ABSTRACT
Nigeria in the mid-1980s is ripe for corporatism, not for reformation or revolution. This corporatist condition is a function of a coincidence of economic and political factors: economic contraction and dislocation on the evaporation of the petro-naira “bubble”; political reorientation and repression on the return of the officers to power; and social differences and debates as economic and political austerity are absorbed into individual and collective psyches. The necessity of a corporatist response has increased in Nigeria as the optimism of the petro-naira “boom” has given way to the pessimism of “gloom.” In the Nigerian, as in other semi-peripheral states, corporatist inclinations are related to domestic as well external ambitions. Nigeria has at times adopted some of the idiom with elements in the officer corps and national entrepreneurial faction advancing the military-industrial complex response to economic, strategic, and foreign policy set-backs. The advent of the Babangida administration was a function not only of the human rights-national security controversy.
