An Unfinished Nation

What I have been reading and my stream of consciousness about Nigerian politics

Governance is decision making for others, good governance is if these decisions are also made on behalf of others. - Oliver Beige

It has been just a little over two years since Nigeria elected a new government, and the political season is now in full swing. I suppose it is a matter of perspective; for the losers of that last political reordering and bargaining, it is simply less than two years for them to force a new deal. My bias is that I would like to see the government take a firmer grip on its struggles to manage the economy, as the country remains in an economic crisis. But politics waits for no one. In a democracy, the incentives of governance are also tied to political survival.

My preferences notwithstanding, there are important things that the country's leadership needs to resolve. A few examples are: Who should control the police? How should the public treasury be managed? How should taxes be administered? Should monetary policy be independent of the executive’s control? Who is a Nigerian? These are all political questions, and there are no simple answers.

As Nigeria reaches sixty-five years of independent nationhood, here are my thoughts on some of these important political questions.

Democracy Is Not a Western Invention

Nigeria's current democratic governance model, as a failed Western import, is now a common complaint by elites and analysts. I have written about this before, but I think it deserves further clarity. The challenges of Nigeria's democracy and the ties to Western origins are both true and misleading. In his remarkable book, The Decline and Rise of Democracy,¹ David Stasavage argues that democratic practices — rule by council, collective decision-making, consultation between ruler and ruled have deep roots in many parts of the world, including in Africa. These early democracies emerged in societies where rulers lacked the bureaucratic machinery to govern unilaterally and thus had to consult with elders, nobles, or assemblies to maintain power.

The real divergence came later. In places like China and the Middle East, early states developed strong bureaucracies that enabled autocratic rule. In Europe, by contrast, the collapse of the Roman Empire left behind weak states that had to bargain with local elites. This created a path-dependent route to modern democracy, culminating in the institutionalised systems of representative government we now associate with the West.

Nigeria’s own encounter with democracy began with the political awakening that accompanied the struggle against colonialism. The demand for self-rule, for a political order grounded in African agency and aspirations, was itself a democratic demand. But independence from colonialism did not bring institutional clarity. The colonial bureaucracy remained largely intact, and its authoritarian habits persisted. The result was a democracy that lacked the impersonal managerial bureaucracy that had developed over centuries in the West. Political authority remained deeply personal, infused with ethnic loyalties, and shaped by a post-colonial elite consensus that struggled to merge unity with pluralism.

The long shadow of military rule further distorted the democratic project. Successive military regimes not only interrupted electoral governance but also reshaped the political aspirations. When civilian rule returned in 1999, it was revived under the banner of the post-Cold War American-influenced presidential system, which favours a strong executive, winner-takes-all elections, and a centralised federal government. But the institutional culture remained militarised, and the new democracy struggled to take root in a system that rewarded hierarchy over deliberation, and loyalty over rules.

Democracy in Nigeria, then, is not merely a Western transplant. It is local ambition filtered through colonial institutions, military authoritarianism, and a constitutional template that was based on maladaptive mimicry. The struggles of democracy in Nigeria are not the failure of an idea. They are the failures of political thinking and design.

Most of Democracy Is Not Democratic

The true engine of governance in any modern democracy lies well beyond the ballot box. Most of the institutions responsible for stability, growth, and order are not democratic in the electoral sense. Central banks, regulatory agencies, courts, and civil services are designed to operate outside the flux of popular opinion — precisely to guard against short-term political interference. In 10% Less Democracy,² economist Garett Jones makes the case for giving slightly more power to experts and slightly less to voters. He argues that in fields such as monetary policy, legal adjudication, and economic regulation, decisions are better left to those with expertise and longer time horizons.

Jones sees a marginal reduction in direct democratic control, especially over institutions that demand specialised knowledge, as a way to improve policy outcomes. Independence, in this context, is not a luxury but a shield from politicised sabotage. A good example is the independence of central banks, which has been linked to lower inflation and macroeconomic stability across a range of countries.

However, Jones can be misread as technocratic authoritarianism, and technocracy is not apolitical. Its authority rests on the assumption that it is bounded by a legal mandate, subject to public scrutiny, and responsive to oversight. When independent institutions overreach, whether through opaque decision-making or actions with profound political implications, they risk undermining the very legitimacy that justifies their autonomy. Paul Tucker, in Unelected Power,³ makes this point clearly: unelected bodies should be treated as constitutional actors, and not as sovereigns. Their mandates must be narrow, their processes transparent, and their actions subject to review.

Nigeria’s recent history with central banking bears out the delicate nature of this challenge. Over the past twenty years, three central bank regimes have all come under different forms of political interference from the executive branch. The first governor announced a currency redenomination that was seen as an overreach, and the presidency overruled him. He was not reappointed for a second term. His successor faced both a global and domestic banking crisis, but his aggressive methods and rhetoric created panic in the financial markets, collapsing asset values. He also fell out with the presidency and was dismissed. The next governor responded by prioritising political survival, aligning closely with the executive. This gave him cover for serious abuses of office, including the monetisation of fiscal deficits above the legal limit for years. He was eventually removed by a new government.

This pattern has entrenched executive interference in institutions that function best when independent, and it goes beyond central banking. The immediate former president suspended the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court three weeks before an election, citing dubious corruption charges. Because election disputes almost always end up at the Supreme Court, the timing appeared designed for political gain.

All this is not an argument for unchecked technocracy of the sort that Paul Tucker warns against. The point is that accountability must be grounded in rules and processes, and should not be left to the whims of political actors. As the central bank scholar Peter Conti-Brown argued, it is strange to call bureaucratic independence anti-democratic when the frameworks that establish such independence are themselves set by democratic institutions. There is also evidence that central bank independence reduces the cost of debt for developing countries. Given how debt remains a persistent problem in much of the developing world, an independent central bank is a matter of sensible policy rather than of unaccountable technocracy.

Most governance decisions fall into this category. Even in a democracy, most decisions are not directly democratic. The real task is to design frameworks that align the incentives and actions of decision-makers with democratic accountability. Decision theorist Oliver Beige believes that citizens and rulers have long been locked in a civilisational game of protection and provision for most of known history. Over a long period in that history, the ruling class held disproportionate power over citizens. The way modern societies escaped this “feudal trap”, as Beige calls it, was through the emergence of professional bureaucracies. What we now describe as democratic accountability did not begin with elections or other familiar signifiers of democracy, but with institutions capable of governing impersonally and predictably. For Nigeria, the path to a deeper democracy lies not only in electoral competition but also in building a more professional, adaptive, and impersonal bureaucracy.

Political Parties Must Be Platforms for Ideas

In any healthy democracy, political parties perform a dual function: they organise competition for power and they shape the policy agenda. In Nigeria, parties have largely failed to do the latter. They have become vehicles for political careers rather than platforms for political thought. Their ideological emptiness is not accidental. It reflects the deeper reality that the political system does not reward programme-based politics. Instead, it rewards personal networks, incumbency, and transactional power-sharing.

This weakness is not unique to Nigeria, but it is especially pronounced. Dani Rodrik argued that ideas matter at least as much as interests in shaping policy. In his account, interests do not exist in isolation. They are defined and pursued through ideas about identity, about how the world works, and about what strategies are possible. Policymakers act within mental models such as Keynesianism, neoliberalism, or socialism, which frame cause and effect even when those models are flawed. They also work within what Rodrik calls a “political transformation frontier”: the range of outcomes elites can achieve without losing power. Innovative ideas can shift this frontier outward by redefining what is feasible.

Lionel Page develops a complementary view. He argues that political ideas serve two functions at once: they justify a coalition’s claims to outsiders, and they organise its members internally. Ideas, once formed, can take on an autonomous life, shaping behaviour beyond narrow material interests. They help coalitions endure, legitimise policies, and guide reform agendas across time.

For Nigeria, this means that parties cannot be content with transactional networks. Without clear ideas about their identity, economic philosophy, and governance ideology, they remain hostage to the ambitions of individuals. By contrast, when parties connect with epistemic communities, adopt thinking frameworks, and invest in policy entrepreneurship, they can expand the space for positive political change.

However, ideas alone are not enough. Political parties require sustainable finance, and how they are financed matters. Richard Sklar’s study of Nigerian parties⁴ during the late colonial period shows how finance became the material foundation of political power. Fundraising was often informal, opaque, and tied to personal networks; parties relied heavily on state-linked resources. All the major post-independence regional parties and governments used state banks, marketing boards, and other functionaries of the state as hidden treasuries of political power.

Political parties of the Fourth Republic have not been any different. The lines between state treasury and party treasury remain blurred. Parties are no more than special-purpose vehicles created around election cycles and sustained by public funds. One of the major parties in the country has been in a perpetual crisis over control of the party. This is mainly because a former governor who was supposedly financing the party lost a presidential primary election. Yet the entire financial structure and process of how a governor finances a political party is secondary to the discourse.

This dependence on state finance by political parties makes them structurally incapable of independence. Institutionalising party finance through transparent public subsidies and membership contributions is a good first step. Public tax filing and financial records for political parties need to be enforced. Nigeria is also long overdue for campaign finance reform. Beyond an expenditure ceiling on campaign spending, private donations to political parties or candidates, especially by wealthy individuals, must be a matter of public record.

Fixing Federalism

Nigeria’s current federal structure is inefficient and threatens a governance crisis. Scholars such as political scientist Rotimi Suberu have described it as hypercentralised, with Abuja controlling a wide scope of policy functions and a dominant share of revenues. States and local governments operate with limited fiscal and policy space. This pattern reflects the imprint of military centralisation, the hydraulic pull of oil rents into a centralised Federation Account, and the nation-building compromises embodied in the federal character principle. The result is a federation that manages the distribution of offices and rents more effectively than it aligns responsibility with authority or creates incentives for accountable service delivery.

The trajectory to this outcome can be traced back to colonial constitutional engineering. The Richards, Macpherson, and finally the 1954 Lyttleton Constitution created the framework of a federal bargain, not out of ideological conviction but as a pragmatic response to deep regional, ethnic, and religious divisions. Federalism became the shield through which regions defended their autonomy. In the North, it protected emirate authority, Islamic law, and a conservative pace of education reform. In the West, it enabled the Action Group to pursue free primary education and regional modernisation. In the East, it gave the NCNC a base for commercial nationalism. As Sklar observed, federalism was socially determined, and it entrenched regional hegemony rather than diluting it. By the late 1950s, premiers in the three regions wielded more power than the federal prime minister. The 1959 elections were a federal bargain between regional parties more than a national contest of programmes. Federalism in this form bought stability but also reinforced centrifugal competition, with each region operating as an almost sovereign entity.

Military intervention in 1966 and the civil war transformed this order. Regionalism was broken by the creation of twelve states in 1967, a strategy intended to weaken secessionist claims. Over subsequent decades, state creation multiplied to thirty-six, fragmenting power but without deepening autonomy. The decisive fiscal turn came with the 1979 Constitution, when the Aboyade revenue formula pooled major revenues into a Federation Account for distribution. This replaced the older derivation-heavy system, in which regions retained significant shares of export revenues. The new system embedded vertical dependence on Abuja, rewarding states not for local revenue effort but for their shares of a centrally collected pool. Oil rents reinforced this design, and federal dominance of the Exclusive Legislative List cemented the unitary character of the federation.

The contrast with other federations is stark. Spain’s Estado de las Autonomías tolerates asymmetry, allowing some communities greater competencies and fiscal powers than others. Canada partitions powers more clearly, giving provinces control over property, civil law, education, and natural resources, backed by a constitutional equalisation programme. Switzerland's federalism is built on subsidiarity, cantonal sovereignty, and co-decision, facilitated by a strong second chamber and intergovernmental conferences. Nigeria’s system, despite its design, is centralised in function, with a 68-item exclusive list, narrow state taxation, weak intergovernmental machinery, and limited subnational control over policing, education finance, and infrastructure. It resembles a federalism of distribution, not one of developmental autonomy.

Reform, therefore, requires more than redrawing boundaries or multiplying units. It must begin by pruning the Exclusive List and returning key responsibilities such as policing, health, education, and infrastructure to the states, supported by fiscal instruments that encourage accountability. It requires codifying equalisation principles so that states are not merely clients of Abuja but autonomous governments with predictable revenues. It demands routinised intergovernmental forums, transparent fiscal rules, and a Senate that functions as a real protector of state competences. Federal character must be rebalanced towards opportunity pipelines, so that inclusion comes from access to education and civil service careers rather than perpetual quota allocation. And there is a case for asymmetry where justified, allowing Lagos or oil-producing states to take on wider competencies in line with their capacities and needs.

A truly federal Nigeria would not be one in which diversity is merely tolerated, but one in which it is institutionally recognised. It would mean a federal government strong enough to enforce constitutional rights, electoral integrity, and national standards, yet restrained enough not to suffocate local autonomy. Suberu’s diagnosis of hypercentralisation remains accurate, but history shows federal bargains can shift. The Supreme Court’s 2024 judgment on local government autonomy is one recent example. The challenge is to move from federalism as the sharing of a national cake to federalism as the creation of more cakes in more kitchens. That requires fewer items on Abuja’s plate, greater fiscal and policy capacity below, and rules that allow all the federating units to learn by doing.

National Identity Without Uniformity

One of the great unfinished projects of Nigerian democracy is the construction of a national identity that is not built on denial. The slogans of unity, such as “One Nigeria”, ring hollow when they serve only to mask deep divisions. The civil war may have ended in 1970, but the settlement that followed never fully resolved the question of belonging.

The scale of Nigeria’s diversity makes it both impossible and unwise to pursue a forced project of de jure unity. With hundreds of ethnic groups and languages, no single narrative can erase the multiplicity of identities that exist in daily life. Attempts to impose uniformity through centralisation or political messaging have produced resentment rather than loyalty. National identity must be built instead on cooperation, not compulsion. It should be a positive project of law, policy, and communication that demonstrates why Nigeria exists and why it is better together. Citizens should see in practical terms that the union delivers benefits in rights, security, and opportunity - not just threats about the dangers of disintegration.

True national identity, therefore, requires a political structure that allows for self-determination without secession. This means deepening local governance so that citizens are never too distant from those who govern them. Participation must begin at the level of the ward, the local government, and the community association. National consensus should not be imposed from above, but should be cultivated at the level of the community.

It also requires a rethink of representation. Citizens should be able to take part in local governance without being absorbed into national politics. A decentralised system should allow for local parties, local issues, and local mandates. The national should not consume the local.

Equally important is the protection of minorities. A federal system must combine decentralisation with equal protection. The rights of religious, ethnic, and linguistic minorities should be safeguarded, not as favours but as constitutional guarantees. The claim that federal over-centralisation is needed to prevent abuse gets the logic backwards. A leaner federal government, freed from the burden of routine administration, would be better placed to focus on national standards, civil rights, and emergency intervention.

Nigeria already has some practical instruments for building cooperation. The federal character principle, often criticised as tokenistic, can be reformed into a true human capital strategy. A true national project for identifying and training a high-performance civil service. Properly designed, it could become a visible demonstration that the federation values merit as well as inclusion.

Ultimately, the basis of national identity cannot be ethnicity, region, or religion. It must be the rule of law. For a society as complex and diverse as Nigeria, the rule of law is the indispensable foundation for cooperation. It assures every citizen, in every part of the country, that they are equal before the constitution and entitled to dignity, security, and justice.

Change Will Not Be Given Freely

None of the reforms discussed here will emerge through benevolent concession. Politics does not operate on goodwill. It is, at its core, a contest of interests, ideas, preferences, and power. Nigeria’s political class, like political classes elsewhere, is not in the habit of surrendering advantage without a compelling reason. The state, as presently constituted, serves its purposes well. It is those left behind by this arrangement, citizens, workers, and communities, who must chart a path towards a different order.

The nature of that struggle must be clearly understood. It is not a call for populist upheaval or cathartic violence. Sustainable reform requires intermediation: the slow and deliberate construction of institutions that can speak credibly to power and negotiate outcomes on behalf of the public. These intermediaries can take many forms: policy think-tanks, the media, professional associations, trade unions, economic guilds, or traditional market groups. What matters is not the label but the function.

For such institutions to serve the public good, they must be grounded in local realities. This requires independence not only from government control, but also from foreign agendas and donor cycles. An institution that derives its incentives externally cannot act as an honest broker between people and state, nor can it meaningfully contest a political order on which its survival depends.

If a new Nigeria is to emerge, it will be because capable and principled intermediaries fought for it, not in the streets, but in the domain where ideas become institutions, and institutions build the architecture of public legitimacy.

A Return to Parliamentarism?

Perhaps the most radical but necessary question is whether Nigeria’s adoption of the American-style presidential system was ever appropriate. As the challenges of the Fourth Republic accumulate, from executive overreach to dysfunctional relations between the branches of government, it is worth revisiting the institutional foundations of the state itself. The time may have come to consider a return to the parliamentary system.

Nigeria’s First Republic, for all its flaws, operated under a parliamentary model. That arrangement was not without tension, but it offered real advantages. Executive power was tied to the legislature, and leadership emerged from within parliament, requiring coalition-building, compromise, and internal scrutiny. The collapse of parliamentarism after independence had less to do with the structure itself than with the conditions under which it was practised: weak party institutionalisation, deep ethnic rivalries, and a zero-sum struggle between the regions. The 1962 crisis in the Western Region and the political violence that followed showed the fragility of parliamentary coalitions in a context where party discipline was shallow and institutions had not matured. These failures were compounded by the absence of a professional bureaucracy and the intervention of the military, which interrupted rather than corrected the democratic process.

The shift to a presidential model in 1979 was motivated less by institutional logic than by the military’s commandist habits and an overstated admiration for American federalism. The consequences have been visible: elections that function as winner-takes-all contests, personalised presidencies, and an unstable balance between the branches of government.

The political scientist Juan Linz long argued that presidential systems suffer from three structural weaknesses. The first is dual democratic legitimacy: both the president and legislature claim to speak for the people, creating inevitable conflict. The second is rigidity: fixed presidential terms make it extremely difficult to remove an ineffective leader without plunging the system into crisis. The third is exclusivity: the winner-takes-all structure of presidential elections excludes losers from governance entirely. These tendencies have been visible in Nigeria, from legislative–executive paralysis to the cult of personality surrounding presidential contests.

Parliamentarism is not a cure-all, but it has structural virtues that make it more resilient. It encourages coalition governments, which foster inclusion and compromise rather than zero-sum exclusion. It allows for swifter resolution of political deadlock, since a failing prime minister can be removed by a vote of no confidence without tearing up the constitutional order. It limits the dominance of individual leaders, because executive legitimacy is continually tied to the confidence of parliament.

The comparative evidence is striking. Studies show that parliamentary democracies are more durable and more effective at delivering governance outcomes. On average, they are associated with stronger rule of law, better bureaucratic quality, and even higher levels of economic development. The historian of democracy will note that much of Europe’s early democratic stability coincided with parliamentary institutions rather than presidential ones. If even the United States, with its long democratic tradition and strong institutions, struggles to restrain presidential excess, then the risks for countries with weaker guardrails are clear.

If development, growth, and a higher geopolitical status of Nigeria are desirable goals, then no option on its political structure should be instinctively excluded. Success goes beyond imitation, and the inertia of the American-style presidential system should not be perpetually entrenched. Parliamentarism deserves to be part of any serious conversation about the country’s democratic future.

Links for Further Reading

1. The Decline and Rise of Democracy: A Global History from Antiquity to Today - David Stasavage

2. 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less - Garett Jones

3. Unelected Power: The Quest for Legitimacy in Central Banking and the Regulatory State - Paul Tucker

4. Nigerian Political Parties: Power in an Emergent African Nation - Richard Sklar