Corruption is bad news, both for developed and developing economies because ‘it benefits the few at the expense of the many; it delays and distorts economic development, preempts basic rights and due processes and diverts resources from basic services, international aid, and whole economies’ (Johnston Reference Johnston2010, p. 1). Such debilitating consequences of corruption motivate the constant attempts, specialist and non-specialist, to come to grips with the phenomenon in order to curtail it. Pierce's book is one such recent and intriguing attempt to comprehend the dynamics of corruption using Nigeria as case study. Rather than see corruption as ‘one phenomenon that variously manifests itself around the globe, or that represents a particular developmental conjuncture’ (p. 19), the book conceives of corruption as ‘a political performative’ (p. 21), a discourse performing political work (p. 20). It is thus a history of the ‘political work corruption has done in Nigeria’ (p. 21).

The book reveals that the discourse of corruption, or a ‘corruption-complex’ in Nigeria, emerged from a specific conjuncture: a practical and material administrative reorganisation (in colonial northern Nigeria) in which (indigenous) officials in rural areas, who had new powers and a real shortage of money, confronted an ideological context in which the use of office to personal ends counted as corruption (p. 37), and the selective prosecution of corruption by the British colonial administration. The prosecution was selective in the sense that when corruption was prosecuted, it was done not for corruption per se but as a means of settling other scores that had little to do with corruption. Simply put ‘the contemporary Nigerian state emerged from institutions pioneered by the British colonial regime. In such institutions, corruption was a label that might be used to explain getting rid of officials in political trouble’ (p. 221). By independence in 1960, corrupt practices which were inseparable from the charge of corruption, which itself was inseparable from patterns of political contestation, had become and remain central to state practice in Nigeria. Corruption had become a necessary and sufficient means for creating and maintaining political hegemony in Nigeria. This is the political work of corruption and explicating it as a ‘set of practices and ways for describing them that simultaneously critique and enable those practices to happen in the first place’ (p. 225) is the central problematic of Pierce's book.

Deploying exhortation or enforcement as strategies for addressing corruption in the context where corruption is a political performative can, Pierce argues, only be marginally successful (p. 229). Rather, ameliorating corruption will require dealing with issues fundamental to the logic of local political culture, which in the Nigerian case involves the ‘intersection of patronage and political life and the distributive issues of revenue across a culturally diverse country’ (p. 229). In other words, ‘corruption cannot be solved until we appreciate its status as a political artifice and political performative’ (p. 21). But, as the author points out in his conclusion, ‘that is easier said than done’ (p. 229). The uniqueness of the book lies in its emphasis on the fact that ‘corruption cannot be fully appreciated without a relatively systematic attention to the history not just of corrupt practices but of the ways in which corruption has functioned as a means of engaging in politics and political critique (p. 222), and doing so by ‘juxtaposing local, national, and global scales of analysis and following them across time’ (p. 222).