Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith (review)

Reviewed by: Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria by Daniel Jordan Smith Chikezirim Nwoke Smith, Daniel Jordan. 2022. Every Household Its Own Government: Improvised Infrastructure, Entrepreneurial Citizens, and the State in Nigeria. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 232 pp. $26.95 (paperback). Nigeria is a site of staggering paradoxes. The country is regarded as Africa's largest economy and yet is home to dire deprivation. On one hand, it is famed for its political vibrancy and popular consciousness; on the other, it presents a reality of perpetual government inadequacy. Standing on years of disappointment occasioned by the inability or unwillingness of the state to provide the essentials of life, or what Nigerians like to call the dividends of democracy, citizens must devise strategies to meet their own needs. [End Page 105] It is against this backdrop that Daniel Jordan Smith draws parallels among infrastructure, governance, and everyday experiences of citizenship. In Every Household Its Own Government, his fourth book, he foregrounds infrastructure in its conceptuality and materiality as being focal to the Nigerian experience. With insights drawn from ethnographic research spanning more than three decades in southeast Nigeria, he explores, in commendable depth, six areas of infrastructure—water, electricity, transportation, communication, education, and security—to show how state failure creates innovative informal systems of sustenance, adapted mostly on the household level, which he claims operates as (and are colloquially called) local governments. However, not all individuals or households are equal. The rich can wield economic and sociopolitical power to shield themselves from the harshness of government neglect by purchasing comfortable alternatives, but the poor must make do with risky, time-consuming, labor-intensive improvisations, which often end up worsening their condition. Remarkably, Smith does not stop at merely capturing these improvisations: he goes a step further to detail the political economic cost. Nigerians across various social strata, by participating in this thriving economy of improvised infrastructure, are implicated in a system that perpetuates inequality. The book is organized in a manner such that each chapter examines one of the six infrastructural domains that Smith chose for this book. To begin with, chapter 1, "Empty Pipes and H2O Entrepreneurs," highlights the often onerous task of acquiring water for daily use—which, in Smith's argument, offers a special insight into "the ways that infrastructure is central to how [citizens] experience and understand politics and inequality" (30). Because existing state-installed waterpipes, designed to service homes in urban centers, hardly ever supply water in any but a few elite neighborhoods, ordinary Nigerians must look to water entrepreneurs, who set up and run private ventures, navigating bureaucratic rules and processes at the margins of (il)legality and acceptable sociality. This is equally true of the electricity sector, explored in the second chapter. For instance, to deal with the nation's power infrastructure, epitomized by frequent power cuts, individuals and small businesses resort to using generators, attempting to manipulate public facilities by themselves, or pay bribes to state officials to keep their lights on. Similarly, as shown in the third chapter, "Okada and Danfo: 'Public Transportation' in Nigeria," citizen commuters, government forces such as the police, and individuals running informal transport businesses converge in a convoluted relationship that is at once marred, lubricated, and compelled by a deficient state apparatus. The last three chapters offer fresh qualitative evidence from the infrastructural areas of communication, education, and security to buttress some of the central arguments of the book: everyday Nigerians (lower-class, middle-class, and aspiring middle-class citizens), by their hustle to create workable infrastructural alternatives, are inadvertently involved in reproducing the system of exploitation that they passionately [End Page 106] lament. Unsurprising, but in no way less regrettable, is the fact that the state and its agents are the highest profiteers in this system, which enables corruption premised on establishing ventures that benefit only the elite. Smith questions if a governmental apparatus that deliberately protects the interests of the rich and powerful at the expense of developing infrastructure for the majority should be viewed as a weak or failing state, rather than a cunning one (53). Ultimately, he asserts that the substance of...