The paper postulates that the potential conflict and divergence between the Nigerian government in its formal structure and its beneficiaries, the Nigerian people, are crucial factors in the development of the country's present crisis. Its discourse adopts the historical approach, starting from the precolonial to the colonial and independent periods of Nigerian existence. It shows that, while governance in the precolonial period ensured largely the participation and the accommodation of the interest of all, including the women and the youth, the later periods witnessed the alienation of the ruled from the rulers; an elite group, the British and their Nigerian successors, made the interest of the majority subservient to their own. The long period of military rule only increased this alienation. Other potential factors of conflict such as ethnicism and religion intensified the subsequent crisis, which was further aggravated by the oil boom and the corruption it encouraged. The paper concludes by acknowledging civil society's valiant efforts to challenge government's increasing arbitrariness in spite of its constraints, and asserts that only democratic governance and a sovereign national conference to establish the basis of accommodation can provide a lasting solution to Nigeria's present predicament.

In their recent review of my book, Trouble Showed the Way: Women, Men and Trade in the Nairobi Area, 1890–1990, Jean Davison and Kinuthia Macharia take me to task on several issues, in particular that I only included women in my study, that I blamed Kikuyu men for victimizing women in a “patriarchal” system, and that I used exclusively economic explanations, called “reductionism,” in analyzing causes of historical changes. These allegations misrepresent this work seriously in my view; moreover, the review seems to be based on partial knowledge of the book, since most of its content is not addressed. A responsible review usually begins by telling potential readers what the book does. Since this one did not, I would like to rectify matters by doing so, while addressing the allegations made. The book is a study of the evolution of the dried staples trade in the Nairobi area, a trade carried out at the retail level almost exclusively by women. It focuses particularly on beans, a women's crop, using the evolution of, and policies toward, beans in Kenya as a template for what happened to women under colonialism in particular. To avoid gender bias and set this trade in context I did a large census of seventeen Nairobi area markets covering the whole trading population (some six thousand traders) and a smaller sample of over a thousand traders, of whom one-third were men. Brief marital histories were obtained from that sample, as well as trading histories. Lastly, I had a very small sample from whom life histories were solicited; these were only staples traders and all were women, as befits a study of staples traders. All of this was supplemented by extensive archival and secondary source research.