaches the state from the financial task of securing revenue from its citizens’ (2003, p. 25). The state therefore exists in a curious zone of ‘self-sufficiency’ in which responsibility towards the people is not a primary consideration. Indeed, the people are more or less superfluous (Apter 2002, Obadare 2008).
How does this logic structure citizenship and the people's relationship with, and attitude toward, the state? Bayart has emphasised the need to be cautious in ascertaining whether the ‘withdrawal of faith (in the state) is actually real and whether the disconnection from the historical sites of political sovereignty or identification has been brought to completion’ (2007, p. 82). In this article the view is that while the disconnection may not have been brought to ‘completion’, it is definitely real, one of its manifestations being the widening of existing, and creation of new, ‘multi-local spaces’ and forms of sub-national identities. Remittances, it would seem, rigidify this process by producing subjects who may be said to be twice removed. This emergent situation provides a framework to rethink existing formulations on postcolonial citizenship.
Next, this is anchored within existing discourses on transnational migration and citizenship. It is shown that even though these new reconfigurations (people vacating, evacuating and recuperating different senses of belonging) are taking place, the literature has focused almost exclusively on the political allegiances of diasporic migrants, ignoring how the remittances that they send back to their societies of origin also generate important ripples in the social domain.
Transnationalism, migration and citizenship: from home to abroad and back home again
Literature on transnational migration is no stranger to citizenship. Kearney (1991), Basch et al. (1993), Ong (1999), Delanty (2000), Coutin (2000) and Sassen (2006, 1996a, 1998a, 1998b), among others, have attempted to show the various ways in which transnational migration is producing the ‘debordering’, ‘deconstructing’, ‘flexibilising’ and ‘repositioning’ of citizenship. In most of this literature, the overwhelming concern is with the travails of traditional forms of citizenship in Western societies, given the rapid and persistent ‘peripheralisation of the core’ (Kearney 1991, p. 57) by former colonial subjects. Since the nation-state project in Western Europe can be said to have assumed a coincidence or coherence between race/ethnicity and territory (between culture and place), the influx of ethnic ‘others’ has forced critical and open questioning about both the formation and responsibilities of the state and also of its constituent subjects. It is difficult, for example, to see the gradual dismantling of the welfare state in Europe – interpreted by some as the ‘retreat of the state’ (van Creveld 1999) – as unconnected with this development. Scholarly discussions about the emergence of a post-nationalised or denationalised citizenship (Sassen 2006) capture this shift appropriately.
In the current transnational era, it is evident that the fates of those who are forced to export human capital, and those who receive it (again, often reluctantly), are inseparably intertwined.6 Therefore, tracking the civic footprints of transnational migration must address matters arising both in Western societies and ‘developing’ countries. In this vein, a focus on the nation-state and citizenship in the latter becomes at least as important as in the former.
The impetus for analysis in exporting countries is enhanced by three related factors. One is a desire to take forward and complicate earlier related work on the African diaspora and development. Important in this regard is this literature's insight on how displacement, movement and re-placement generates new forms of political consciousness (Zack-Williams and Mohan 2002, p. 230, Adi 2002, Reynolds 2002). Second, a focus on citizenship clears the conceptual ground for analysis of different forms of political engagement, in particular new modes of civic activism that are best seen as outgrowths of the new transnationalism. Third, and arguably most important, there is an impetus to subject to closer scrutiny the changing nature of civic identity, community, and structures of fealty between the people and various poles of authority. This will necessarily include, although will not be limited to, what Chabal describes as the ‘real or imagined cultural nationalisms’ (2009, p. 59) unleashed by an apparently unstoppable process of globalisation.
That said, it is not as if the problems of citizenship in ‘peripheral’ formations are completely alien to the relevant literature; it is the circuitous way in which the latter has gone about apprehending the former that makes for interesting reflection. For example, discussions about the emergence of ‘fractals’ or ‘non-entire’ global borders have invariably particularly focused on the category of individuals (indeed, a tiny elite) who criss-cross the globe as representatives of powerful transnational firms and illustrate the increasing porosity of international borders. The broader discourse relates to the perceived emergence of a new form of ‘economic citizenship’ that is not located in individuals, but firms and markets, particularly the global financial markets, and a wide range of global economic actors (Sassen 1996b, p. 38). According to Hansen and Stepputat (2205):
These global players can demand concessions and protection from states, tax holidays, disciplined labor, macro-economic stability, and so on, in return for investment, jobs, and hard currency. The highly skilled labor, consultants, and professionals who accompany, work for, and facilitate the work of such large ‘corporate citizens’ have acquired unprecedented options in terms of mobility and flexibility of access to various nation-states. … In this world of fast information flows, effective lobbying, and the ability to generate capital across the globe, the nation-state appears weak, eroded, and increasingly porous. (p. 33)
From the discussion thus far, it can be seen that even though transnational migration literature has addressed the problem of citizenship, its focus remains partial. There has been an interest in how ‘the modernist nation-state appears to be undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of an imagined community founded on the fiction, often violently sustained, of cultural homogeneity, toward a nervous, xenophobically tainted sense of heterogeneity and heterodoxy’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 2006b, p. 32; emphasis in original). This article has pointed to how former colonial subjects are implicated in this process. However, increasingly, post-colonials are ‘citizens for whom polymorphous, labile identities coexist in uneasy ensembles of political subjectivity’ (ibid).
It is contended that dependence on remittances introduces interesting complications into this picture, especially in a country such as Nigeria, where ‘withdrawal of faith in the state’ is arguably closer to completion than in other postcolonial societies.
Conclusion
The increase in the scale and volume of known global migrant remittances has sparked massive academic and policy interest. Evidence that a growing number of households in the receiving societies are becoming reliant on these financial flows for various forms of provisioning, including education, health and housing, has raised expectations in some quarters that they could be the long sought-after motor of economic development in Africa. It has been argued that there are several problems with this view, including its arguably inadequate understanding of the nature of remittances, its simplistic and unproblematic conceptualisation of development, and its failure to embed the economics of remittances in a wider socio-political frame.
It is argued that although this literature has been correctly interested in the economic habits of remittance dependants (what are described here as a ‘remittance class’), and the supposed economic consequences of reliance on remittances, it has overlooked (or failed to emphasise) how economic and political agencies are mutually imbricated, and therefore does not interrogate what can be argued is the more salient issue – what becomes (politically) of subjects who are reliant on financial remittances. It appears that the question of the socio-civic implications of the dependence on remittances is absolutely critical and is inescapable, particularly in societies where withdrawal of faith in the state is already high. The significance of this question for Nigeria and other African societies currently implicated in the logic of remittance-dependence can hardly be over-emphasised.
More important, the emergence of a remittance class has very interesting implications for notions of citizenship, the relationship between ‘citizens’ and the state, and the patterns of political allegiances. For example, how do those dependent on remittances define their moral obligations to the state? What expectations do they have of the state, and how do they put forward the case for the enjoyment of citizenship rights? At the same time, what duties would the state – that is marginal to their economic survival – expect them to perform? These are important theoretical questions, answers to which – depending on data from specific countries – will definitely enrich scholarly understanding in the following key areas: transnational migration, particularly as it affects citizenship; remittances; social and economic citizenship in African countries and other societies with a burgeoning ‘remittance class’; the state; and identity formation.
Some of the larger and universally relevant issues that are bound to come into view in this mode of inquiry – for example, the vagaries of membership in a changing world (Butler and Spivak 2007) and the emergence of alternative forms governance outside of the straitjacket of the nation (Little 2003) – are already being debated in other contexts. That being the case, exploring how transnational migration and remittances might speak to this debate is bound to open up new conceptual vistas.