ABSTRACT
Nigeria’s Constitution proclaims the country a ‘federal republic’ and enshrines the nation’s ‘federal character’, but it also incorporates several hyper-centralizing features, with the consequence that Nigeria effectively functions as a federal-unitary hybrid rather than a genuinely decentralized federation (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999: sections 1 and 14). The major elements of Nigeria’s unitary federalism are a constitutional division of powers that entrenches the hegemony of the national government, a fiscal system that is almost entirely based on the intergovernmental distribution of centrally collected oil revenues, a political process that is dominated by one major political party, and an integrated federal administration system that perpetuates the centripetal legacies of nearly three decades of post-independence military rule. These constitutional and institutional characteristics, in turn, reflect certain structural and historical features, including Nigeria’s origins in unitary British colonial rule, economic underdevelopment, communal fractiousness and shallow liberal-democratic traditions. Despite strong critiques of the shortcomings of the over-centralized federal system and a clamour for ‘true federalism’ among sections of the political elite, the historical and structural entrenchment of the system makes a shift to a fundamentally more decentralized federation unlikely.
