When Lagos State renamed 24 Igbo-named streets in the Ajegunle district to Yoruba names in 2024, it set off a controversy that continues to find expression on social media and everywhere else. The timing was hardly coincidental, coming after Peter Obi's shocking electoral victory over Bola Tinubu in Lagos State during the 2023 presidential election, the first time an Igbo candidate had defeated a Yoruba politician in the latter's home stronghold. Streets like Imo Eze and Uzor became Layiwola Oluwa and Kalejaiye Adeboye, erasing the historical memory of Igbo settlers who developed previously undeveloped areas of Lagos and reflecting what Babafemi Ojudu called "long-simmering tension between Yoruba and Igbo communities that reached a boiling point during the 2023 elections." Babatunde Fashola, the former Lagos governor, felt compelled to intervene in the matter by warning of the dangers of erasing memory.
The ongoing dispute has become a microcosm of how Nigeria's ethnic diversity, rather than being a natural blessing, has been transformed into a menace that reduces elections to tribal headcounts and threatens the very foundations of democratic governance. I also think that this controversy is a good opportunity to talk about one of my most controversial takes about Nigeria’s diversity.
Diversity as far as the eyes can see
Nigeria stands as one of the world's most ethnically complex nations, home to 371 distinct ethnic groups speaking over 520 languages. The three largest groups - Hausa-Fulani at 30 percent, Yoruba at 15.5 percent, and Igbo at 15.2 percent - together constitute roughly 60 percent of the population, while hundreds of smaller communities make up the remaining 40 percent. This extraordinary diversity spans the geographic breadth of Africa's most populous country, from the Sahel borders to the Atlantic coast, encompassing Muslims and Christians, pastoralists and farmers, ancient kingdoms and modern megacities.
What explains this extraordinary diversity in a country where geography poses few barriers to human movement? Nigeria is not particularly mountainous as a terrain that might explain the separation and isolation of different groups over time. The country consists mostly of plains and plateaus, with its highest point at Chappal Waddi reaching only 2,419 meters, modest by global standards. You can traverse from one end of Nigeria to the other without encountering anything more inconvenient than rivers that, while substantial, have never been insurmountable obstacles. The Benue River, even at its widest point during flood season at Yola, spans only 3,000 to 4,500 feet - barely a mile - while at its confluence with the Niger at Lokoja, the two rivers together form a navigable stretch merely two miles wide. For context, the English Channel at its shortest point stretches 21 miles, and that didn't stop William the Conqueror from sailing across with an invasion fleet of 600 ships and 7,000 men in 1066 - or Captain Matthew Webb from swimming the whole thing in 1875, fueled by nothing more than brandy, beef tea, and Victorian pluck. Indeed, we know from historical records that long before missionaries and colonialists arrived, the peoples in the space now known as Nigeria had been interacting quite significantly through trade networks, migrations, and cultural exchanges. Nigeria is not an archipelago either, with islands cut off from each other by vast expanses of ocean.
Welcome to the Black Byzantium
So what explains this extreme diversity that caused anthropologist Siegfried Nadel to name the Nupe kingdom alone "Black Byzantium" on account of its fiendishly complex ethnic makeup? Before we come to answer this question, let’s consider one of the most visible ways this diversity manifests in today’s Nigeria.
The Byzantine complexity that Nadel observed in the 1940s has evolved into something far more insidious - a political system that has weaponised diversity into a zero-sum calculus, subordinating governance to ethnic arithmetic. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in Nigeria's institutionalised system of rotational power-sharing - "zoning" - which reduces every elected office to an expression of tribal identity, rendering development secondary to whose "turn" it is to rule.
Governorships epitomise this crisis. In Benue State, a 1998 power-sharing pact pledged to rotate the governorship among its three senatorial zones. Yet for 24 years, the Tiv-majority Zones A and B monopolised the office, excluding the Idoma people of Zone C. By 2022, the marginalised Idoma - denied even a single term - mobilised under the Benue Rebirth Movement, warning that continued exclusion risked an "impending crisis" as youths threatened revolt. When major parties again fielded Tiv candidates in 2023, the cycle of betrayal cemented a demand for Idoma statehood. Kaduna mirrored this fracture: a supposed north-south governorship alternation collapsed into northern Hausa-Fulani dominance, pushing Christian southern minorities to demand Gurara State - a partition even northern elites conceded was inevitable after "decades of political marginalisation".
Senatorial seats reveal similar fissures. In Cross River North, an unwritten rotation among five local governments collapsed when Governor Ben Ayade (Obudu LGA) sought to retain the Senate seat in 2023 after his prior term. Such local rebellions have now prompted national action: this year, the Senate considered a constitutional amendment to mandate that each federal House constituency within a Senate district gets a turn at producing the Senator. The bill's text states that if one constituency has provided the senator, it "shall not be eligible" again until all others in the district have done so. This proposal directly targets scenarios where one locality monopolises the Senate seat, often due to an influential politician's incumbency. Although not yet law, its mere introduction indicates broad recognition that rotational "fairness" has become so entrenched that lawmakers seek to codify what was once unwritten, signalling an attempt to constitutionally dismantle the dominance of "political landlords" who have occupied legislative offices for decades.
Even federal constituencies enforce micro-zoning with tribal precision. In Kogi’s Yagba East constituency, a rotation pact among three LGAs unravelled in 2023 when an incumbent from Yagba East sought a third term, overriding Mopamuro LGA’s "turn". Elders decried the betrayal of a "brotherly arrangement" designed to prevent "perpetual dominance". Enugu’s Igbo-Etiti/Uzo-Uwani constituency faced parallel tensions: a 1998 agreement to alternate its House seat between two LGAs repeatedly sidelined the smaller Uzo-Uwani, breeding accusations of "marginalisation by demographic advantage".
Local governments, the very lowest rung of power, are not immune. In Cross River’s Akamkpa LGA, a failed rotation for the chairmanship in 2024 ignited fury when Awi Ward - excluded for 50 years - was bypassed again. Petitioners warned the governor of "grave compromise of fairness", invoking the LGA’s "dark political history" of violence. Enugu North LGA’s rotation pact between Ogui and Ngwo communities collapsed in 2023 when an Ngwo legislator sought a second term, fracturing the city’s fragile cohesion. Most tragically, Jos North LGA’s disputed chairmanship election in 2008 - fuelled by perceptions of a stolen "turn" - sparked ethno-religious riots killing 300 in 48 hours, proving how local zoning failures can detonate national fault lines.
Countless other spheres of public life - from party hierarchies to traditional institutions - bend to the same forces, with northern states offering equally stark illustrations. Within political parties, zoning disputes routinely paralyse internal democracy: PDP elders from the North mobilised in 2010–2011 to block President Jonathan’s re-election bid, citing an unrecorded "gentleman’s agreement" that the presidency belonged to the North for two terms - a pact “breached” by the death of President Yar’Adua. In Benue, the aforementioned Benue Rebirth Movement now lobbies not just for elected positions but for statutory appointments (commissioner roles, board seats) to be tied to a rigid zoning formula, arguing that Idoma exclusion permeates the entire bureaucracy.
Kaduna’s Southern Kaduna minorities, denied governorship rotation, simultaneously battle for recognition of chiefdom stools historically dominated by Hausa-Fulani emirates. Their 2021 Gurara statehood petition explicitly linked political marginalisation to cultural erasure: "Our traditional rulers are treated as second-class while resources from our land fund northern-dominated state projects". In Plateau State, the 2008 Jos riots - sparked by a local government chairmanship dispute - rapidly metastasised into conflicts over indigene-settler status, a bureaucratic weaponisation of ethnicity determining who may contest any office, own land, or access schools.
Enugu’s Ogui-Ngwo pact originally encompassed not just elected chairs but party nomination slots for state assembly seats - a non-elected privilege fiercely contested when rotation collapsed. Meanwhile, in Ebonyi, the "orderly" governorship rotation between senatorial zones masks constant bargaining over commissionership quotas, where each zone demands proportional bureaucratic spoils as compensation for awaiting its gubernatorial "turn".
As petitioners in Cross River’s Akamkpa LGA warned, ignoring zoning for a mere council chairmanship risks "imploding" the entire locality - that is, in Nigeria’s ethnocracy, no position is too humble to escape being reduced to an identity token. When the Ogui community demanded its "turn" for Enugu North’s chairmanship, they framed it not as administrative competence but as historical redress: "50 years of exclusion" cannot stand.
A Fine Theorem(?)
I could chronicle these zoning arrangements indefinitely- the phenomenon is so pervasive that it saturates every level of Nigerian public life, from the presidency down to village water committees, from university vice-chancellorships to local market stall allocations. Each position, no matter how minor, becomes a battlefield for ethnic arithmetic, a token in an endless game of tribal musical chairs where governance is perpetually subordinated to the question of whose "turn" it is to eat. The entire public sphere has been carved up into ethnic fiefdoms, with development held hostage to identity politics.
Which returns us to the original question: why does Nigeria exhibit such extreme ethnic diversity that it requires this elaborate system of power rotation? Here, I advance a theory that may be controversial but demands consideration. Nigeria's extraordinary diversity did not arrive ex cathedra from some divine decree or natural process - it was manufactured here on earth through human action, specifically as a defensive response to one of history's darkest times. The bewildering array of ethnic groups we see today, I argue, is the direct product of centuries of slave raiding that terrorised the region from the 15th through the 19th centuries to feed the trans-Saharan, trans-Atlantic and domestic trades. As domestic slave raiders ravaged communities for human cargo, populations responded with the only logical strategy for survival: they fragmented, isolated themselves, developed distinct languages and customs that would mark them as separate from their neighbours. In a world where any stranger might be a slaver or spy, differentiation became a survival mechanism. The extreme diversity that Nadel observed in the Nupe kingdom, the 371 ethnic groups and 520 languages that bewilder modern Nigeria, may thus be a fragmentary legacy of communities desperately trying to make themselves illegible to slavers, inadvertently creating the ethnic puzzle that still confounds the nation today.
I am not clever enough to have produced rigorous research to support this theory that has haunted me since writing Formation, but I recently discovered that economists Warren Whatley and Rob Gillezeau reached strikingly similar conclusions through empirical analysis. In their 2011 paper, they demonstrate what I had only intuited: that Africa's ethnic fragmentation is not some primordial condition but rather the direct consequence of the slave trade. Using spatial data from 200 points along the West African coast, they found that regions with higher historical slave exports show significantly greater ethnic diversity today - with the slave trade potentially creating anywhere from 43 to 110 additional ethnic groups in heavily affected areas.
The mechanisms they identify are as intuitive as they are tragic. When the value of humans as commodities exceeded their value as subjects to be taxed, the entire logic of state-building collapsed. Why build kingdoms when raiding villages was more profitable? The prohibition against enslaving "one's own" created perverse incentives to manufacture new ethnic markers - to emphasise minor differences in dialect, to invent new rituals, to draw ever-finer distinctions between "us" and "them." Each community's survival depended on becoming unintelligible to potential raiders, on making themselves too different, too foreign, too "other" to be considered kin. The slave trade atomised societies, transforming Africa into what Whatley and Gillezeau call a landscape of "moral ethnicities" - thousands of micro-communities whose primary organising principle was mutual distrust. Colonial powers later found this fragmented terrain so bewildering that indirect rule became their only option, further cementing ethnic boundaries that had been drawn in suspicion.
Once we understand that Nigeria's extreme ethnic diversity is not some primordial gift from the gods but rather a trauma response, we can finally see it for what it is: a problem to be solved, not a thing to be celebrated. This is not about denying cultural richness or advocating homogenisation but about recognising that the hyper-fragmentation of Nigerian society into 371 ethnic groups and 520 languages is a historical wound that continues to fester, poisoning every attempt at national development. The street renamings in Lagos, the endless zoning arrangements, the reduction of democracy to tribal headcount - these are not expressions of healthy diversity but symptoms of a society still organised around the logic of mutual predation that the slave trade inscribed into its DNA.
For Nigeria to approach even a fraction of its potential, it must wage a conscious, deliberate struggle against this malign inheritance. This means actively crafting policies that incentivise cooperation over fragmentation, that reward merit over ethnic calculus, that build bridges rather than walls. Instead, Nigeria does the opposite: institutions like the federation account, which I've written about, actively entrench ethnic competition by turning every naira of government revenue into a prize to be divided, ensuring that Nigerians relate to their state not as citizens but as contestants in a zero-sum game. Every policy, every institution, every political arrangement that reinforces ethnic arithmetic rather than dissolving it represents a choice to remain enslaved to the worst legacy of slavery itself. Until Nigeria summons the courage to confront these demons - to recognise that its diversity is not destiny but history, and that history can be transcended - it will remain trapped in the ethnic prison that slavers built, counting tribes while the future slips away.
Ok, that all sounds good. You don’t need to type in the comments that this is all easier said than done. Believe me, I know.
Thank you, Feyi, for another insightful and informative piece.
Just as you have adequately proffered, the faultliines on which Nigeria is built are deep and enormous.
Unfortunately, we've not be blessed The calibre of Nigerians, as leaders, who define a vision for Nigeria, as an entity, rather, this cave- out attitude that permeates.
How do we break free from the this york, the people must be enlightened to realise that power for freedom lies within their grasp ( or hands more appropriately).
A bag of rice, onions and pepper may provide stomach infrastructure today, but the consequences, as you're enumerated, may take centuries, to overcome, if at all.
Somehow, we shall come through, Europe and West, have gone through their dark ages.
I believe Africa, will not be permanently left behind.
Now it begins to make sense. Sad that our diversity rather than being a strength has been a curse. So who will restructure the country when every leader is a beneficiary of the same ethnic arithmetic? Oh by the way, this article reminds me to find the time to finish reading my Formation, delving into the audio book to make this faster, hi Elnathan!