Political science has long claimed that African political systems are dysfunctional because they are too embedded in social and material relations. This assumption informed the rise of the World Bank’s good governance agenda in the late 1980s. This chapter situates this technocratic vision of how to fix African politics in a longer ‘epistocratic’ political tradition that emphasises the knowledge-based, epistemic dimensions of governance. In this context, the Lagos model, developed first in Lagos state, southwest Nigeria, and then extended to nearby Oyo and Ekiti, was celebrated by donors as an example of ‘home grown good governance’, where governance reforms were not imposed by donors through conditionality but actively adopted by the government itself. By tracing how this domesticated version of the good governance agenda was contested in the twenty-first century electoral competition, this book re-evaluates the social, material and epistemic dimensions of good governance. This chapter offers a brief overview of the history of good governance in Nigeria. It then considers the methods and methodologies we can use to study competing conceptions of good governance, connecting the empirical study of politics ‘on the ground’ to more theoretical debates in political theory, before summarising the key contributions of the book.

Politics in Nigeria teaches us that power must be socially embedded for it to be accountable. Previous chapters drew on in-depth qualitative fieldwork in southwest Nigeria to theorise alternative conceptions of the constituent parts of the good governance agenda, namely, accountability, transparency, and the public–private divide. If we are to take the social dimension of these “ethnographically derived political concepts” seriously, then we need to rethink the neo-classical economic ontology of the dominant approach to good governance, which relies on principal–agent models. Thus, the book’s empirical analysis gives rise to normative political prescriptions which entail a methodological critique. The second part of the chapter argues that by neglecting the social dimension of governance, technocracy is vulnerable to populist challengers who leverage unmet demands for closeness and connection. Socially embedded governance intersects with three key debates of interest to theorists of democratic politics, concerning scale, inequality and conflict. By rethinking the contours of politics, we discover that the struggles of Nigeria’s fourth republic are not marginal to democratic theory – the struggles of a democracy yet to really get started – rather, they lie at the crux of what it means to wield power responsibly.