Nigerian Politics Remain Tied to Ethnicity

By Henry Srebrnik, [Summerside, PEI] Pioneer Journal

Ethnic power sharing has never worked as intended in Nigeria, despite various federal and other formulas designed so that every one of its many ethnic and religious groups “get their piece of the national cake.”

Not long after the country attained independence in 1960, the Igbos, a majority in much of the country’s southeastern region, declared themselves the independent Republic of Biafra in May 1967. Several weeks later, the Nigerian civil war began. 

It lasted until January 1970. After early Biafran successes, the war became one of attrition, characterized by massive civilian deaths on the Biafran side, some from direct military action but most from starvation and disease. About one million people perished.

Nothing that drastic has torn the nation apart since then. Today, political elites cite the importance of segmental representation along ethnic, regional, and religious lines within a federal system, proportionality in all areas of government, and accommodation and cooperation. This is the “official” rhetoric.

But things look different behind the scenes. In fact ethnic mobilization and violence have both increased, fueled by demands for the allocation of federal resources and the reorientation of the federal structure around “ethnic nationalities.”

And while the military has kept in the political background over the past two decades, after running this fractious state for almost 33 years, the legitimacy of the civilian regimes that followed has been eroded by these tensions.

Here’s the problem: political entrepreneurs in Nigeria mobilize ethnic networks primarily to capture access to state resources. Therefore power-sharing institutions that define access to state office and federal revenues in terms of ethnic, regional, and religious identities reinforce the centrality of identity-based ethnic networks as a means to acquire political and economic power. 

Since that becomes the surest way to accumulate wealth and power, such ethnic networks are indispensible avenues for pursuing them. 

Political elites among the numerous ethnic groups establish clientelist networks to attract mass followings; these supporters see them as a means to gain access to patronage.

And this has led to the rapid expansion of quota systems across all branches of government.

The 1999 constitution that ended military rule incorporated the Federal Character Commission (FCC) to oversee the administration of a formal quota system in federal, and eventually state and local, employment. 

It monitors the hiring and promotion policies of “all bureaucratic, economic, media, and political posts at all levels of government” in order to ensure their compliance with “the principles of proportional sharing.”

In effect, the FCC administers one of the largest affirmative-action programs in the world, officially organized around the representation of states but in practice, through the use of the “indigeneity” requirement as defined in the legislation, around ethnicity. 

The system privileges ethnic origins over citizenship and enables powerful local patronage brokers to control jobs.

Meanwhile, there has been growing religious tension between Muslims and Christians. This has since been exacerbated by the Boko Haram insurgency in the northeast.  In the states of Adamawa and Nasarawa, 40 villages have been destroyed since Jan.15. 

Last month at least 110 schoolgirls were abducted by the terrorist group in Dapchi, Yobe state. The attack came some four years after they kidnapped more than 270 girls from a school in the town of Chibok, in Borno state. Of those, 100 remain captive.

A new separatist group, the Indigenous People of Biafra, has sprung up. It wants a number of states in the south-east, made up mainly of Igbo, to break away from Nigeria. President Muhammadu Buhari declared it a terrorist organization last year.

The 2016 resumption of hostilities in the oil-rich Niger Delta by a group of militants, the Niger Delta Avengers (NDA), following years of relative peace, in a region that is the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy, has also become a problem. 

The sectarian violence has put a tremendous strain on the country’s political institutions.

Can Nigeria resolve some of its problems through power-sharing? These arrangements typically bring different political parties and conflict actors together, often in the form of a broad government of national unity. 

But this would require switching to a parliamentary system, and no one seems to be asking for that.