Nigeria, Africa's most populous democracy, celebrates her 50th year as an independent nation in October 2010. As the cliché states, ‘As Nigeria goes, so goes Africa’. This volume frames the socio-historical and political trajectory of Nigeria while examining the many dimensions of the critical choices that she has made as an independent nation. How does the social composition of interest and power illuminate the actualities and narratives of the Nigerian crisis? How have the choices made by Nigerian leaders structured, and/or been structured by, the character of the Nigerian state and state-society relations? In what ways is Nigeria's mono-product, debt-ridden, dependent economy fed by ‘the politics of plunder’? And what are the implications of these questions for the structural relationships of production, reproduction and consumption? This collection confronts these questions by making state-centric approaches to understanding African countries speak to relevant social theories that pluralise and complicate our understanding of the specific challenges of a prototypical postcolonial state.