A Discourse on Accumulation and the Contradictions of Capitalist Development in Nigeria

ABSTRACT

The study examines and conceptualizes accumulation in the context of Nigeria‟s neocolonial state. It investigates the nature of accumulation in Nigeria and, the role of the state and social classes in the accumulation process; the implication of the hegemony of foreign capital and transnational accumulation for the development of underdevelopment in Nigeria; the impact of the state-capital model of primitive accumulation on the crisis and contradictions of capitalist underdevelopment in Nigeria. The key issue was to explain why the neo-colonial model of primitive capital accumulation (PAC) did not result in autocentric capitalist development in Nigeria. The study uses the five decades of dependent development in post-colonial Nigeria to explain the failure of development policies in the context of the modernization ideology to engender domestic capitalist development. Furthermore, the study examines the neoliberal Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and privatization programme and how they deepened primitive capital accumulation and the crisis of underdevelopment in Nigeria. An eclectic framework of analysis rooted to the underdevelopment, dependency, World System and Marxist theories was used in the study. This framework was used to examine oil-based accumulation and its impact on the state-capital model.

On the basis of the state-capital model, involving local and foreign accumulating social classes which evince primitive capital accumulation, the study theorizes accumulation in the context of the deepening crisis of a dependent capitalist economy.The study concludes that at the root of the development of underdevelopment in Nigeria is the contradiction of oil-based accumulation and the compradorized and primitive capital accumulation forms used under the state-capitalist model of accumulation in the context of the Nigerian rentier economy.