Daniel Jordan Smith is a Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University, as well as a Director of the Africa Initiative. He received a bachelor’s degree in Sociology from Harvard University in 1983, a master’s degree in Public Health from Johns Hopkins University in 1989, and a PhD in Anthropology from Emory University in 1999. A former Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, he focuses on Nigeria, exploring political culture, gender, health, and social change. Smith received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his scholarly contributions and has co-convened seven Brown International Advanced Research Institutes (BIARIs) on Development and Inequality, Population and Development, and Health and Social Change in Africa.
Charlotte Peterson: In your book, A Culture of Corruption, you explore different aspects of corruption in Nigeria, from scam real estate sales to the highest level of fraud and nepotism within the government. From an anthropological perspective, what social or cultural factors can contribute to the normalization of corruption in society?
Daniel Smith: That’s a very good question. I want to start with answering the inverse. In most places where corruption is a problem and people in the society are unhappy about corruption, it’s important to recognize that it’s as much a culture against corruption as it is a culture of corruption—like in Nigeria, where I do my anthropological research and about which I wrote the book about corruption. People within the society also see the state as rife with corruption, with cultural and social factors that contribute to the prevalence of corruption.
I think it’s important to acknowledge that even though there are social and cultural—as well as political and economic—factors that lead to and contribute to corruption, it’s not a monolithic cultural trait: People are unhappy about corruption. The labeling of something as corruption is, in fact, an indicator that the thing that they’re labeling is potentially morally, socially, and politically problematic. That said, I do think there are social and cultural factors that contribute to the social reproduction of corruption in society. In many post-colonial societies, such as Nigeria—which has only been independent for 50 years—much of it is related to the intersection of a modern bureaucratic state and an older system of political authority that depended more on personalistic relationships. When you get a transformation from a system of political authority that depends more on personalistic social relations to a more bureaucratic kind of state, which colonial powers superimposed on their colonies before they left, you get an environment where people are navigating these two registers at the same time—the official formal bureaucratic state and getting things done through who you know. You get corruption. The continuing prevalence of a personalistic way of doing things politically, intersecting with a bureaucratic official state that doesn’t perform adequately from people’s point of view, leads to corruption, typically the use of public office for private gain. Here, we have a strict idea that the public and the private are supposed to be separate. But in places like Nigeria, it’s more normal to imagine that if you want the formal state to be effective, you actually have to use the personalistic way of doing business to get the formal state to do what it’s supposed to do, opening up lots of opportunities for corruption.
CP: Given your research on corruption in Nigeria, what parallels, if any, do you see between it and the systems of corruption cultivated in American history?
DS: I’m an anthropologist, and for a long time, anthropologists weren’t comfortable writing about corruption in the non-Western societies that we studied, in part because corruption is often used as a stigmatizing label to brand the other as somehow deficient and in a way that would have us believe that their corruption is somehow their cultural problem, whereas in our society, we feel we’ve somehow moved beyond corruption. That’s just absolutely not true. I think there are a couple of things to say about the parallels and the differences between corruption here, meaning in the Global North and the United States, and there, meaning in Nigeria and in the Global South. One is that we still have plenty of corruption. Look at the revolving door between government and industry. You can pick up the newspaper on any day and find a story about corruption in the United States. The idea that we’ve moved past corruption is ludicrous; we have plenty of corruption. And indeed, the scale of our economy is so large that, arguably, we probably have more corruption than there is in Nigeria in real US dollars. The other thing that I think is important to think about when comparing levels of corruption in Nigeria and the United States is why we care about corruption in the first place.
It seems to me that the only reason we care about corruption is that it can be bad for society. It can promote and increase inequality. It can promote an increase in injustice. It can promote increased suffering. It affects people’s well-being. If corruption just greased the wheels and everyone did well, we wouldn’t have a problem, but we would probably call corruption something else. In our country and much of the Global North, why do we care about corruption? We care about corruption for human welfare. We care about it because it contributes to inequality. In Nigeria, if someone gets disproportionately rich, everyone says, “Oh, they must be corrupt.” Indeed, many of the ways people get disproportionately rich and powerful are through corruption, even in our own society. We have people who are dramatically richer than other people by orders of magnitude greater than one sees in a place like Nigeria. Here, though, we have a sanitized version of it—a national narrative that says our multi-millionaires and billionaires got that money because they earned it. They pulled themselves up by their bootstraps. They were entrepreneurial, risk-taking capitalists. The dynamics of how they got their money may be different than a Nigerian politician who steals money from the budget. Ultimately, the stealing of money is problematic in the ministry in Nigeria because someone who is getting richer doesn’t deserve to get rich. In our country, we have stories that tell us that those getting paid millions a year deserve that money. We’ve sanitized the creation and reproduction of inequality such that we don’t even notice the morally problematic nature. At least in places like Nigeria, when someone has lots of money, others think, “Oh, that person must be corrupt,” even if it’s not true. How else could they have such ridiculous amounts of wealth compared to other people in society?
CP: Certainly, the United States is seeing a more explicit transition to an oligarchical state, considering Elon Musk’s direct involvement and overt political corruption.
DS: One of the things that has characterized the new administration is the number of billionaires who appear in various settings. I remember seeing a picture in the newspaper of the inauguration. There were quite a number of billionaires in a very small group of people. The Trump administration seems to have a disproportionately large number of billionaires who are cabinet secretaries. Of course, Elon Musk is the ultimate symbol of wealth—exorbitant and extreme wealth. He’s the richest man in the world. I can’t help but see it as a tremendous irony that the richest man in the world is going after “waste” in the American government and finding it in programs designed to help people who are poor, whether that’s internationally or in this country. It just strikes me as not only ironic but deeply disconcerting, in part because it doesn’t make any sense for any other reason than for mean-spiritedness. Cutting USAID, for example, is not going to save very much money—if you wanted to cut big money, you’d have to go after the Defense Department. You’d have to go after much bigger pieces of the pie.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.