THE BENEFITS OF PATRONAGE: Political Appointments As Empowerment Programme To Build A Stable Society

Political patronage is the appointment or hiring of a person to a government post based on partisan loyalty. Elected officials at the national, state, and local levels of government use such appointments to reward the people who help them win and maintain an office.

Patronage is typically understood as rent-seeking: a strategy whereby politicians

build and maintain clientelistic networks and steer bureaucratic efforts for political and/or private gain, which may hurt development.

In contrast to this view, it is necessary to look at how and when political appointments and connections can enhance the maintenance of society’s social and political stability. The argument is not that patronage is universally good, or that it comes with no costs.

The net benefits of patronage are more likely to be positive in contexts where there are no easy substitutes for this governance approach. This is often the case in developing contexts, and particularly in poor and small localities, with dire financial constraints, small labour markets, and limited human capital. In these settings, the competitive, merit-based recruitment of appointees is less likely to be enough for selecting and motivating effective representation. The benefits

of patronage are especially important among “street-level managers.

The argument that patronage is beneficial for service delivery is not completely new and builds on insights from political science, economics, and public administration. Previous research in political science has acknowledged the ambivalence of patronage and recognized its beneficial uses for political party building (Sorauf, 1960; Huntington, 1968), integration of isolated communities into the nation (Weingrod, 1968), interest aggregation (Scott, 1969), political stability (Arriola, 2009), and state building (Grindle, 2012).

As a scholar, initially, the large number of appointees could be seen as the practice of sinecure, a medieval practice whereby, there exist offices or positions, which have no work or duties attached, that means they require or involves little or no responsibility, but the position gives the holders status and financial benefits.

But in our context as a developing society, a political appointment is a form of citizen empowerment. It is human capital that constitutes the most important asset of a political entity; hence it is vital to cater to their wellbeing and existence. That is not to underplay the place of capital projects, in terms of infrastructure development in the progress of society

This governance season has been most bountiful for Deltans. Apart from the wave of appointments by the governor, many elected and appointed officers added their own sets of appointees, especially with the emergence of Ovie Omo-Agege as the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate.

All these appointments are highly commendable, but those lucky ones must understand the times we are in the country and make good use of the returns on such appointments.