PART 2/12

The meeting starts twenty minutes late. Sixteen people in a room that smells of generator fuel and something sweet he cannot identify. Plastic chairs. A whiteboard with writing from a previous meeting that nobody wiped off. A window that is open but faces a wall.

He is the only person with a printed document. Nobody else has brought anything to read.

The ward chairman opens the meeting. He introduces Ola. He says: we have a brother who has come back from abroad. He says: he wants to do something for the community. He looks at Ola.

Ola opens his mouth.

The chairman speaks first. He says: Brother Ola will share his vision with us at the next meeting. Tonight we have other business.

He moves on. Ola closes the folder.

The other business takes forty minutes. It is about a plot of land near the market. Who is responsible for collecting the dues. Whether the dues should go up. A woman argues one position with some force. Two men argue the other. The chairman listens and says something that does not resolve it but moves it along.

Then any other business. A man Ola doesn't know talks for seven minutes about something that happened at a meeting three months ago that Ola has no context for. People nod at the right moments. Ola nods with them.

The chairman closes the meeting. People stand, stretch, begin to separate into small conversations.

A man comes up to Ola. He introduces himself as Dapo. He says he has heard about what Ola is trying to do. He says it is a good thing.

Then he says: you should come to the chairman's office next Friday. He says there is someone he should meet.

Ola asks who.

Dapo says: a friend. He says: someone who is interested in the kind of work you want to do.

He shakes Ola's hand. He leaves.

Ola stands in the emptying room with his folder.

Outside. His car. Engine off. The folder on the passenger seat.

He has been to three ward meetings now. At none of them has he been permitted to speak. He understands this is a process with its own rhythm and that pushing the rhythm is the wrong move. He understands it intellectually. He also understands that he has been in Nigeria for five months and has not opened the Wageningen folder with anyone in this country except himself.

He picks up his phone. He finds Pieter's number. He does not call it.

He starts the engine.

A political party in Nigeria at the ward level is not what its constitution says it is.

I spent time reading party constitutions. They describe organisations with clear structures, democratic processes, mechanisms for member participation, and rules for candidate selection that emphasise transparency and equal access. These documents are real. They are registered with INEC. They are cited in court judgments. They are the legal basis on which parties operate.

They describe something that does not consistently exist in the wards.

What exists in the wards is an access structure. Party membership at this level confers the right to be present. It does not confer the right to be considered. Being considered requires something the constitution does not describe. It requires relationship capital accumulated over time through the specific currency of Nigerian ward politics. Attendance. Contribution. Demonstrated loyalty. The performance of affiliation in forms the ward executive recognises.

I mapped the decision chain for candidacy at the LGA level. The chain works as follows.

A ward aspirant needs the support of their ward executive. The ward executive makes a recommendation to the LGA party chairman. The LGA chairman is in consultation with the state party structure. The state structure has a relationship with whoever controls the federal party apparatus. In practice, the most powerful node in this chain at the local level is not at the top. It is at the LGA chairmanship level, because the LGA chairman is the person with actual operational control of the candidate field. They know what the state structure wants. They know what the ward executives can be persuaded to do. They sit at the junction.

I went looking for who controls the LGA chairman.

The answer varies. In states with a dominant sitting governor, the governor's influence reaches down to the LGA level through political loyalists placed in key positions. In states where the governor's grip is contested, power at the LGA level is more diffuse. Factional. Controlled by people whose authority comes from relationships built over previous election cycles.

The factions are the thing I kept returning to.

A faction at the LGA level is not an organised group with a manifesto. It is a network of people who share a patron at the state or federal level and who benefit from that patron's continued access to power. The patron provides resources, protection, access to contracts, the informal currency of political life. In return, the patron expects the network to deliver a specific political outcome when asked.

A new aspirant at the LGA level is not evaluated primarily on their proposal. They are evaluated on which network they belong to. Or, if they belong to none, on which network they are useful to.

A man with a technically sound agricultural proposal and no factional attachment is an independent variable in a system that has no mechanism for independent variables.

I found nothing in any party constitution that addresses factionalism. The constitutions describe parties as unified organisations. They do not describe the factional reality that governs how decisions are actually made. The gap between the document and the practice is not accidental. It is functional.

Dapo told Ola there was someone he should meet. Someone interested in the kind of work Ola wants to do.

That sentence has a specific weight in the context of ward politics. It means someone has been watching. It means Ola has been assessed before the assessment was announced.

Whether the assessment is an opportunity or a negotiation depends on what the someone wants.

Ola does not know yet. He will find out on Friday.