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Politics Of Local Government And State Creation
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Nigeria is an amalgam of diverse ethnic
nationalities at varying degrees of political development before
colonialism. Some of these nationalities were encapsulated in the major
empires and kingdoms that dotted the political landscape of the present
Nigeria. Others continued to resist annexation by these empires and
kingdoms until the advent of colonial rule which amalgamated all into
one entity. Trailing the 1914 amalgamation were cries of domination and
marginalization by virtually all ethnic groups thereby calling for
‘self-determination’. These seemingly ethnic-motivated cries and
requests for self-determination were underestimated by the Henry Willink
Commission of 1957. A decade later, the Yakubu Gowon regime, owing to
the foggy political atmosphere in the country, created twelve states out
of the four existing regions. This example was followed by virtually
all the military regimes after him probably with intention to curry
acceptability by the citizens. The exercises which were considered a
panacea for the national integration project have had boomerang effects
because they have reinforced the problems they were ab initio set out to
solve. In a historical discourse of this nature, it is important to
attempt to clear possible obstacles to a firm grasp of the unfolding
analysis by defining the topical terms to be found herein. The
operational concepts in this paper are essentially Politics and National
Integration. Admittedly, scholars, politicians and commentators have
traded minds on a generally acceptable definition of the term
‘politics’. Politics as defined by Harold Lasswell is an empirical
science that studies the shaping and sharing of power about “who gets
what, when and how. This appears to suggest that power is pivotal in
determining the allocation of resources to the citizenry. M.I. Okwueze
does seem to associate himself with the view of the direction of power
being determined by the science of politics. As he puts it, “politics is
the science of arranging, determining and influencing allocation of
power and resources in the life of a people, an organization, a
community, nation and the world at large. He further contends that
“politics, in its broad and dynamic perspectives, can be seen as a
process of adjustment and inter-play of power and interest within the
public sphere and the affairs of a society be it on a local, national or
international levels. It is perhaps in the context of this that the
prompting of states creation in Nigeria can be appreciated. In the
context of this paper, politics is the struggle of a people for
uninhibited access to political power, opportunities to contribute to
the issues of governance and equitable distribution of national wealth.
One of the absurdities of Nigerian federalism well noted in the extant
literature as one of the factors responsible for her convoluting
character is structural imbalance, created by the British colonial
administration that handed over at independence a federation with a
preponderant Northern Region, which was about a third of the entire
federation both in land mass and population size. This lopsidedness
undoubtedly is a negation of J.S. Mill’s law of federal stability, which
posits that for a federation to be stable the component parts must be
fairly equal in size. Coupled with minorities’ fear of marginalization,
the quest by Nigerians, most especially the minorities, for the creation
of their dream states has reached a crescendo. Thus, continuing
fragmentation of the polity at intervals have equally animated
sub-nationalities. to keep on demanding and insisting on creation of
local government areas; all in an attempt to achieve geo-political
balancing. Ever since 1954, when the minorities in the country first
bombarded the then colonial government with an avalanche of requests for
the creation of their autonomous divisions, in order to ensure equity
and justice in an unfolding Nigerian federal structure; the demands for
the creation of additional states and localities to the already existing
ones by Nigerians have become a common place. From a federal structure
of four units in 1960 (federal and three regions), now we have a
staggering number of 37 units along with the federal capital territory
and 774 local governments (Gboyega, 2003). It needs be reiterated that
the experience of ethnic minorities worldwide has shown that several
approaches can be adopted to manage the problem. These include:
assimilation, ethnocide, genocide, constitutional safeguards, reversal
of status and territorial solution, which otherwise is known as, state
and locality creation. When this is to be done, to enhance national
integration, a number of factors are equally taken into consideration.
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ABSRACT - [ Total Page(s): 1 ]Agitations for state creation are almost as old as the Nigerian nation. The more states that are created, the more the problem they are intended to solve persists. Just as the exercises enfeeble the constituent units vis-Ã -vis the federal government so do they detach the units one from the other. The state creation exercises have heightened the indigene-non-indigene phenomenon (statism) which is antithetical to a sense of common nationhood. The federal character principle which is intended to ... Continue reading---
