Harvest behind ballot: Gardener’s theory and politics of public poverty

By Kunle Olawunmi

A Nigerian family buys fuel to generate electricity, sinks a borehole for water, contributes to neighbourhood security and struggles to pay school and hospital bills. It pays taxes too. If this is your household, you are supplying services you should be able to expect from government. Yet every four years, you are asked to believe again.

In 2006, during my master’s research on poor governance in Nigeria at Schiller International University, I developed the Gardener’s Theory. I wanted to understand a question that still troubles me: why do the people whose labour sustains a country so often live as though they have no rightful claim to its wealth?

Imagine that you and your neighbours own a garden. You cultivate it and entrust its management to a gardener. His duty is to protect the land and ensure that its harvest sustains you. Then merchants approach him, offering private wealth and protection. Gradually, their requirements begin to govern his decisions. He still speaks in your name, but the garden increasingly serves their purposes. When the harvest comes, you find yourself begging for what your own labour helped produce.

That is the relationship the theory asks us to examine. The people provide labour and hold the commonwealth in trust for future generations. The rulers control access to it. External powers and commercial interests seek resources, markets and influence. When rulers secure their own rewards by accommodating those interests at public expense, the gardener becomes a broker for the merchants. His success and your wellbeing can move in opposite directions.

Twenty years later, the pattern remains recognisable. Consider what happens between your contribution to national wealth and your struggle to obtain the simplest public service. Who controls the decisions along that route, and who collects the proceeds? Why does another sacrifice so often fall to you?

As Nigerians prepare for presidential and National Assembly elections scheduled for 16 January 2027, these questions belong beside the familiar contest over who will win. An election can change the occupants of public office while leaving the beneficiaries of power remarkably undisturbed.

We should begin with what belongs to us. Section 14 of Nigeria’s Constitution locates sovereignty in the people and makes their security and welfare government’s primary purpose. Citizens delegate authority; they do not surrender ownership of their country. A ballot is no deed of conveyance.

The history behind this distortion reaches further back than our present parties. The Atlantic slave trade turned human beings into merchandise through networks that included European traders and African intermediaries. Colonial conquest extended foreign control over territory, labour and production. The Berlin Conference of 1884 and 1885 helped establish rules for imperial territorial claims. Colonial authorities subsequently governed much of Africa through arrangements in which local intermediaries helped administer extraction.

Independence created the possibility of a different relationship. It did not automatically dismantle the economic channels through which wealth moved or the advantages enjoyed by those controlling access. The uncomfortable question is whether a governing elite uses sovereignty to develop its people or negotiates a profitable position for itself within those channels.

Consider how this can work in ordinary decisions. A ruler needs political finance and allies. A company wants favourable access to a resource. An intermediary brings them together. Where scrutiny and enforcement are weak, the bargain can reward both parties while the public bears its cost. No instruction from a foreign capital is necessary for their interests to converge. Domestic rulers can participate willingly and must answer for their choices.

The Glencore case gives that relationship substance. In 2022, the United States Department of Justice reported admissions that Glencore and its subsidiaries paid more than $52 million to intermediaries in Nigeria, intending that at least part would finance bribes to officials. The business included obtaining crude oil contracts. Glencore International pleaded guilty. Foreign commercial ambition and the misuse of Nigerian public authority met in a documented scheme.

Now follow the money beyond Nigeria. In 2020, Jersey, Nigeria and the United States agreed to return more than $300 million in confiscated Abacha assets. Jersey’s government described funds laundered through the American banking system and held in Jersey through a British Virgin Islands company. Money taken from the Nigerian people had acquired a corporate identity and an offshore address.

The governments that helped recover this money deserve acknowledgement. Their cooperation also shows that such channels can be investigated. But an account of corruption that ends with the Nigerian official leaves receiving institutions and intermediaries outside the frame. Each participant’s responsibility must be established by tracing the transaction. Crossing a border does not erase the theft or the duty to investigate it.

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Oil theft requires the same attention. Chatham House’s 2013 investigation described Nigerian participants, foreign transport and buyers, and financial channels handling the proceeds. Some stolen crude was refined locally; some travelled abroad. The report also warned about uncertain quantities and destinations. Its lesson remains useful: follow the cargo and its payment, with evidence, beyond the man beside the broken pipeline.

The mineral economy presents another route. Institute for Security Studies research has described illegal gold networks in Nigeria’s north-western and central regions connecting local actors with foreign demand. Insecurity can make such markets harder to regulate, while criminal earnings can sustain those who profit from disorder.

A 2024 Associated Press investigation documented children working in illegal lithium mines in Nasarawa and followed a sale to a Chinese company. The company did not respond to the AP; China’s embassy said its companies operated within local law.

We owe affected communities an explanation precise enough to help protect them. Mineral profits, kidnapping, ideological insurgency and disputes over land can interact, but they are not interchangeable causes. Finding that somebody benefits from violence does not, by itself, prove that they organised it. Following the evidence is how we identify responsibility without allowing the guilty to hide behind exaggerated accusations.

Changing foreign partners does not automatically change the relationship. The same test must apply to Britain, France and the United States as to China, Russia or any other power. Does the bargain build productive capacity and leave a fair return for Nigerians? Foreign expertise can be useful, but contracts require open competition, a defensible price and assets that work. We should judge a project by what people can use after the inauguration ceremony. A new merchant can occupy an old position in the garden.

This is the chain of dependence the theory describes. People produce wealth. Rulers control licences, contracts and public revenues. Domestic beneficiaries and external partners can capture a disproportionate share. When too little returns as productive investment and public services, households remain vulnerable. That vulnerability can strengthen patronage and make organised scrutiny more difficult. Poverty can therefore become both an outcome and a condition that sustains the arrangement.

Why, then, does a country with such resources keep borrowing? Resources underground are not yet money in the treasury. Investment is needed to develop them, and borrowing can finance useful infrastructure. But a loan cannot correct the diversion of revenues or contracts designed to favour insiders. Where those failures continue, citizens can inherit repayments without receiving the promised benefits.

Questions about who benefits become more urgent when governments announce economic reforms. Creditors seek repayment, while governments seek financing. You need affordable food and functioning services. These interests can overlap, but their compatibility must be demonstrated. IMF or World Bank approval cannot substitute for evidence that a policy improves the lives of those expected to endure it.

Fuel subsidies can be costly, badly targeted and open to abuse. Privileged access to cheap dollars can also enrich a few at public expense. Reform may be justified. Its timing, protection for vulnerable households and use of the savings remain public responsibilities. The World Bank has itself described both the costs of the previous arrangements and the pressures accompanying reform. A family cannot feed on the announcement of a future benefit.

When fuel costs rise, the trader’s working capital buys less. When the naira weakens, imported medicines and machinery become dearer, while foreign-currency debt can require more naira to service. Exporters and holders of foreign currency may benefit. Ask who is exposed to the pain, who is protected from it and what measurable improvement is promised in return.

Taxation deserves the same scrutiny. A functioning country needs revenue. Citizens are entitled to ask why greater demands on their incomes coexist with services they must purchase privately. The World Bank’s October 2026 assessment reports improved growth and public finances, alongside higher state revenues and spending. It also records continuing pressure on household purchasing power and the need for better services. Those gains should make better services possible. What has the additional money done for you?

This is the implication that troubles me most. Public failure can coexist with private success. A contract may enrich its beneficiaries while the road deteriorates. An electricity arrangement may generate payments without reliable supply. Those able to purchase private alternatives face less personal exposure to public failure. An arrangement that exhausts you may remain tolerable, even profitable, to somebody empowered to change it.

Return, then, to the ballot. Voting matters because public authority must remain contestable. But an election does not automatically reveal who finances a party, who owns a contractor or whose interests shape an appointment. If those relationships remain beyond scrutiny, we can replace a gardener while leaving his obligations to the merchants intact.

This is the sense in which elections can become an opiate. The campaign offers relief from despair and a vision of a country finally at peace with itself. When that emotional release substitutes for scrutiny, we emerge from the celebration to find the old obligations intact. A promised future has excused an unaudited present. The next campaign invites us to take another dose of hope.

For a household under pressure, immediate help may matter more than an argument about institutions. That need deserves respect. It is exploited when assistance requires recipients to suspend judgement or accept political loyalty as a condition of survival. Ethnic or religious appeals can serve a similar purpose when they ask us to defend an officeholder against questions we would ask of anyone else.

The awakening I seek begins with recovering our standing as citizens. The person asking for a functioning hospital is making a legitimate public claim. The community demanding safe roads has nothing to apologise for. When a public official delivers a service, the money does not become his personal gift to us. We should be able to acknowledge good work without forgetting whose authority and resources made it possible.

I write with urgency because waiting has a human cost. A child who misses school does not get those years back. Illness will not wait for the next administration. The costs of poor governance accumulate in households long before they appear in a campaign speech. Understanding how those costs are imposed can help us recover the confidence to challenge them.

That confidence must carry into the decisions made between elections. Candidates should disclose their financial backers. Governments should publish major contracts, the real owners of contracting companies, borrowing terms and records of delivery. Legislatures must pursue discrepancies, while courts, auditors and journalists need protection to do their work. Citizens should be able to trace a promise into a budget and then into a service they can use.

Responsibility abroad belongs in the same account. Banks must investigate suspicious wealth. Commodity buyers must establish where their supplies originate. Governments receiving illicit assets must act against facilitators within their jurisdiction and cooperate in recovery. Condemnation of corruption has little credibility where its proceeds remain welcome.

There is no reason to regard this arrangement as our destiny. Its durability depends on choices and institutions that can be challenged. The Gardener’s Theory should help us recognise those relationships and organise to change them. Its purpose is to restore our capacity to judge, including the courage to question the politicians we support.

In January, Nigerians will choose who tends the garden. We must also insist on deciding what happens to the harvest. We are its owners. We should never have to approach it as beggars.

•Olawunmi is a retired Nigerian Navy Commodore and Associate Professor of International Relations, Intelligence and Strategic Studies at Chrisland University, Abeokuta.