Bureaucratic and Ethnic Pluralism: the Nigerian Experience

The thesis of this work is that the apparent failure of bureaucracy in Nigeria (as in other developing states in Africa) is a consequence of arrested political development, and not, as supposed, of moral or managerial incompetence. Drawing upon Fred W. Riggs\u27 prismatic model, the investigation demonstrates that variant patterns of bureacratic behavior in these developing countries have an internal logic of their own. The deviations do not represent an imperfect incorporation of modern administrative practices so much as they reflect the realities of the political and social context. Given the incompleteness of the state\u27s authority, the performance of the civil service is explicable as a calculated effort of actors to optimize self-interest