Paper short abstract:

Contemporary political debates in Oyo State, Nigeria challenge dominant understanding of transparency. Good Governance style reforms, by implicating reformist state governments in international networks which are seen by many as unknowable or even conspiratorial, undermine transparency in people.

Paper long abstract:

Transparency has become a core component of the anti-corruption and good governance discourses over the last two decades. Making information about government activities publically available is seen as instrumental to accountability: unless citizens know what their government is doing they can't hold it to account. However, questions of what sort of information should be transparent and to whom, have often been elided by universalist conceptions of good governance. This paper uses the case study of Oyo State in Southwest Nigeria to bring mainstream debates about transparency into conversation with the study of conspiracies and unseen politics.

In Oyo, media commentary and popular debates attest to the strength of popular concerns over transparency in politics. Nigerian scholarship has repeatedly focused on the persistent influence of 'cartels', 'mafias' and other unseen connections in the distribution of state power and resource distribution. Historically these conspiracy theories have played on fears of ethnic and regional domination. However, tracing these concerns into the new context of reformist 'good governance' states, such as Oyo, they take on new forms. The unseen connections that animate contemporary distrust are those between reformist leaders and their development partners in the spheres of international private investment, donor institutions and remote metropolitan centres. Relationships, networks and policies that constitute 'good governance' as understood by donors and elites, are in themselves seen as untransparent.

The paper contributes to theoretical debates, arguing for the importance of transparency in people. As such, it challenges to the claimed universalism of dominant understandings of 'good governance'.