It is increasingly recognized in public administration that the relationship between trust and transparency is not straightforward. Recently, right‐wing populists have risen to power, rejecting transparency requirements based on documents while claiming that they “hide nothing.” Clearly, existing scholarly conceptualizations are insufficient for understanding how transparency operates as a value in real‐world political contestation. An analysis of state‐ and national‐level politics in Nigeria reveals that, while always retaining a core informational component, there are multiple competing conceptions of transparency. Popular demands for transparency express a belief that not only should data be made transparent, but also the social networks in which politicians are embedded. “Transparency in people” can clash with more traditional, technocratic transparency practices centered on data. By rethinking who or what should be made transparent—data, things, or people—this article offers fresh theoretical insights on the complex politics of transparency and trust.

Urban renewal is central to ‘world-class’ city aspirations on the African continent: demolitions and evictions exemplify the power of the state to restructure urban space, prioritizing elite forms of accumulation and enforcing aesthetic norms of cleanliness, order and modernity. The ubiquity of world-class city-making has been taken by urban studies scholars as evidence of African leaders’ converging on a unitary aspirational urban imaginary. This article contends that the concept of world class should instead be understood as a key terrain on which African governments’ distinctive and diverse ideational ambitions are expressed. In Oyo State, southwest Nigeria, vernacular political traditions—in this case Yoruba cultural nationalism centred on the ideas of Obafemi Awolowo—were deployed by the state governor to legitimize urban renewal. Drawing on the Yoruba notion that elitism can be ‘generalized’, the cultivation of globalized urban forms was not only a project of becoming ever more homogenously ‘international’ but a historically grounded aspiration to become ever more essentially Yoruba. Thus, beyond commonalities across the discourses used to legitimize neoliberal urban development—world class, international and global—these universal sounding imaginaries may at the same time express much more particularistic political projects.

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I am grateful to the organisers and participants at the Nigerian Politics panel of the African Studies Association UK conference at the University of Birmingham, September 2018 for their comments and feedback. The comments of the editor, the associate editor and two anonymous reviewers were helpful in re-orienting and clarifying the ideas in this paper. Thanks must go to Sule Buba for ongoing inspiration, and Luisa Enria for astute feedback.

This article argues against the long-standing instinct to read African politics in terms of programmatic versus patrimonial politics. Unlike the assumptions of much of the current quantitative literature, there are substantive political struggles that go beyond ‘public goods good, private goods bad’. Scholarly framings serve to obscure the essentially contested nature of what counts as legitimate distribution. This article uses the recent political history of the Lagos Model in south-west Nigeria to show that the idea of patrimonial versus programmatic politics does not stand outside of politics but is in itself a politically constructed distinction. In adopting it a priori as scholars we commit ourselves to seeing the world through the eyes of a specific, often elite, constituency that makes up only part of the rich landscape of normative political contestation in Nigeria. Finally, the example of a large-scale empowerment scheme in Oyo State shows the complexity of politicians’ attempts to render distribution legitimate to different audiences at once.