Offers a radical political interpretation of history that generates fresh insights into the emancipatory potential of ordinary Nigerians and their precolonial cultural institutions

Nigeria is famous for "419" e-mails asking recipients for bank account information and for scandals involving the disappearance of billions of dollars from government coffers. Corruption permeates even minor official interactions, from traffic control to university admissions. In Moral Economies of Corruption Steven Pierce provides a cultural history of the last 150 years of corruption in Nigeria as a case study for considering how corruption plays an important role in the processes of political change in all states. He suggests that corruption is best understood in Nigeria, as well as in all other nations, as a culturally contingent set of political discourses and historically embedded practices. The best solution to combatting Nigerian government corruption, Pierce contends, is not through attempts to prevent officials from diverting public revenue to self-interested ends, but to ask how public ends can be served by accommodating Nigeria's history of patronage as a fundamental political principle.

The book is an introduction to the study of culture, with emphasis on the dynamism factor intrinsic and susceptible to generating growth, development initiatives and change, especially in religion and other aspects of Nigerian society. The collection of 19 papers is organised into five parts: Concepts and Theoretical Alignments, Social Institutions in Culture Change and Development, Religious Traditions and Change Experience, Votaries and Sectarian Reaction to Culture and Religious Change, and Pastoral Objective and the Management of Cultural Diversity and Change in Christianity.

Part 1. Origins and spirituality of Nigerian Pentecostalism. Sources of Nigerian pentecostalism --The spell of the invisible --Excremental visions in postcolonial Pentecostalism --Desire and disgust : ways of being for God --The Pentecostal self : from body to body politic --Part 2. Ethical vision of Nigerian Pentecostal spirituality. Politics: between ontology and spiritual warfare --Miracles, sovereignty, and community --Altersovereignty and virtue of Pentecostal friendship --Spirituality and the weight of blackness --"This neighbor cannot be loved!" : invisibility and nudity of the "Pentecostal other"--Pentecostalism and Nigerian society.

This is an introduction to African Christian ethics for Christian colleges and Bible schools. The book is divided into two parts. The first part deals with the theory of ethics, while the second discusses practical issues. The issues are grouped into the following six sections: Socio-Political Issues, Financial Issues, Marriage Issues, Sexual Issues, Medical Issues, and Religious Issues. Each section begins with a brief general introduction, followed by the chapters dealing with specific issues in that area. Each chapter begins with an introduction, discusses traditional African thinking on the issue, presents an analysis of relevant biblical material, and concludes with some recommendations. There are questions at the end of each chapter for discussion or personal reflection, often asking students to reflect on how the discussion in the chapter applies to their ministry situation.

E-mails proposing an "urgent business relationship" help make fraud Nigeria's largest source of foreign revenue after oil. But scams are also a central part of Nigeria's domestic cultural landscape. Corruption is so widespread in Nigeria that its citizens call it simply "the Nigerian factor." Willing or unwilling participants in corruption at every turn, Nigerians are deeply ambivalent about it--resigning themselves to it, justifying it, or complaining about it. They are painfully aware of the damage corruption does to their country and see themselves as their own worst enemies, but they have been unable to stop it. A Culture of Corruption is a profound and sympathetic attempt to understand the dilemmas average Nigerians face every day as they try to get ahead--or just survive--in a society riddled with corruption. Drawing on firsthand experience, Daniel Jordan Smith paints a vivid portrait of Nigerian corruption--of nationwide fuel shortages in Africa's oil-producing giant, Internet cafés where the young launch their e-mail scams, checkpoints where drivers must bribe police, bogus organizations that siphon development aid, and houses painted with the fraud-preventive words "not for sale." This is a country where "419"--the number of an antifraud statute--has become an inescapable part of the culture, and so universal as a metaphor for deception that even a betrayed lover can say, "He played me 419." It is impossible to comprehend Nigeria today--from vigilantism and resurgent ethnic nationalism to rising Pentecostalism and accusations of witchcraft and cannibalism--without understanding the role played by corruption and popular reactions to it. Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.

Demonstrating how political culture facilitates or distorts political preferences and political outcomes, this book explores how the historical development of social conditions and the current social structures shape understandings and constrain individual and collective actions within the Nigerian political system. Political Culture, Change, and Security Policy examines the extent to which specific norms and socialization processes within the political and civic culture abet corruption or the proclivity to engage in corrupt practices and how they help reinforce political attitudes and civic norms that have the potential to undermine the effectiveness of government. It also delineates specific doctrinal models and strategic framework essential to the development and implementation of Nigeria’s national security policy, as well as innovative approaches to national development planning. Professor Kalu N. Kalu offers an exhaustive study that integrates several quantitative models in addressing a series of theoretical and empirical questions that inform historical and contemporary issues of the Nigerian project. The general premise is that it is not enough to simply highlight the problems of the state and address the what question, we must also address the why and how questions that drive political change, policy preferences, and competing political outcomes.

"The Ethical Dilemma - Charting a bold and new path for ethics and values in Nigeria." The book traces the history of Nigeria's ethical challenges from 1959 to the present date, and recommends that an Agency be established under the Office of the President with a mandate to monitor and recommend corrective steps for unethical behavior in both public and private establishments. In this timely and apt book, the author travels down memory lane to draw on key aspects of the turbulent history of the geographical expression called Nigeria to attempt an analytical description of the malady he aptly calls Nigeria's ethical dilemma. To broach a subject whose scope is as expansive as the culture and ethnicity of Nigeria is diverse, the author has ingeniously sought safety in the 1999 constitutionally-prescribed seven National Ethics of Discipline, Integrity, Dignity of Labour, Social Justice, Religious Tolerance, Self-Reliance and Patriotism; in a rare literary excursion into the complex subject of ethics and values in Nigeria. Unequivocally qualified to intellectually profess on this subject, having over the past decade earned the sobriquet, 'The Apostle of Ethics, ' Tajudeen Toyin-Oke has acquitted himself creditably by engaging in a sound and lucid analysis of the underlying factors responsible for the decline in ethics and values in Nigeria. He draws from his own rich personal and professional experience to tell this less than savory side of Nigeria's story. The author, in recommending a brutally-frank national self-audit, while remaining optimistic for a glorious future, suggests that, Nigeria, in holding onto methods that are a mere relic of a mixed glorious and inglorious past, needs to courageously accept that even traditions can be remade anew so that a people can step out of their 'comfort zone, ' and into a new and vibrant era of genuine growth and development. He concludes that, in this season, Nigeria needs leaders who are strategic in thinking and deliberate in deed, and who are committed to working with the best interests of the people they lead in mind, and that a remarkable transformation cannot be achieved without a fundamental shift in our long-held paradigms, and most importantly, an ethical revolution. It is that ethical revolution that has been the author's avowed and passionate quest over the past one decad

“A true classic of world literature . . . A masterpiece that has inspired generations of writers in Nigeria, across Africa, and around the world.” —Barack Obama “African literature is incomplete and unthinkable without the works of Chinua Achebe.” —Toni Morrison Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe's critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa's cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man's futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order. With more than 20 million copies sold and translated into fifty-seven languages, Things Fall Apart provides one of the most illuminating and permanent monuments to African experience. Achebe does not only capture life in a pre-colonial African village, he conveys the tragedy of the loss of that world while broadening our understanding of our contemporary realities.