This paper has alluded to the role of the colonial tripartite federal legacy in exacerbating ethno-regional conflicts and paving the way for ethno-military infighting and secessionist warfare in Nigeria. On the eve of the outbreak of civil war, however, the Nigerian Federal Military Government, led by the Northern ethnic minority officer, Yakubu Gowon, dissolved the country’s four regional units into twelve states, six each in the north and south. Although it failed to stop the war, the creation of new states contributed crucially to the collapse of the Igbo secessionist campaign, to the relative
stabilization of post-war Nigeria, and to the prevention of any further major secessionist conflict in the federation. These achievements reflect the genius of Nigeria’s multi-state federalism in mitigating conflict through the following five mechanisms:
1. The partial compartmentalization or decentralization of conflicts in separate, multiple, sub-federal arenas (rather than a few large regional centres), thereby reducing the capacity of such conflicts to polarize or destabilize the entire federation;
2. The fragmentation and relegation of each of the three major ethnic groups into several states, none of which can individually threaten the stability or continuity of the federation;
3. The establishment of several more or less heterogeneous ethnic minority-dominated states, thereby promoting the political accommodation and empowerment of communities that were previously disenfranchised under the defunct regional structure;
4. The moderation and sublimation of ethnicity through the promotion of intergovernmental alignments that cut across ethnic fault-lines as constituent states that are not exactly isomorphic with ethnic boundaries cooperate and compete along functional lines of interest, including issues of states’ rights and constitutionalism; and
5. The promotion of some form of distributive justice through the devolution and redistribution of resources to multiple sub-federal jurisdictions as well the representation of diverse sub-federal elites in national government institutions, as concretized in Nigeria’s revenue sharing and “federal character” policies, respectively.
Yet, deep contradictions and costs have vexed Nigeria’s multi-state federalism, as evidenced in the continuing acrimonious debates about the country’s federal arrangements, the instability that has plagued both military and civilian governments since the civil war, and the loss of more than ten thousand lives in ethnic and religious violence since the restoration of democratic rule in May 1999. The major weaknesses of Nigeria’s post-civil war multi-state federalism can be summarized as follows:
a) Nigeria’s multi-state federalism has suffered enormous structural erosion both from the country’s extended lapses into military rule and from the overwhelming dependence of sub-national state and local authorities on centrally collected revenues, which have accounted for over 80 percent of all government finances in the federation since the seventies. The economic over-centralization of the federation, in particular, has explosively focused partisan, sectional, and factional political and economic competition in the country on the control of the central government, with devastating implications for national stability.
b) The centralized funding of sub-federal authorities has stimulated ethnic and sub-ethnic pressures for the formation of new sub-national units as an avenue for easy access to national oil revenues. Yet, the sweeping proliferation of states, now 36 in number, has simply compounded the syndrome of over-centralization since “the greater the number of states, the weaker and less viable individual states will become, with the direct consequence that the center [sic] would actually gather more powers”.
c) The proliferation of sub-federal administrative boundaries and identities, in a context defined historically by discrimination against settlers and non-indigenes, has led to a sharp contraction of the geo-political space in which a Nigerian can claim indigene status within a particular state and enjoy full citizenship rights. The Nigerian constitutions since 1979 have compounded the unfortunate dichotomy between indigenes and non-indigenes at the state level by explicitly mandating the representation of an indigene of each state in the federal cabinet, and then defining an indigene genealogically (rather than residentially) as a person whose ‘parent or… grandparent was a member of a community indigenous to that state’ (Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999: 318). In essence, in several Nigerian localities and states considerable turmoil and violence, sometimes involving hundreds of fatalities, has resulted from attempts to exclude large, but ostensibly non-indigenous, resident communities from socio-economic and political opportunities, including land and placement in educational and politico-bureaucratic agencies, claimed or controlled by ‘indigenes’ or local or state governments.
d) The proliferation of economically inefficient and dependent sub-federal jurisdictions, and the emphasis on the redistribution of opportunities among sectional constituencies or ‘indigenes,’ reflect and reinforce the ‘ethno-distributive’ nature of Nigerian federalism and ‘federal character.’ This invariably involves the systematic subordination of principles of economic efficiency and viability to politico-distributive considerations, which nudges the federation towards economic stagnation and fiscal insolvency. At the same time, the fiscal crisis of the Nigerian federation has promoted the recruitment of economically disillusioned youths into violent ethnic movements (the so-called ethnic militias and vigilantes), while undermining the capacity of the federation to maintain ethnically neutral and professionally competent police and security forces that can prevent the escalation of sectional conflict into large-scale violence.
e) Nigeria’s distributive multi-state federalism, which is based essentially on the massive redistribution of resources from the oil-rich Niger Delta to the rest of the federation, has engendered violent struggles for local or regional ‘resource control’ in the oil-rich sections. These economic grievances have persisted in spite of recent constitutional and statutory provisions that are designed to return at least 13 percent of centrally collected oil revenues (including offshore oil revenues) to the oil-bearing states on a derivation basis.
The aggravation of the contemporary tensions of Nigerian federalism by dominant military political elites bears reiteration. Despite their remarkable reconfiguration of the Nigerian federation in response to the Biafran secessionist threat, Nigeria’s military rulers have generally governed in an arbitrary, self-serving, sectional, centralizing and polarizing manner. Their civilian counterparts, although constrained by constitutional and electoral imperatives to govern in a more accommodative manner, meanwhile have not hesitated to manipulate sectional sentiments, such as Muslim pressures for Sharia, as a way of deflecting mass-based pressures for the socio-economic dividends of democracy.
