Chapter 6: The Levers of Power: Godfathers and the Architecture of Extraction

The Dual-Track State

The political landscape of Nigeria operates on a dual-track system—the visible constitutional framework and the invisible architecture of godfather politics. In Maiduguri, I watched a brigadier general beg a civilian for access to a governor. In Port Harcourt, I saw a commissioner defer to a man who held no office but controlled the party's purse. In Jos, a local government chairman once told me, over warm beer in a dim parlour, that his monthly security vote was not for security but for "stakeholders." He did not need to name them. Everyone knows who they are.

The godfather systems of Lagos and Kano are not aberrations. They are prototypes. One was built on commerce and land; the other on emirate authority and agricultural patronage. Both have now gone national. And both teach the same lesson: in Nigeria, the state does not merely fail to protect its citizens. It actively extracts from them. Nigeria does not have a security problem. It has a protection problem. Every armed group—from Boko Haram to pipeline vandals to ethnic militias—is speaking the same sentence to the same deaf state, in the only language the state has taught them to use: force. The godfathers simply use a quieter dialect.

In 2019, I sat in a car park in Ikeja while a local government councillor explained his job to me. He was an educated man, an accountant by training. He had campaigned on a promise to fix drainage in his ward. Within a month of taking office, he received a visit. The visitor did not threaten him. The visitor simply informed him of the monthly remittance expected from his office, the contractors he was permitted to use, and the projects he was not permitted to initiate without clearance. "I am not a councillor," he told me that afternoon, watching a rainstorm darken the asphalt. "I am a collection point." He resigned six months later. I do not use his name because he now works in the private sector and fears retribution. But his story is not unique. It is the operating system.

The system works because it is layered. At the top sits the godfather, who selects candidates, allocates contracts, and maintains the relationships that keep the machine lubricated. Below him are the commissioners and agency heads, who convert policy into revenue. Below them are the local government chairmen and councillors, who collect from the markets, the motor parks, and the land registries. At the bottom are the enforcers—the union boys, the party youths, the vigilantes—who ensure that deviation is costly. This is not a conspiracy. It is a business model. And like any business, it publishes no annual report.

The extraction is not random. It is systematic. A godfather does not steal from the treasury in the crude manner of the 1970s oil boom. He structures the treasury so that the money flows to him before it reaches the public. He places his nominees in the ministries that control procurement. He ensures that the tax collection contract goes to a firm he trusts. He approves the list of local government chairmen before the primaries open. By the time the budget is printed, the distribution is already decided. The legislature does not allocate. It ratifies. The citizens do not choose. They inherit.

The result is a protection market. A citizen who needs a police report, a building permit, or a hospital bed must first determine which stakeholder controls the relevant office. In Lagos, a property developer told me in 2021 that his building approval took fourteen months because he had approached the ministry directly instead of through the designated intermediary. Once he paid the intermediary, the approval came in ten days. The fee was not a bribe in the traditional sense. It was a toll. The state had outsourced its functions to private collectors, and the citizen paid twice—once in taxes, once in tribute.

Lagos — The Corporate Machine

Bola Ahmed Tinubu was governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007. When he left office, he did not leave politics. He built a machine. Over the next sixteen years, that machine elected every governor, senator, and House of Representatives member of any consequence in the state. It controlled land allocation, contract awards, and the National Union of Road Transport Workers, which operates motor parks as parallel tax collection points. Tinubu selected his successor, Babatunde Fashola, in 2007. He selected Fashola's successor, Akinwunmi Ambode, in 2015. When Ambode proved insufficiently pliable, Tinubu replaced him with Babajide Sanwo-Olu in 2019. Each transition was dressed in democratic ritual—primaries, campaigns, elections—but everyone in Lagos knew who had made the choice. The primaries were ratifications, not contests.

The machine delivers services. Lagos State Ministry of Finance reported internally generated revenue of approximately N815 billion in 2023. This is not loot in the crude sense. It is the product of an efficient, ruthless fiscal system that taxes everything from property to pavement. The question is not where the money comes from. The question is where it goes. BudgIT, in its State of States report for 2023, noted that Lagos carries the heaviest debt burden of any Nigerian state while simultaneously posting the highest IGR. The machine borrows against the future to fund the present, and the present belongs to the stakeholders.

The land bureau is where the machine breathes. In a state of twenty million people where horizontal expansion has reached its physical limits, every square metre of land is political currency. The Eko Atlantic project, launched on reclaimed oceanfront land in Victoria Island, was marketed as a Dubai-style financial centre. By 2024, it remained largely a construction site with luxury apartments sold to elites and infrastructure financed by public bonds. The Lekki Free Trade Zone, established in 2006, has generated more controversy than commerce, with host communities in Ibeju-Lekki complaining that compensation for acquired land was diverted through political channels. I visited one of those communities in 2022. An elder showed me a copy of the allocation letter he had received in 2014. The amount had been paid, he said, but not to him. It had gone to a holding company registered in Lagos Island, owned by a man who had never set foot on the land. The elder was still farming the same plot, waiting for a court date that had been postponed seven times.

The tax collection infrastructure offers another window into the machine's mechanics. In 2002, the Lagos State government contracted a private firm, Alpha Beta Consulting, to collect taxes on its behalf. For nearly two decades, the firm handled a significant share of the state's revenue collection. The terms of the contract were never made public. When a whistle-blower alleged in 2018 that the firm had under-remitted billions of naira, the state assembly promised an investigation. No public report was issued. The firm continued operations until 2022, when the state government announced it was bringing tax collection in-house. The announcement was made without explanation, without audit, and without accounting for the years of revenue that had passed through private hands. This is not corruption in the sense of a single theft. It is the institutionalisation of opacity.

On 25 February 2023, the machine suffered a visible wound. Peter Obi, running on the Labour Party ticket, won the presidential election in Lagos State. It was the first time the All Progressives Congress had lost Lagos at the presidential level since the return to democracy in 1999. Young voters in Surulere, Yaba, and Ikeja stood in lines for hours, defying rain and intimidation, to vote against the machine's candidate. Middle-class professionals, university students, and informal sector workers who had never participated in partisan politics registered en masse. They organised through WhatsApp groups and Twitter spaces, circumventing the party structures the machine controlled. On election day, they filmed incidents of voter suppression at polling units in Eti-Osa and Lagos Mainland. The footage travelled faster than the thugs could run. For the first time in two decades, the machine lost control of the narrative.

But machines learn. The governorship election on 18 March 2023 demonstrated the Lagos model's resilience. INEC declared Sanwo-Olu the winner with 762,134 votes to the Labour Party's 312,329. Opposition agents were excluded from collation centres in key local governments. In some areas, results were announced before votes were counted. The Labour Party challenged the result at the tribunal, but by September 2023, the petition had been dismissed. The machine had absorbed the shock and recalibrated. It did not need to win every vote. It needed to control the count.

The NURTW provides the machine's street-level muscle. Musiliu Akinsanya, known as MC Oluomo, is the chairman of the Lagos State Parks and Garages Management Committee and a former NURTW leader. In the lead-up to the 2023 elections, he was filmed addressing a gathering in which he warned Igbo voters to stay home if they would not vote for the APC. He later claimed he was joking. No authority prosecuted him. This is not a failure of law enforcement. It is the division of labour. The state provides the uniform; the union provides the muscle. When the election is over, both return to their stations—the policeman to the checkpoint, the union chairman to the motor park—and the city continues its dual-track existence.

A driver cannot load passengers at Ojuelegba without the branch chairman's permission. A trader cannot move goods from Mile 12 without paying the levy. These payments do not appear in the state budget. They appear in campaign finance. They appear in the pockets of boys who enforce electoral directives on polling day. I have watched them work. They do not threaten violence openly. They do not need to. They simply remind you that your stall, your route, your livelihood exists at their pleasure. The Lagos State government has never published an audit of NURTW revenue collection or its disbursement— itself a measure of institutional opacity.

The Lekki-Epe Expressway, rebuilt with tolling rights granted to a private consortium in 2011, offers another example. The toll gates at Admiralty Circle and Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge collect revenue that does not appear in the state budget as public income. The concession agreement has never been published in full. Commuters pay daily, but they do not know who owns the concession, how the revenue is split, or when the concession expires. In 2020, during the EndSARS protests, the toll gates were burned. The state government announced their reopening in 2021 without explaining what had changed. The fires had damaged the infrastructure, but they had not touched the contract. The tolls resumed. The machine does not mourn its outposts. It rebuilds them.

The Lagos State Land Bureau processes thousands of title documents annually. In 2018, the administration attempted to raise property taxes through the Land Use Charge, proposing increases that would have doubled or tripled payments for middle-class homeowners in Surulere and Magodo. The protests were immediate and multi-ethnic—Yoruba landlords stood alongside Igbo traders and Hausa merchants. After three months of sustained pressure, the government retreated, reducing the increases. The episode revealed something important: the machine can be pushed back when its extraction becomes too visible. But it does not break. It waits. By 2023, the Land Use Charge had been quietly adjusted upward again, in smaller increments, spread across more neighbourhoods. The arithmetic of extraction is patient.

Kano — The Palace and the Court

Kano is different. The machine here wears a robe and a turban. It speaks in the language of the emirate and the prayer of the faithful. The Kano Emirate predates Nigeria by centuries. It was a centre of commerce and Islamic learning when the British arrived. The colonial administrators left it intact because it was useful. The post-colonial state left it intact for the same reason. But what was once a system of governance has become a system of leverage. The emir controls district heads. The district heads control village chiefs. The village chiefs control votes. This is not tradition. It is topology—a map of power that every politician in Kano learns to read.

Muhammadu Sanusi II was not a passive monarch. He had served as Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria from 2009 to 2014. His 2014 suspension from the CBN by President Goodluck Jonathan—after he exposed a $20 billion shortfall at the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation—made him a symbol of institutional courage. When he became emir in 2014, he used the position to campaign against child marriage, to advocate for girls' education, and to criticise state government spending. By 2019, Governor Abdullahi Umar Ganduje had had enough. In May 2019, the Kano State House of Assembly passed a law creating four additional emirates, fragmenting the authority of the ancient throne. In March 2020, Sanusi was deposed. The official charge was insubordination. The real charge was independence.

The deposition was not a cultural dispute. It was a hostile takeover. The emirate's land holdings, its traditional revenue streams, and its network of district heads were all redistributed to loyalists. Ganduje installed a pliant emir in the main palace and four others in the new emirates. The machine had absorbed the traditional authority and turned it into a political franchise. When I visited Kano six months after the deposition, a textile merchant in Kantin Kwari market told me that the five emirates had created five new tax collection points where one had sufficed. "We used to pay one homage," he said. "Now we pay five." He laughed, but there was no humour in it.

Kano's agricultural sector provides the machine with its rural muscle. Fertiliser distribution, grain storage contracts, and irrigation project awards flow through party structures. A farmer in Bagwai local government area does not ask the Ministry of Agriculture for input. He asks the ward chairman. The result is not merely corruption. It is the substitution of political loyalty for agricultural productivity. Kano should feed the nation. Instead, its farms feed a patronage network. No updated fertiliser distribution audit has been published by the Kano State government since 2019— itself a measure of institutional opacity.

The irrigation schemes tell the same story. The Hadejia-Nguru wetlands, once among the most productive floodplain farming zones in West Africa, have seen federal and state irrigation contracts awarded repeatedly since 2015 with minimal visible output. In 2022, the Kano State government announced a N30 billion agricultural transformation programme. By 2024, local journalists in the state could not identify a single completed project under the scheme. The money had moved through the accounts of companies registered in Kano and Abuja, owned by men whose names appeared on campaign donation lists.

On 18 March 2023, the New Nigeria Peoples Party candidate, Abba Kabir Yusuf, defeated the APC incumbent in Kano. It was a stunning reversal. Rabiu Kwankwaso, who had served as Kano governor from 1999 to 2003 and again from 2011 to 2015, had broken with the APC and built a party from scratch. His Kwankwasiyya movement provided the organisational base—red caps, motorcycles, and a network of loyalists in every ward. Abba Kabir Yusuf, his son-in-law, was the candidate. The APC, fractured by Ganduje's succession crisis and a rebellion by his deputy, could not match the enthusiasm. For a night, it seemed the Kano machine had been dismantled by democracy.

But the machine does not concede. The APC challenged the result at the election petition tribunal. On 20 September 2023, the tribunal annulled 165,663 of Yusuf's votes, declaring them invalid because they were not stamped or signed by INEC officials. The margin of victory had been 128,897 votes. Removing the disputed votes put the APC candidate, Nasiru Yusuf Gawuna, ahead. Yusuf appealed. The Court of Appeal in Abuja affirmed the tribunal's ruling on 17 November 2023. For seventy-six days, Kano had no legitimate governor. Then, on 12 January 2024, the Supreme Court reversed both lower courts. It held that the tribunal had no jurisdiction to deduct votes on the basis of unstamped ballots. Yusuf was reinstated. The machine had lost in the voting booth, won in the lower courts, and lost again at the apex. The lesson was clear: when the ballot box fails, try the courtroom.

The violence that accompanied the 2023 election cycle in Kano was not random. It was structural. The Yan daba—political thugs employed by both parties—clashed in several wards on election day. In Dala local government area, a polling unit was burned after results showed a NNPP victory. In Fagge, APC agents were chased away by motorcycle-riding youths. The police made arrests, but the charges were dropped within weeks. The Yan daba are not criminals in the eyes of the machine. They are labourers. They are paid during campaigns, deployed during elections, and abandoned afterwards. Some graduate to armed robbery. Some join the bandit gangs operating in the Rugu Forest. The pipeline from political thuggery to organised violence is direct, and it is well documented by researchers at Bayero University Kano. The machine does not mind. It has already hired the next batch.

When the Local Goes National

By May 2023, the godfather had become the president. Tinubu's inauguration transferred the Lagos model to Aso Rock. Within months, key federal appointments reflected Lagos machine logic: competence was secondary to loyalty, and institutional independence was a threat to be managed. By mid-2024, the administration had appointed at least six former Lagos State commissioners or special advisers to federal positions. The Special Adviser on Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale, came from the Tinubu communications stable. The President's Chief of Staff, Femi Gbajabiamila, had served as Speaker of the House of Representatives with Tinubu's backing. Previous administrations had at least pretended to a national spread. The Tinubu administration made no such pretence. The Lagos machine had simply relocated to the federal capital.

The national scale changed the arithmetic. In Lagos, the machine extracted from a state of twenty million people. In Abuja, it extracts from a nation of two hundred million. The fuel subsidy removal of June 2023—Tinubu's first major policy decision—transferred billions of naira from household budgets to federal treasury accounts. The subsequent disbursement of "palliatives" to state governments created a new pipeline of patronage, with governors in loyal states receiving favourable treatment and opposition states complaining of exclusion. By November 2023, the naira had depreciated by over ninety per cent against the dollar. Inflation reached 33.95 per cent by May 2024, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The cost of living crisis that followed was not engineered by godfathers. But it was managed by them, and in the management, opportunities for extraction multiplied.

The federal budget became the new frontier. In 2024, the Ministry of Works awarded contracts for the reconstruction of the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway. The project, estimated at over N15 trillion, was awarded without public bidding to a firm with identifiable connections to the Lagos political establishment. The minister defended the award as an emergency procurement. Critics noted that the emergency had not existed three months earlier. The Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, inaugurated in phases since 2013, continued to generate variation orders and contract extensions that pushed the final cost far beyond original estimates. These are not infrastructure projects in the ordinary sense. They are financial instruments. The concrete is secondary to the cash flow.

The pattern is not limited to construction. In 2023, the Central Bank of Nigeria underwent a leadership change that replaced the governor with a former Lagos State commissioner. By early 2024, several CBN departments had been reorganised, with new directors drawn from the same Lagos network. Monetary policy—interest rates, exchange rate management, cash supply—was now being shaped by men who had learned their trade in a state where the godfather's preference was the only economic indicator that mattered. The naira's freefall in late 2023 was not caused by the Lagos machine. But the machine's response—protecting privileged access to foreign exchange while ordinary businesses scrambled for dollars—was entirely consistent with its state-level playbook.

The offshore dimension completes the picture. In April 2016, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Panama Papers, based on 11.5 million documents leaked from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca. Among the Nigerian names were then-Senate President Bukola Saraki, who declared that his offshore holdings were held in a blind trust established before he took office, and former Senate President David Mark. The leak also named the late Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, the former Bayelsa State governor who had been convicted of money laundering in London in 2005. Fewer than twenty Nigerian politicians carried verifiable links to offshore companies. No reliable total asset valuation was ever published. No Nigerian court has convicted any politician named in the Panama Papers. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission announced investigations in 2016. By 2024, none had reached a courtroom. The offshore structures were not secrets uncovered by brave journalists. They were public knowledge that the state chose not to act upon.

The reliance on foreign medical care and education provides another index of extraction. Premium Times and Sahara Reporters have documented multiple state governors seeking treatment abroad—Governor Rotimi Akeredolu in Owo spent months in a German hospital in 2023; Governor Yahaya Bello was photographed at a London clinic in 2022. These are not medical emergencies. They are exit strategies. A ruler who does not trust the hospital he built will not defend the school he funded. The offshore account, the foreign hospital, the British passport—these are the insurance policies of a class that has diversified its risk while keeping its extraction domestic.

A Dissenting Voice

Not every scholar accepts the "godfather" label. Dr. Jibrin Ibrahim, Senior Fellow at the Centre for Democracy and Development in Abuja, argues that "godfatherism" is an imprecise term that conflates legitimate party organisation with criminal patronage. All political systems, he notes, have power brokers. The American party boss, the British whip, the Indian political family—all exercise influence beyond their constitutional roles. The problem in Nigeria, Ibrahim contends, is not the existence of influence but the absence of institutionalised accountability. When a newspaper publishes evidence of corruption and the publisher receives a tax audit the following week, the press is not free. When a judge rules against a governor and finds her security detail withdrawn, the judiciary is not independent. When a primary election is decided in a living room rather than a voting booth, the party is not democratic.

I interviewed Ibrahim in 2022, and his argument has stayed with me. It explains why the fall of one godfather rarely changes the system. It explains why Kwankwaso, who defeated the Ganduje machine, is himself described as a godfather by his critics. The machine reproduces itself because the institutional soil has never been tilled. Ibrahim's warning is clear: if we dismantle individual power brokers without building institutions, we will simply create space for new ones. The vocabulary of godfatherism can obscure the institutional rot that makes extraction possible. He is right. But in Lagos and Kano, the brokers have names, addresses, and balance sheets. Whether we call them godfathers or power brokers, the arithmetic is the same.

The Arithmetic

I have spent fifteen years reporting from the front lines of Nigeria's violence. I have seen what Boko Haram does to a village in Borno. I have seen what bandits do to a school in Zamfara. I have seen what oil thieves do to a creek in Bayelsa. And I have seen what the Lagos machine does to a young graduate who cannot get a job without a connection. The violence is different in scale but not in kind. All of it proceeds from the same source: the state's refusal to protect its citizens unless they pay tribute.

The graduate in Ikeja who spends five years unemployed despite a first-class degree learns that merit is a myth. The trader in Kano whose shop is demolished because she did not contribute to the ward chairman's fundraiser learns that property is a privilege. The farmer in Bichi who watches his fertiliser allocation diverted to a party loyalist learns that agriculture is politics. The herder in Plateau who cannot access a grazing route because the land has been rezoned for a politician's farm learns that mobility is a crime. Each of them is receiving the same education. The state does not exist to serve. It exists to select. And if you are not selected, you must find your own protection.

Some find it in ethnic militias. Some find it in prayer. Some find it in migration—north to Libya, south to Lagos, west to Ghana. And some find it in the streets, with a placard or a voter card, refusing the selection. The generation born after 1999 has never known a Nigeria without these machines. But they have also never known a Nigeria without the internet, without WhatsApp, without the ability to organise outside party structures. In February 2023, in Lagos, they proved that the machine could be outvoted in pockets. In October 2020, across the country, they proved that the machine could be outshouted in the streets. These are not revolutions. They are rehearsals.

The connection between the calculator and the gun is not metaphorical. It is logistical. The bandit in Zamfara who kidnaps a farmer for ransom is operating in a state where fertiliser allocation has been captured by political networks. The militant in the Niger Delta who blows a pipeline is operating in a region where oil contracts have been controlled by federal patrons for fifty years. The herder in Plateau who carries an AK-47 is operating in a landscape where land use decisions are made in government houses, not community halls. Each of these armed groups is addressing a protection deficit created by the same architecture of extraction. The godfather takes the contract. The bandit takes the hostage. The militant takes the oil. The herder takes the grazing land. They are competing for the same resource—the void left by a state that has chosen extraction over protection. The godfathers of Lagos and Kano do not carry guns. They carry calculators. And the arithmetic they practice—extract, divide, rule—produces the same bodies as any insurgency.

Sources

1. Lagos State Ministry of Finance, Internally Generated Revenue Report, 2023.
2. Independent National Electoral Commission, 2023 Presidential Election Results, Lagos State, 25 February 2023.
3. Independent National Electoral Commission, 2023 Governorship Election Results, Lagos State, 18 March 2023.
4. Independent National Electoral Commission, 2023 Governorship Election Results, Kano State, 18 March 2023.
5. Supreme Court of Nigeria, Abba Kabir Yusuf v. All Progressives Congress & Ors, Judgment delivered 12 January 2024.
6. Court of Appeal, Abuja Division, Abba Kabir Yusuf v. Nasiru Yusuf Gawuna & Ors, 17 November 2023.
7. Kano State Election Petition Tribunal, All Progressives Congress v. Abba Kabir Yusuf, 20 September 2023.
8. BudgIT, State of States: The 2023 Edition, fiscal analysis of subnational debt and revenue.
9. International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, The Panama Papers, April 2016.
10. Ibrahim, J. (2020). "The Logic of Political Godfatherism in Nigeria." Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD) West Africa.
11. Premium Times, investigative series on state governors' overseas medical travel, 2022-2023.
12. Sahara Reporters, documentary coverage of political elite medical tourism and offshore holdings, 2016-2023.
13. National Bureau of Statistics, Consumer Price Index Report, May 2024.