Lagos as a Political Leadership Laboratory: Elite Recruitment, Political Succession and National Power in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic

Abstract

Lagos is a singularly important subnational political space in the Fourth Republic of Nigeria where electoral competition, party organisation, executive government, elite networks and access to electoral office overlap. The central question is not just why Lagos is economically and electorally relevant, but how political institutions and networks have worked over time to recruit, socialise, select, test, succeed and reproduce political actors, and when and how some of their accumulated political capital has become relevant to the national political arena. This article builds on the notion of the political leadership laboratory as an integrated meso level approach to analyzing these interrelated processes. The concept is not that recruitment, socialisation, candidate selection, political careers, patronage, and elite reproduction are new mechanisms. Its value is in its ability to combine these well-known processes in a lasting subnational political space and in its clear analysis of the potential for turning subnational political capital into national political influence. The study is based on academic scholarship, party documents, legal records, fiscal data and contemporaneous reporting, and a qualitative longitudinal case study and process tracing from 1999 onwards. The empirical analysis is organised around seven dimensions: recruitment, socialisation, selection, testing, succession, reproduction and nationalisation. The Tinubu period is a moment of political and organisational formation, the Fashola period is a moment of consolidation and adaptation, the Ambode period is a moment of testing the executive autonomy and coalition politics, the Sanwo Lulu period is a moment of reproduction and adaptation, and the national career of Lagos based political networks is a contingent moment of nationalisation. The study reveals the existence of enduring political networks and somewhat regularised recruitment and succession processes, as well as exclusion, conflict, replacement and adaptation. Lagos is thus an analytically relevant case to theorise how subnational political spaces can be used for leadership production and national elite circulation, but not as a case study that can be used to explain national political realities, nor as an example of mechanisms that are found everywhere.