In this piece, Dr Yusuf Bangura, a co-editor of a book on selected works of Prof Jibrin Ibrahim provides a foretaste of the broth. Those who have had the privilege of reading this text elsewhere would notice that two graphic illustrations are missing because graphics are still a problem for the setting here. But the references have been published along. The book which could not be produced to beat the Jibrin at 70 birthday last November is now scheduled for publication early 2025.
By Yusuf Bangura
Making democracy work in underdeveloped multiethnic societies is one of the big challenges of our time. Perhaps, nowhere is this more so than in Africa, the least developed and arguably most ethnically diverse region in the world, with a history of messy and authoritarian rule. In the 1960s and 1970s, political scientists were pessimistic about the compatibility of Africa’s socio-economic structures with democracy. That pessimism was aided by the rapid descent of most countries into one party and military dictatorships just after independence in the 1960s.
The dramatic reversal of fortune in the 1990s when ordinary citizens rallied against and defeated authoritarian regimes across the continent represented a sobering reminder of the pitfalls of democracy theorisation in African politics. The pendulum massively swung the other way: the change in favour of democracy was seen not only as a celebration of freedom and triumph of the will, it also spawned a new literature on the inevitability of democracy in all corners of the world. Democracy came to be seen as the ‘only game in town’ on a world scale. If the least developed region could embrace democracy, the structural or socio-economic constraints that pessimists worried about should not stand in the way of any country that developed the will to demand and fight for it.
It is one thing, however, to fight for democracy and install it; it is a totally different thing altogether to build and make it work for everyone. More than 30 years after Africa’s engagement with democracy, there is widespread dissatisfaction with how it is practiced and made to address voter choices and wellbeing. In many countries, the fundamental democratic principle of free, fair and credible elections is yet to be fully respected; basic rights of organisation, expression and assembly are not well protected; the political system is polarised, unstable and violence-prone; and democracy has not meaningfully improved the wellbeing of voters. Democracy has been reduced in many countries to authoritarian civil rule, with limited freedoms and periodic but questionable competitive elections.
The shining light of democracy has dimmed and its inevitability or consolidation questioned. As in the 1960s and 1970s, soldiers have been emboldened in many countries, especially in West Africa, to challenge civil authority or the democratic experiments. There is strong evidence that democracy has either backslid or stagnated across the continent (Arriola, Rakner and de Walle 2023). Surely, even with all its flaws, Africans still favour democracy over military or one-party rule when they are polled (Afrobarometer, 2024). However, satisfaction with democracy has declined–by seven percentage points from a decade earlier, according to Afrobarometer. There is, indeed, often an outpouring of support for military strongmen when they take over the reins of government and suspend democratic constitutions, as the recent cases of Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso demonstrate
As Africa’s most populous country, with a democratic heritage and deeply divided ethnic and religious structures, perhaps there is no better country than Nigeria that captures the problems of identity politics, the debilitating legacies of military dictatorship or authoritarianism, and the highs and lows of enthroning and consolidating democratic rule in Africa.
This book is a selection of what we believe are Jibrin Ibrahim’s finest academic writings on the subject. A close reading of Ibrahim’s numerous publications, many of which are not included in this volume, indicate that he has been preoccupied, over a period spanning more than 30 years, with three big issues in his study of Nigerian politics: identity, authoritarianism, and democracy— the trifecta we have used as the title of the book. He approaches these issues with an admirable level of academic objectivity, razor-sharp critical scrutiny, and an amazing attention to detail. He does not shy away from asking difficult questions, getting to the fundamentals of issues, and unpacking them in various dimensions to make them intelligible to readers. Nor does he allow his ethnicity or faith to get in the way of his analytical work.
This introductory chapter offers a guide to the book. It first explores the structural constraints that affect the practice of democracy from a theoretical and Africa-wide perspective before discussing Nigeria’s politics based on Ibrahim’s 18 chapters in the book.
Structural constraints and democracy: theoretical issues
Three issues stand out as structural constraints to democratic consolidation in Africa: identity politics, underdevelopment, and the rentier character of the state. Identity politics may undermine the development of a civic culture of shared values, in which citizens are treated equally, and reduce politics to a zero-sum game that degenerates into conflicts.
Underdevelopment, or low levels of income and structural change, may hamper the development of social forces that are less beholden to primordial interests and hold back the development of voter autonomy and choice. And a rentier state, in which the state relies for its reproduction on rents or unearned income from external sources, may transform politics into a game of elite competition for rents or state resources, leading to exclusionary patronage networks. How countries have managed these constraints may explain the strengths and limitations of their democracies.
A major axis of identity politics in Nigeria
Identity politics
Identity is a very complex subject that encompasses the totality of social values–stretching from how individuals are raised in families, clans, neighbourhoods, villages and cities to how they are socialised in professions, associations, interest groups, state projects and transnational networks. This complexity makes it difficult to pin someone down to a single identity, let alone one that transcends time. The historical record suggests that identities evolve continuously and can be highly situational. Although they convey a picture of uniformity, they are always contested as members who are assumed to share a common identity may be structured differently. People who speak the same language or share the same faith, for instance, may share very little else in terms of income and wealth or class status, social networks, and life experiences.
In popular parlance, however, when identity is evoked, there is less concern for the totality of social values than with a primary or foundational set of values that are assumed to transcend other identities. Language, religion, culture and skin colour are often the markers of such foundational or core identities. This may explain why identity issues are all too often embedded in emotions and are a source of antagonism and violent conflict (Bangura, 1994).
In much of Sub-Saharan Africa, the foundational bases of identity are ethnicity (defined as language and traditional culture) and religion (defined as the Abrahamic faiths of Christianity and Islam). Skin colour, other physical attributes, or race are important primarily in regions that experienced European settler colonialism (Southern and parts of East Africa) and countries in the Sahel (Mauritania, Mali, Chad and Sudan) where black Africans and those who claim attachment to an Arab identity coexist.
With more than 3,000 languages or language groups, Africa is rivalled only by Asia as the most ethnically diverse region in the world. Except for Eswatini, Lesotho, and Somalia (which is riven by clan conflicts), African countries are highly ethnically heterogeneous. Indeed, in only a few countries (Botswana, Zimbabwe, Niger, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, Rwanda and Burundi), does a single ethnic group account for more than 50 percent of the population. Africa is, thus, a continent of minorities, even though some large groups often accord to themselves a majority or dominant status. The high level of Africa’s ethnic fragmentation may account for the low incidence of movements for self-determination. Save for a few cases (such as the quest by the Igbo for a state of Biafra in Nigeria, the demand for a Casamance state in Senegal, and the creation of Eritrea from Ethiopia and South Sudan from Sudan), identity politics in Africa revolves around struggles over the distribution of state resources and offices—not over demands for the creation of nation states.
The links between ethnicity and religion are complex. Since the two religions that define identity in Africa are universal rather than locally crafted, ethnicity and religion do not always neatly overlap or align. In other words, different ethnic groups may share the same religion, and individuals who share the same ethnicity (the Yoruba in Nigeria; and the Mende and Limba in Sierra Leone, for instance) may belong to different religions. Where an ethnic group is religiously heterogeneous, language or ethnicity most often takes precedence over religion; religion, in other words, may play a less important role in defining the identity politics of the ethnic group. In situations where there is a strong overlap of ethnicity and religion (among the Hausa, Igbo, and ethnic minorities in southern Nigeria and the Middle Belt, for instance), both ethnicity and religion can be used as important markers in defining the discourse and politics of groups. In Nigeria, because the majority of Muslims live in the North and the majority of Christians live in the South, a North-South cleavage articulated through the medium of religion is also an important variable in the discourse and practice of identity politics.
Religion may transcend ethnicity and become a dominant marker of identity for some groups, especially in periods of rapid change, economic crisis, and instability. Using the medium of religion, disaffected individuals may yearn for spiritual upliftment over and above their ethnic identity, and advocate for a return to an imagined glorious past, which they believe provides society with a sense of direction, cohesion, and pride. Such a posture is often guided by a fundamentalist reading of religious texts. Groups may seek to ‘cleanse’ society or change the laws, norms, morality and politics of a country in accordance with a rigid interpretation of sacred texts (Haynes, 1995). Religious fundamentalism poses a problem in ethnically plural societies for both co-religionists (who are accused as lax in religious practices) and those who follow a different religion. It elevates religious texts or God’s word above secular constitutions that set rules for democratic practices. Religious fundamentalism also adds a layer of mistrust and polarisation in the discourse and management of identity politics, as the chapters on identity and political turbulence in this volume demonstrate.
Identity politics may affect democracy in three crucial ways. First, it may make it difficult for a national culture of shared values to develop. Representative democracy, we should note, is a political system in which those who govern are chosen through competitive, free and fair elections; and citizens enjoy basic rights to associate, speak and move freely, as well as exercise choice in electing representatives. Equality, voter autonomy, compromise and accountability are the bedrock of such a system. They require a civic culture that transcends primordial values and sentiments for representative democracy to work. Identity politics, on the other hand, creates a discourse of ‘us-versus-them’, insiders and outsiders, and an emotive value system that treats citizens differently.
Second, and related to the first, identity politics may create bifurcated or multiple publics, making it difficult to hold public officials accountable. Those in power may enjoy the support of an ethnic voting bloc even if they underperform in office; and groups or voters linked to opposition parties may not reward a governing party regardless of its performance. Third, elections may become an ethnic census rather than an exercise for electing parties that are interested in promoting the public good. Those who speak the same language, hold the same faith, or share a common heritage may vote as a bloc; those who win may fill state offices with group members; and losers may be condemned to a life of misery or disadvantage. Under such conditions, elections may be perceived as an existential threat and parties may cheat or refuse to play by the rules, creating cycles of violence, repression and instability.
Having said this, it is important to stress that ethno-religious identity, in and of itself, is not pathological. The level of fragmentation or polarisation of ethno-religious segments plays a big role in shaping the character and dynamics of identity politics. The more ethnically fragmented a country is (such as Tanzania where the three largest of its 130 ethnic groups account for only about 20 percent of the population), the less likely it is for ethnicity to constitute a systemic problem. Similarly, in countries where the largest ethnic group accounts for an overwhelming majority of the population (the Tswana in Botswana, for instance), the largest group is likely to fragment into competing tendencies or parties, allowing individuals from smaller ethnic groups to participate actively in the parties formed by the dominant ethnic group. The difficult cases are countries with only two (Rwanda and Burundi, for instance) or three ethnic groups, and countries where two, three or four large groups coexist with a large number of smaller ethnic groups leading to regional formations and limiting the scope for bargaining (Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Kenya, for instance). (Bangura, 2006).
Democracy as a promoter of underdevelopment in the African context
Underdevelopment and structural change
The link between development and democracy has been extensively studied by political scientists and economists. There is more consensus on the positive impact of economic development on democracy than there is on democracy’s impact on development. Cross-country data suggest that regime type is not a predictor of economic growth or development. In other words, economies may grow or regress under both democratic and authoritarian regimes (Kholi, 2004), even though some believe that democracies tend to use labour more efficiently (Przeworski et al, 2000). And additional institutions, such as social pacts, may be required to make democracy work for welfare improvement (Stephens, 2007; UNRISD, 2010; Bangura, 2015).
Crucially, however, statistical and qualitative studies indicate that economic development is good for democracy: it may generate structural change, which may involve moving people from low value-added activities, such as traditional agriculture and petty informal sector jobs, to high value- added manufacturing activities and services. Such changes may weaken voter ties to traditional values that drive identity politics. Large numbers of people may find themselves in ethnically heterogeneous work settings that require construction of new relationships and values to bargain for improved wellbeing.
Nowhere is this democracy-enhancing quality of development more striking than in countries where manufacturing is the highest employer of labour and contributor of national wealth. Workers are forced to organise themselves into unions and bargain for improved wages, welfare benefits, shorter working hours, safe working conditions, and paid leave. The defence of seemingly economic and social interests at the workplace draws workers and their unions into the arena of democratic politics. They demand accountability, independent union organisation and the right to free expression and collective bargaining, critical for the resolution of wage and welfare disputes (Bangura, 1991). It is not surprising that industrialisation is often associated with democratic development and consolidation. It promotes voter autonomy and civic bonds that defend workplace economic interests and wider societal concerns. It also creates a large middle class with strong attachments to civic values and facilitates the expansion of civic and professional organisations necessary for the institutionalisation of democracy.
This happy convergence of development and democracy is well articulated in the literature on modernisation, which highlights the social and economic requisites of democracy, such as the importance of income levels, organised interest groups, a large middle class, civic activism, and inclusive political institutions (Przeworski et al, 2000; Lipset, 1994; 1959). In their statistical study on democracy and wellbeing, Przeworski et al report that democracies tend to survive only in countries with upper-middle-income status or income levels, which they peg at USD6,000. Such an income level suggests far reaching structural change and existence of a large middle class as well as independent civic organisations. Democratic reversals in some high-income countries in recent years may question this reading of development and democracy.
One does not need the statistical data of Przeworski et al to believe that democratic struggles can occur, and democracies can be instituted, in underdeveloped or poor countries. A large number of poor countries were part of the global wave of democracy recorded in the Freedom House democracy index of 2002, which showed that democratic regimes grew from 66 in 1990 to 121 in 2002. The problem, however, has been the consolidation of democracy in poor countries, the bulk of which are located in Africa. Using data from V-Dem’s liberal democracy index, Arriola, Rakner and de Walle (2023) find that Africa’s level of political liberalisation or democratisation in the 1990s was much lower than Latin America’s or Eastern Europe’s even though military and one-party dictatorships were ended in almost all countries in the three regions. Although regular multiparty elections continued to be held in Africa after the democratic transitions of the 1990s, the process of democratisation stalled very early in most countries, and rights were only partially respected. They report that the average liberal democracy scores have remained the same, or stagnated, over a long period. In other words, whatever the level of democracy attained by most countries in the mid-1990s, this is largely the same, presently. Significantly, none of the countries that perform well in the index (Botswana, Cape Verde, Ghana, Mauritius, Namibia, and South Africa) are low-income countries per capita for 2024.
Figure 1: GDP per capita at constant prices ($): Sub-Saharan Africa and Nigeria 1960-2024
Sub-Saharan African countries have, on average, not made much economic progress since independence in the 1960s. The great promise of the first decade and half of independence when those countries registered respectable growth rates comparable to other global regions turned sour in the 1980s as most economies were plunged into deep and protracted recession and forced to implement deflationary adjustment policies that reversed most of the gains. As Figure 1 shows, the GDP per capita (at constant prices) of Sub-Saharan African countries rose from USD1,139 in 1960 to USD1,518 in 1975; it stayed roughly at that level until 1980 when it sharply dropped from USD1,484 to USD1,149 in 1995—almost the same level as in 1960. It then rose consistently to USD1,651 in 2014 before flattening again. It is currently barely above USD1,600, which is just about USD450 above the income level of USD1,145 used by the World Bank to characterise low-income or the poorest countries of the world. Disturbingly, 22 of the 26 countries currently classified as low-income or the poorest in the world are in Sub-Saharan Africa. A further 11 that have graduated to lower-middle-income status have a per capita income of less than USD2,000.
As Figure 1 shows, Nigeria performed higher than the Sub-Saharan African average after 2008 when it graduated into the ranks of lower-middle-income countries. However, it has been able to cross a USD3,000 income level only once—in 2014. Between 2018 and 2022, GDP per capita hovered around USD2,000; it has since fallen sharply to alarmingly low levels, following the deep devaluation of the naira between 2023 and 2024. The naira suffered a massive three-and-half-fold (355%) devaluation vis-a-vis the US dollar from N460.72 on 29 May, 2023, when the new president, Ahmed Bola Tinubu, was sworn in, to N1,639 on 4 October 2024. Nigeria’s GDP per capita is currently estimated at USD1,110. This is lower than the World Bank’s USD1,145 cutoff point for countries classified as low income. Nigeria may be demoted from the ranks of lower- middle-income countries or reclassified as a low-income country when the World Bank does its next classification in July 2025.
A distinct feature of underdevelopment in Africa is the failure of most economies to experience far-reaching manufacturing-led structural change. It is reckoned that only 1.9 percent of global manufacturing takes place in Africa. The manufacturing sector’s share of GDP stagnated at about 10 percent for much of the 2000s and employment at about 14 percent. Africa’s colonial role as a global supplier of raw materials has not changed with independence, IMF-inspired structural adjustment, and globalisation. In Nigeria, manufacturing accounts for only 15 percent of GDP, and only about 12 percent of workers in the formal labour force are employed in manufacturing. Most people in Africa are still employed in traditional agriculture and low value/low skill informal sector activities in urban settings. Where structural change has taken place, it has involved a change largely from agriculture to mining in terms of GDP shares, with agriculture and informal petty activities still accounting for the largest share of employment.
Underdevelopment or limited structural change may impact society and politics in two important ways. The first is the disarticulated nature of African economies and societies–traditionally captured by the notion of a rural-urban divide, but which increasingly also includes bifurcated urban settings. Following the logic of the Kuznets curve, in which inequality first rises and then declines as countries transition from agriculture to manufacturing, low-income agrarian and rentier economies that have not fully made the transition to manufacturing are associated with high levels of inequalities in income, social protection and services (Galbraith, 2008; UNRISD, 2010). The bulk of the rural population and those who eke out a living in precarious, low value, urban activities find themselves at the bottom of the pyramid. Such inequalities may reinforce traditional values of kinship, undermine voter autonomy and encourage patronage politics–the lifeblood of identity politics. Second, if the inequalities assume ethno-religious lines, as they tend to do in Nigeria’s highly unequal North-South cleavage, it will be difficult to develop pan-national identities and civic values. Identity politics may become zero-sum games in which state institutions lose legitimate authority to allocate resources fairly, plunging societies into cyclical or permanent crises.
Is this promoting or demoting rentierism?
Rentier states
The fiscal basis of states, or the way states raise revenues and finance their activities, is important for understanding state-society relations and democratic politics. The ability of states to tax citizens played a big role in the long process of state building in countries with a good record of economic, social and political development. Taxation was the primary means for financing wars and meeting the needs of rulers. The variety of revenue sources that are available to counties today, such as mineral resource rents, foreign aid and consumption taxes, were either non- inexistent or not large enough to meet the fiscal needs of governments. This meant that rulers had to craft resource or tax bargains with citizens to get the latter to willingly agree to pay taxes and avoid coercive measures that might lead to resistance and low tax yields.
The literature on taxation and European state building refers to such bargains as fiscal contracts (Levi 1988, Brewer 1988, and Tilly 1975): citizens agreed to give part of their incomes as taxes to the state in exchange for what Mick Moore (2008) has described as ‘institutionalised influence over public policy’ by citizens. Such contracts allowed citizens to influence the spending decisions of rulers, provided a basis for the institutionalisation of rights, and paved the way for the subsequent expansion of rights in the field of social services and welfare protection. A similar fiscal contract could be observed in western Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s, before the oil boom, when the regional government financed its activities by using the surpluses of peasant farmers generated by the cocoa marketing board; in exchange, the government provided substantial support in education and other social services and cushioned the incomes of farmers from global price fluctuations (Helleiner 1964; Wheeler 1968).
The fiscal basis of current African states differs substantially from what obtained in the history of industrial societies generally. In addition to personal income taxes, African states finance their activities from many other revenue sources, including international trade taxes, value added or consumption taxes, corporate taxes, mineral resource rents, and foreign aid. However, taxation plays a much less prominent role in the revenue sources of most African states. The average tax- to-GDP ratio is only about 15.6 %–much lower than that of the Asia-Pacific region (19.8%), Latin America and the Caribbean (21.7%) and OECD countries (34.1%). Indeed, the tax-to-GDP ratio of resource-rich countries (Equatorial Guinea’s is 5.9%; Nigeria’s is 6.7%; Democratic Republic of Congo’s is 10%; Gabon’s is 10.7%; Sierra Leone’s is 11.7%; and Cameroon’s is 13.3%) is well below the African average (Hujo and Bangura, 2020).
For a large number of African countries, mineral resource rents and foreign aid constitute the main revenue sources for financing the state. Of the 24 most highly aid dependent countries in the world (defined as countries where aid constitutes about 50 percent or more of tax revenues), 19 are in Africa. The ratio of foreign aid to tax revenue is extraordinarily high in many countries: it is more than 200 percent in the Central African Republic; more than 100 percent in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Sao Tome and Principe; and more than 75 percent in Malawi, Guinea Bissau, Burundi and Rwanda (Hujo and Bangura, 2020).
States in which mineral rents dominate government revenues have been referred to as rentier states, which may produce pathological outcomes in politics and development (Aidi, 2019; Wantchekon and Jensen, 2004). The emergence of foreign aid as a dominant revenue source in low-income countries has led some economists (Easterly, 2021) to also characterise aid dependent countries as suffering from the ‘resource curse’ of rentier states. The logic is simple: aid and mineral rents offer states access to easy external finance, which does not create incentives to craft revenue or tax bargains with citizens; nor do such rents encourage states to engage in productive activities that will improve national wellbeing. Mineral rents give those who run the state a free hand to spend public revenues without worrying about accountability to citizens; and governments in aid dependent countries may be more accountable to foreign donors than to citizens.
Prior to the oil boom of the 1970s, revenues from agriculture, or peasant surpluses, played a substantial role in financing the Nigerian state. OPEC’s six-fold oil price hike in 1973 dramatically changed the fiscal structure and transformed Nigeria into a rentier state, prompting the military ruler at the time, Yakubu Gowon, to remark that “Money is not Nigeria’s problem, but how to spend it”. As Figure 2 shows, oil rents as a percent of GDP skyrocketed from 2.8 percent in 1973 to an astonishing 27 percent in 1974. They reached their highest peak in 1979 at 40.9 percent of GDP before crashing to 1.6 percent in 1982. They picked up again to a new peak of 28.7 percent in 1993 and crashed to 7.1 percent in 1998. Their highest peak in the Fourth Republic was 22 percent in 2000. However, since 2000, the contribution of oil rents to GDP has been marked by wild fluctuations and a downward spiral, accounting for only 6.2 percent of GDP in 2021. Volatility in global oil prices and marked reduction in oil output due to massive oil theft and instability in oil producing regions account for the decline. Some scholars have observed that oil revenues no longer account for the lion’s share of government revenues and that Nigeria has, since 2015, transitioned into a “post-oil state” (Burns and Owen, 2023). They estimate that non-oil revenues are now almost the same as oil revenues.
Surely, oil has lost its lustre in the fiscal structure of the Nigerian state. However, non-oil revenue currently enjoys equal shares with oil revenue in public finance largely because of the collapse of oil rents and not because of a dramatic increase in taxation, which, as we have seen, is only about 6.7 percent of GDP—the second lowest in Africa after Equatorial Guinea. Only Lagos state seems fiscally viable among Nigeria’s 36 states: it was able to internally generate more than one billion dollars of revenue in 2022 (N651.2 billion at an exchange rate of USD1=N450) before the massive devaluation of the naira in 2023 (Fadoju, 2023). The other states (and the federal capital) among the top five performers in internally generated revenue (Rivers N172.8 billion; Abuja N124.4 billion; Ogun N120.6 billion; and Delta N85.9 billion) do not come close to what Lagos has achieved. Nineteen states could not generate even USD50 million dollars from domestic taxation in 2022; such states may not be viable without handouts by the federal government from the oil rents.
It is important to note that not all rentier states produce perverse outcomes in politics and development. Canada and Australia financed their industrialisation from mineral resources; oil and gas in newly industrialised Malaysia did not crowd out its manufacturing sector; and when Norway
Figure 2: Oil rents as a percent of GDP (Nigeria): 1970-2021. Source: World Bank Group. Oil rents (% of GDP)—Nigeria. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=NG
Norway discovered oil after it had industrialised, it did not experience a resource curse or Dutch disease because of the institutions it established to manage the revenue windfall. In Africa, Botswana has also avoided the resource curse by maintaining macroeconomic stability, improving social services, and institutionalising democracy. It has consistently adopted policies that discourage exchange rate overvaluation, as well as fiscal strategies that set targets on government spending, and created special funds that stabilise its mineral revenues.
What sets Nigeria apart is the lack of consensus among its political elite for the crafting of institutions that will stabilise its oil rents and discipline its divisive redistributive politics. The politics of rent distribution permeates all facets of public life. It is at the centre of demands for the creation of more states, secessionist agitations, and never-ending calls for the restructuring of the federation. It also drives rebellion and instability in oil producing areas as citizens in those areas clamour for a fairer share of revenues. Importantly, the rentier state fuels high levels of inequality and corruption in the form of contract inflation, outright stealing of public wealth, padding of federal and state budgets, exorbitant salaries and benefits for those in elected offices, and patronage networks that undermine voter autonomy, transparency and accountability. By distorting the process of economic development, rentierism hinders the growth of social classes and civic groups that are vital for the deepening of democracy.
Politics in Nigeria
The dynamics and interconnections of identity, underdevelopment, and rentierism inform much of the conduct of politics in Nigeria. They are at the heart of the analytical framework deployed by Jibrin Ibrahim in the 18 chapters selected for this book. This section of the introduction guides the reader through the three-part structure of the book: identity and political turbulence; authoritarian politics and democracy; and episodic events, contested issues and turning points.
Identity and political turbulence
The six chapters on identity and political turbulence address five issues that have shaped the trajectory of Nigeria’s politics since independence in 1960. These are the internal divisions within groups and contestations over the number and types of identities accorded importance in public policy; elite grievances that drive identity politics; the corrosive effects of indigeneity on citizenship; the contradictory pulls of religiosity and secularism; and gender discrimination.
Ethnicity and religion are the main markers of identity politics in Nigeria. Despite its salience in society and politics, ethnic identification can be fuzzy or contested. There is a high level of inter- marriage and many people have multiple ethnic identities. This runs counter to the public discourse in which individuals are expected to affirm only one ethnic identity. There is no authoritative number of languages or ethnic groups in the country. Published figures vary considerably: some claim that there are 250 ethnic groups; others believe that there are 370 or more ethnic groups (Mustapha, 2006) and 500 language groups; and still others advance a figure of between 250 and 400 ethnic groups. Part of the problem is the lack of consensus on what constitutes an ethnic or language group.
A group may splinter into sub-groups or different groups altogether; and a common language, culture or religion may not translate into a common ethnicity or identity. Nnoli (1995) observed, for instance, in his Ethnicity and Development in Nigeria, that a group in Rivers State, which is believed to be Igbo because of its shared language, names and culture with the Igbo, invented a new Ikwerre identity to distance itself from the Igbo because of the wider public discrimination against the Igbo after the civil war. Under its cultural Iwhnurohna Progressive Union, this group continues to claim a separate Ikwerre identity despite attempts by the president of the apex Igbo organisation, the Ohaneze Ndigbo, to assimilate it into the broader Igbo ethnicity (Naku, 2024).
Regardless of the lack of clarity on the number of ethnic groups, Nigeria’s high level of ethnic heterogeneity is not in dispute. However, three groups—the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo—account for more than 60 percent of the population, giving rise to the belief that Nigeria is ethnically a tripolar society. This tripolarity was imposed by the British, who created and governed Nigeria as a colony of three regions in which the Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo were each allowed to dominate one region. Chapters 1 and 2 challenge this framework for understanding Nigerian society and politics. Smaller ethnic groups in each of the regions dominated by one of the three dominant groups have historically asserted their rights to full recognition as independent ethnicities and microstates.
Nigeria’s assumed bipolarity in the religious sphere is also contested as there are many segments or fragments of belief systems within each religious bloc. Chapters 2 and 3 throw light on the different sects and divisions within Islam and Christianity, as well as the tensions between the monotheist values of Islam and Christianity, on the one hand, and the polytheist (belief in many gods) tradition of African religions on the other, highlighting the resilience of African religious practices even after conversion into the two monotheist religions.
Nigeria’s ethnic and religious structure is, thus, driven by forces of both polarisation and fragmentation. Polarisation (which narrows identities and conflicts to a limited number of cleavages and issues) generates systemic, difficult-to-manage, political turbulence; and, although not well institutionalised, fragmentation (which expands the universe of identities), helps to localise conflicts or prevent them from becoming systemic.
Historically generated elite grievances are the main drivers of identity politics and polarisation. Chapter 1 provides an overview of these grievances. These are Hausa-Fulani elite frustrations with accusations from other Nigerians that they are responsible for the dire state of the country because of their historically dominant role in governance, even though, as putative advocates of Hausa-Fulani elite interests claim, they are underrepresented in the bureaucracy, modern businesses and social services. Additional elite grievances include the failure of the Yoruba’s iconic leader, Obafemi Awolowo, to achieve his life-long ambition to rule Nigeria, the cancellation of the presidential election results of 12 June 1993, which Moshood Abiola, a Yoruba, won, and the visceral feeling among the Yoruba elite that the cancellation was orchestrated by the ‘Hausa-Fulani oligarchy’ to confine the Yoruba to the status of a permanent opposition group in politics; and a strongly held belief by the Igbo elite that the Igbo are being treated unfairly in most domains of public life for the Biafra secessionist war they waged in the 1960s. There are also fears of domination by the Hausa-Fulani expressed by Northern ethnic minorities in the Middle Belt, and, to some extent, the Bornu elite; and historical fears by Southern minorities of domination by the Igbo and Yoruba, as well as the opposition by groups in the oil regions to the unfair distribution of oil rents and degradation of their environment.
These grievances mirror the six geopolitical zones (North-West, North-East, North-Central, South-West, South-East, and South-South) that have been superimposed upon the 36 states of the federal system. Identity politics is sometimes pursued through the prism of a North-South cleavage; at other times, and on some issues, the geopolitical zones may take centre stage; sometimes, ethnic and/or religious grievances within states, or between groups across several states, may define the contours of identity politics. Regardless, identity politics co-exists with, or is buttressed by, unwieldy systems of patronage around oil rent redistribution, which may involve elite-based cross-ethnic alliances and trade-offs. The rules are often opaque or not clearly defined; and actors may behave irrationally, turning the politics of ethno-religious claims-making into a game of brinkmanship. As the chapters on identity demonstrate, identity politics has produced one civil war; highly divisive, sometimes no-holds barred, public discourses; and periodic cases of turbulence or large-scale violence across many parts of the country. However, even though identity grievances often push the Nigerian state to systemic crises, they do not always pull in the same direction, making it difficult to categorise any group as a permanent loser.
The issue of indigeneity enshrined in the 1999 constitution adds fuel to the politics of ethnic claims-making. Indigeneity tends to freeze ethnic identities in their primordial form by preventing ethnic crossovers or adoption of civic identities. Chapter 5 extensively discusses this issue. On the one hand, the constitution upholds the rights of Nigerians to equal citizenship; yet it also places limits on those rights, especially on matters relating to the implementation of the federal character principle on governmental appointments, admission into educational institutions, and granting of scholarships. Those who lack deep historical roots in a state or local government area are disadvantaged even if they have lived, or are married to individuals, in those places for decades.
Ethnic grievances are sometimes couched in religious terms, even though ethnicity and religion do not always overlap. Combined ethnic and religious polarisation breeds high levels of intolerance and a propensity for violence. As Chapters 3, 4, and 6 illustrate, there is an almost unresolved tension in Nigeria between rising religiosity and demands for greater secularisation. This is driven by long running economic crises and adjustment programmes that have failed to cushion large sections of the population from huge welfare losses, especially in the North. In his introductory chapter to his co-edited book Creed and Grievance, Mustapha (2018) notes that high levels of North-South and Muslim-Christian inequalities play a crucial role in understanding the political role of religion in the North. Mustapha’s data show that the northern states are four times poorer than the southern states.
The importance of religion in Nigeria’s politics requires, in some instances, its disentanglement from ethnicity when analysing identity. Ebenezer Obadare (2018) titles his book on religion and politics in Nigeria The Pentecostal Republic to underscore what he believes has been a profound impact of Pentecostal forces on politics in the Fourth Republic; and the Muslim fundamentalist group in the North, Boko Haram, wages war against both ‘infidels’ of different ethnicities and those with whom they share a common ethnicity and faith. They pose a threat to democratic values and practices. Religious minority and gender rights are given short shrift in parts of the country where religion and public law have been tightly integrated. Chapter 4 provides a rich analysis of the debate on, application of, and negotiations around, Sharia, including a balanced analysis of the tensions between equality and Sharia in the 1999 constitution. Gender discriminatory practices under both Islam and Christianity are further explored in Chapter 6, which highlights the common ground shared by the two religions on the ‘immorality’ of women’s sexuality and efforts to control women’s bodies and sexuality. Case studies on the implementation of Sharia, the conflict over girls’ uniforms in Queen Amina College in Kaduna, and the National Assembly Bill on public nudity and sexual intimidation enrich the discussion on religion and gender politics.
The chief ideologue of the ‘armed populist’ variant of authoritarianism in Nigeria
Authoritarian politics and democracy
Two institutional frameworks dominate the political science literature on solutions for the governance of ethnically divided societies. These are majoritarian institutions that reward moderation in party behaviour and vote pooling while also encouraging adversarial politics; and consensus-based or power sharing arrangements that seek to accommodate the ethnic segments as autonomous units (Bangura, 2006). The first seeks to promote plurality or national integration within the party system by encouraging politicians to seek votes outside their ethnic strongholds. The Alternative Vote proportional representation electoral system in which voters rank candidates on the ballot is often canvassed as the ideal instrument for engineering such an outcome (Horowitz, 1985). The second framework accepts ethnic parties as given and promotes plurality at the governmental level, through unity governments or grand coalitions, rather than in the party system (Lijphart, 1977). The designers of Nigeria’s rules for political competition opted for a combination of the two systems: adversarial, majoritarian politics and limited forms of power sharing. They seek to discourage ethnic parties while at the same time incorporating power-sharing ethnic elements in the majoritarian governance institutions.
The rules do this in three ways. First, even though Nigeria’s electoral rules are based on the highly disproportional first-past-the-post system, parties are expected to obtain a certain share of votes across the federation (25 percent in two thirds of the 36 states) for them to be declared winners. This provision limits the number of parties that can have a realistic chance of winning the presidency, which pushes them to seek votes outside their ethnic strongholds by forming ethnic coalitions. Ethnic competition occurs, therefore, within, rather than between, the parties. Second, the constitution affirms that each of the 36 states should have at least one representative in the federal government. And third, the constitution stipulates, through what is popularly called ‘the federal character principle’, that appointments in the bureaucracy should reflect the ethnic makeup of the federation (Mustapha, 2006). These provisions set Nigeria apart as the only African country that has institutionalised far-reaching rules for taming the scourge of divisive identity politics and incentivising cross-ethnic collaborations in public life.
The big question, however, is why these rules have not worked or worked sufficiently enough to stabilise Nigeria’s politics. Divisive identity politics and authoritarian practices remain resilient and virulent. Chapters 7-12 throw light on this dilemma. The democratic rules for a fair, tolerant, and multiethnic public sphere were crafted by the military, which was in power for 29 out of 39 years of self-rule before the Fourth Republic was installed in 1999. Especially under the regimes of Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, military rule in Nigeria was highly authoritarian and corrupt. The country was effectively run as a unitary state; the military appointed state governors and administrators; and as Chapter 8 notes, corruption, which had reached epic proportions under the government of the National Party of Nigeria (1979-1983), was transformed into the raison d’etre or essence of statecraft. Under the military, an internationally acclaimed minority rights activist, Ken Saro-Wiwa, from the oil producing region was executed; a famous journalist, Dele Giwa, was killed by a parcel bomb; draconian decrees were promulgated that curtailed free speech, assembly and movement; and many civil rights activists lost their lives or were incarcerated for challenging authoritarian rule.
Chapters 8, 10 and 11 provide a useful analysis of the legacy of the military’s authoritarian practices that continue to bedevil multiparty politics today. These include the concentration of power and fiscal resources at the federal level, turning the central state into a site of intense competition for siphoning resources. The politics of oil rent distribution, or fiscal federalism, identity-based resource claims, and the state’s failure to act as a fair arbiter in resolving grievances have created strong feelings of mistrust towards the state. There are loud and persistent calls for far-reaching restructuring of the federal state (Osaghae, 2023; Suberu, 2023; Jega, nd) as no segment of the power elite seems satisfied with its operations. As Ibrahim (Chapter 1) puts it “No one has any commitment to it, and everybody is seeking…access, not to bake the cake, but to eat it”. Some want to completely break up the state, others want to turn it into a confederation of regions, while others insist largely on the delegation of police powers to states and reversion to the revenue formula of derivation to determine how the oil rent is utilised. As Chapter 1 notes, elites from all the key ethno-regional formations have advocated secession, confederation, or far- reaching restructuring of the state at various times in the country’s turbulent history.
Added to this mistrust of the state is how the military’s practice of suppressing dissent, purging the party system of ideology, and detaching parties from engaged grassroots members informs the way political parties organise their affairs to contest for power. During the Second Republic (1979-1983), political parties, such as the People’s Redemption Party (PRP), which governed Kano and Kaduna states, and the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), which was dominant in the Southwest, espoused ideological positions on the economy and society. The PRP was identified with land reform in favour of the talakawa (commoner) and the UPN with universal primary education.
In contrast, political parties in the Fourth Republic are totally bereft of ideologies. More disturbingly, the contemporary parties lack internal processes of democracy or open and fair systems of contestation for choosing representatives; and party officials or ‘godfathers’ have hijacked the main parties and severed the links between them and their membership. Chapter 12 cites the bizarre case of 2005 when the governing party at the time, the People’s Democratic Party, dismissed all its members as part of a ploy to get rid of what was perceived as recalcitrant members, including the Vice President of the country, Atiku Abubakar. Another important way political parties have mimicked the authoritarian practices of military rulers is through parties’ quest for hegemony when they win elections—they incentivise members of opposition parties to change sides and weaken opposition parties’ abilities to hold governments to account.
It is not surprising that most of Nigeria’s elections have been fraudulent or extensively rigged. Ibrahim notes in Chapter 12 that the elections that have been relatively fair are those of 1959 (conducted under colonial rule), 1979 (administered by the military with no strong interest in the outcome), and 2015 (conducted by a competent, fair and determined chief electoral officer, Attahiru Jega, and aided by an improved voters’ list, a biometric ID-card, and a verification machine). The elections of 2003 and 2007, he concludes, were the most fraudulent in Nigeria’s electoral history. The 2023 elections were also marred by serious irregularities as the Results Viewing (IRev) portal, which the chief electoral officer, Mahmood Yakubu, claimed would transmit results in real time did not work or, as some argued, was sabotaged during the transmission of the presidential results.
Chapters 7 and 10 demonstrate, however, that belief in, and struggles for, democracy have deep roots in the country. This is traced to the fragmented character of Nigerian society and the development of a large body of legal professionals and journalists, starting from the period of decolonisation. It has made it difficult for ‘oligarchic Sultanic rule’ to take hold, even under military rule. There is an extensive discussion of the role of the media, labour unions, student unions and professional associations in struggles for democracy across all regimes. It may explain why military rule has always been perceived as a temporary rupture in democratic governance; and why, before the regime of Babangida, all military rulers eschewed the title of President—such a title was reserved only for civilian heads of state. Indeed, Nigeria’s democratization cannot be mechanically linked to the so-called 1990s ‘third wave’ of global democratization. Each military regime generated calls for a speedy return to democratic rule. Unlike most African countries, therefore, Nigeria has experienced three transitions from military to civil democratic rule (1979, 1998, and 1999) in its post-independence history. However, the balance of forces is still heavily weighted against groups that seek to advance the democratic frontier. This can be linked to the low pace of industrialisation or development, the stunted growth of organised working classes, as well as the deleterious effects of rent-seeking and identity politics.
A BusinessDay graphic which, coincidentally, speaks to this story
Episodic events, contested issues and turning points
A high frequency of episodic events underpins Nigeria’s volatile politics. Actors engage in combative, no holds barred discourses; dangerous brinkmanship; and sometimes violence in pursuing interests and making claims. These may become systemic, assume a binary ‘us versus them’ cleavage, and impact all sections of society. Some events may become turning points in charting new directions; others, however, may remain unresolved, continue to fester, and impose considerable strains on the polity. Episodic events have occurred under both military and multiparty regimes. They are the hot burning issues that dominate discourses about politics on the street level.
One of the hallmarks of Ibrahim’s scholarship is his incisive probing of such events to clarify their essence and dynamics. Chapters 13-18 address six such issues or events: the 1987 landmark religious crisis in Kaduna that soured relations between Muslims and Christian minorities in the North; Babangida’s never-ending authoritarian transition programme that was spearheaded by a select group of political scientists; the ‘power shift’ debate in the transition to the Fourth Republic; the 2007 movement that challenged Olusegun Obasanjo’s attempt to amend the constitution and prolong his term in office; the First Lady syndrome that mimics the authoritarian values and practices of the presidency and the political class; and the case of Lady Ime Udom, a high achieving woman, who was rigged out of the primaries of a leading political party because of her gender and lack of ‘godfather’ support.
Chapter 13 discusses the large-scale destruction of churches, private hotels, bars, houses and lives in five towns in Kaduna state in 1987, following a violent standoff between Muslim and Christian students at a college, the killing of a dozen people, and demolition of a mosque, two churches, and private houses in Kafanchan. The immigrant Muslim Hausa-Fulani population in Kafanchan was believed to have suffered the brunt of the attacks. The scale and geographical spread of the reprisal attacks against Christians seemed unprecedented. In the eyes of many, they represented a turning point in the simmering antagonism between Christian minorities and the majority Hausa- Fulani Muslim population in the North. While the Kafanchan attacks might have been spontaneous, the large-scale reprisals were believed to have been orchestrated. Ibrahim traces the crisis to two important developments in the country: the rise of religious fundamentalism in both Islam and Christianity; and the jockeying for power by different sections of the power elite in the flawed transition to democracy. With vivid illustrations, he argues that the images and discourses on domination produced by religious fundamentalists were incorporated by politicians in their politics of brinkmanship for control of the state. These include the frenzied reactions against the spate of books that were published by retired military officers from the South about the civil war around the same period, including the burning of Obasanjo’s book, Nzeogu–a hated figure among ruling circles in the North for his coup and execution of the revered Northern leader Ahmadu Bello, in 1966. Ibrahim offers a detailed analysis of the various fundamentalist groups and activities within Islam and Christianity as well as the grievances and mobilisation of politico- historical symbols of each camp in the struggles for power.
Chapter 14 explores the flawed transition itself. This is a trenchant critique of the role of distinguished political scientists in subverting democratic norms and processes. At the heart of the transition programme was the military’s creation of two artificial parties, onerous and undemocratic rules for contesting elections, and shifting of the goal posts when the goals were met. Various agencies were established to give the transition programme respectability. It was clear, however, that the military ruler, Babangida, had no interest in ceding power. He suspended the process on 12th June 1993 even though the presidential election was deemed one of the most credible in Nigeria’s history. This profoundly deepened the North-South regional polarisation and comprehensively discredited military rule. It was a major turning point in civil-military relations, although the country had to endure even more draconian military dictatorship under Sani Abacha before electoral democracy was restored in 1999.
Demands for what came to be called “a power shift” from the North to the South intensified among politicians during the debate on transition from military rule. It was no longer enough to transition to democracy; the president, Southern elites insisted, should be a Southerner. Chapter 15 addresses this demand for a “power shift” and how it affected different ethno-regional groupings. It should be noted that the constitution makes no provision for power rotation between the North and South or among states. Attempts by political parties to practice such rotation have been controversial. Both the South and North have three geopolitical zones. If power shifts to the South, or the North, which zone or state should it shift to? In the foundation election of 1999, there was a consensus among members of the two main parties to field a candidate from Yorubaland or the South-West (which was believed to have been wronged by the cancellation of the 12th June 1993 results).
However, the politics of the rotation principle has not been aligned in the main parties in subsequent elections. For the 2023 elections, for instance, the ruling All Progressives Congress resolved that the party’s presidential ticket would be zoned to the South after Buhari, a Northerner, had served two terms as president. The situation, however, was complicated for the main opposition party, the People’s Democratic Party, whose last party leader and president of the country, Goodluck Jonathan, was a Southerner. Peter Obi and members of his Igbo ethnic group argued that it was the turn of the Igbo to contest the presidency. However, Atiku Abubakar and Northern politicians affirmed that the South had had its turn and a Northerner should be given the party ticket. Abubakar won the primary, and Obi switched to the Labour Party.
The rotation principle, which is unavoidable in a divided polity like Nigeria’s, needs fair rules to ensure that it does not provoke feelings of permanent exclusion from the presidency by ethnic groups. The problem of tenure elongation or removing term limits in constitutions is a hot button issue that has affected African democracies. Since the democratization wave of the 1990s, nine tenure elongations have been recorded across the continent. They often happen during the tenure of the foundational president in transitions to democracy. Chapter 16 demonstrates that Obasanjo, the first president in the Fourth Republic, tried to change the constitution and extend his tenure. However, groups within the legislature and civil society organised, resisted and comprehensively defeated his plan. The chapter discusses the methods used and alliances formed to challenge the “third term” plan. The plan was so unpopular among broad sections of the population that pro- third term politicians were publicly harassed and humiliated. Some were afraid to visit their constituencies. However, through his control of the governing party, Obasanjo was able to install a successor and made it difficult for those who opposed him to be voted back into office. The defeat of Obasanjo’s tenure elongation plan was an important turning point in Nigeria’s multiparty politics: since its defeat, no Nigerian president has toyed with the idea of a “third term” plan.
Chapters 17 and 18 deal with an important flaw in Nigeria’s, indeed wider Africa’s, democratic politics: overbearing First Ladies and marginalisation of women from power. Chapter 17 discusses the rise of the Office of First Lady in Nigerian and wider African contexts. Even though the Nigerian constitution makes no provision for such an office, spouses of presidents have projected power by sharing the supreme executive authority of their husbands. In Nigeria, this phenomenon can be traced to the powerful interventions of Maryam Babangida, wife of military ruler Babangida, in politics during the 1980s and early 1990s—such as her usurpation of the powers of the national women’s organization, harassment of prominent women whom she saw as a threat, influencing of decisions on cabinet dismissals and appointments, and creation of a large network of offices and followers on gender issues. The phenomenon of First Lady became entrenched under subsequent presidents. Today, even the spouses of state governors perform similar roles at the state level. Offices of First Ladies are heavily funded by the budget; and, by promoting gender causes that have global appeal, they have also been able to attract enormous funds from international donors. One striking feature of the First Lady syndrome is the mimicking of the authoritarian, divisive, and wasteful practices of their ‘heads of state’ husbands and the political class—making the Office of the First Lady an aspect of state abnormalities that needs to be cleansed.
Chapter 18 is a fascinating analysis of how an educated, high-achieving and independent woman with considerable legal, NGO and community work was rigged out of the primaries of a leading political party, the People’s Democratic Party, for a Senatorial seat at Akwa Ibom state. She lost because she was not sponsored by a godfather or powerful man. She was also discredited because of her non-marital status and accused by some of projecting strength and independence—values that are largely associated with men in public life. Amazingly, although the chief of her traditional community held very chauvinistic views about women, he supported her because he saw her as a “man woman”. Her experience brings out in bold relief some of the findings of a larger study by Ibrahim and Salihu (208) on Women, Marginalisation and Politics in Nigeria, from which this chapter is extracted. Women were rigged out of the primaries by labelling them as cultural deviants; male gatekeepers used abusive language and violence to demotivate female political aspirants; male opponents played the indigeneity card, which treats women in mixed marriages as outsiders in both their original states and states of their husbands; and the affirmative action policy for women’s representation was wielded as a stick to challenge women’s commitments to parties.
The late Prof Claude Ake, the chief questioner of the feasibility of democracy in Africa
Conclusion
Nigeria is still a highly divided and unstable nation despite 25 years of competitive multiparty politics, seven vigorously contested elections, and one transfer of power from an incumbent government to an opposition party. It is unable to routinely conduct free, fair and credible elections; voter participation is incredibly low (with the 2023 elections recording a miserly 26.7 percent turnout, in which the winner received a disputed 37 percent of the vote); its level of corruption remains stupendously high; and it is mired in complex crises and insecurities. These insecurities include the violent campaign for an Islamic state by Boko Haram in the North-East; kidnappings for ransom by terror groups across large parts of the country; persistent and violent conflicts between Fulani herders and farmers in many states of the federation; violent and subversive activities by the Indigenous People Of Biafra (IPOB) in the South-East for an independent Igbo state; and acts of sabotage, oil theft, kidnappings and killings in the oil producing areas in the South-South by locally armed and mobilised youths. It is not surprising that Nigeria’s democracy ratings by global democracy-tracking institutions have been either poor or middling. Democratic forms of politics coexist, or are intertwined, with highly authoritarian values and practices.
This book provides valuable insights for understanding the problems that Nigeria has faced in trying to craft an orderly, inclusive, and democratic system of government. Three structural constraints have hampered such efforts: identity politics, underdevelopment or limited structural change, and the rentier character of the state. Identity politics frustrates the development of a civic culture of shared values. Underdevelopment weakens the development of social forces that may transcend primordial or ethnic interests and promote voter autonomy and work-based and civic interests. And rentierism transforms politics into a game of elite competition for rents, leading to exclusionary patronage networks.
Insights from the study of ethnic structures and governance suggest that identity may become a problem when it is articulated within a polarised ethnic structure of two or three groups; or one in which two, three or four large groups coexist with a large number of small groups, leading to a few power blocs or coalitions that may limit the scope for bargaining. This suggests that calls for Nigeria to return to a confederation of regions in the current debate on federal restructuring are misguided. A confederation of regions works against the logic of fragmentation that helps multiethnic societies to avoid systemic polarisation.
As the chapters in this book indicate, structural constraints are not cast in stone. There are copious cases of countervailing pressures for change, civic activism, and attempts at consensus building. They indicate possibilities for national renewal and forms of politics that deliver accountability, development and improvements in wellbeing. This is a book that depicts hope and despair, forward steps and regressive outcomes, as well as enormous opportunities and mindboggling constraints. It is underpinned by a fervent belief in a united Nigeria and the ultimate triumph of democracy that works for everyone.
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