Ethnicity and Bureaucratic Corruption in Nigera's Public Service

Ethnicity And Bureaucratic Corruption In Nigeria’s Public Service: Implications For National Development

TABLE OF CONTENT

Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgement
Preface
Table of content
Chapter One

CHAPTER ONE
Ethnicity
Nigeria is the third most ethnically and linguistically diverse country in the world, after New Guinea and
Indonesia1. This ethnolinguistic diversity has very significant implications in almost every area of the economy. It implies a major investment in educational and media resources to reach a diverse population.
Diverse ethnic groups, with varied cultural patterns, have very different levels of social capital and thus differing capacities to enter into the process of pro-poor change. The relative wealth of the country and the large size of some ethnic groups has allowed them to express their ethnicity in remarkable and sometimes problematic ways that are not mirrored in other similar countries. Dominance of particular ethnic groups in certain sectors of the economy has significant implications for equity. The pattern of dominant and excluded minorities is embedded in the administrative and economic subsystems and has important implications for access to justice and equitable resource-sharing. Ethnic conflict has been a perennial feature of the Nigerian scene since pre-colonial times, but access to modern media and sophisticated weapons has increased the intensity of such conflicts to a degree that threatens the present fragile democracy. The education system, its teaching tools and attitudes reflect strongly the dominant urban culture and effectively exclude monoglot speakers of minority languages in many areas.

Bureaucracy:
The principle of social organization which characterize the twentieth-century industrial societies is “rational coordination” otherwise known as ‘Bureaucracy’. Under this form of organization, people are brought together in formal and complex settings run by professionals and experts. The professionals are called ‘Bureaucrats’ while the organizations they run are known as ‘Bureaucracies’. The nineteenth century produced a number of brilliantly descriptive and literary accounts of modern bureaucracies. Many writers call attention to the increasing bureaucratization of human activity but Max Weber a German Sociologist, historian and economist, is credited with having made the most thorough analysis of bureaucracy (Mullins, 1999).