Ethnic Politics In Nigeria

This book is more than just a study of ethnic politics in Kenya and Nigeria. The two countries are a microcosm of the entire continent: the problems it faces, its successes and failures, and the hope and despair of hundreds of millions of its people whose aspirations have been frustrated by decades of corrupt leadership that has skilfully exploited one of Africa's biggest weaknesses -- tribalism. But the people themselves are also responsible for that. They have allowed tribalism to flourish and destroy the countries. And they have allowed unscrupulous politicians to use and abuse them -- without storming the Bastille. What they are not responsible for is dictatorship African leaders instituted to perpetuate themselves in office by exploiting tribalism. These despots have been so good at it, and have done it for so long since independence, that many African countries are now on the brink of collapse, with the people at war against themselves.

This book investigates the dynamics and challenges of ethnicity and elite politics in Nigeria.

Badru examines the class dimension of the Nigerian political crisis since 1960, when this culturally diverse nation became independent. He claims that the ruling elite, whether constituted in the military or the civil society, consistently used ethnicity to secure its own class domination in the absence of a coherent class ideology.

Part of the Research in Ethnic Relations series, this study provides a comprehensive overview of the ethnicity and development in 20th-century Nigeria.

Diploma Thesis from the year 2017 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Africa, language: English, abstract: Ethnicity remains an important aspect of Nigeria Policy making process used in analysing political conflict among ethnic groups in the country. However, it has not been properly researched in the field of Conflict and Strategic Studies. Therefore, gaps and insufficient literature prompted this study to examine the ethnicity as potent contributor of political conflicts in Nigeria. The study focuses on four major ethnic groups: Yoruba form the South West, Igbos of the South East, Hausa from the North, while the Ijaw represents the South-South region. The study aims to understand and assess the veracity that ethnic methods of politics on socio-political conflict among the ethnic groups, determines what, how and when political considerations are arrived at in Nigeria. The study adopted quantitative research technique to analyse and capture political conflicts among the ethnic groups. The survey research design was adopted via administration of questionnaire (EPQ) with a population of 600 with a cluster sampling techniques used for the ethnic population. A reliability index of 0.69 was got after using Pearson product moment correlation co-efficient via test re-test statistics. The results revealed that there is a significant relationship between ethnic politics and political unrest 'P-value for ethnic politics and political unrest is = .038 α = 0.05, hence the stated hypothesis was rejected'. Thus, the study recommended an all-inclusive implementation of true federalism, meritorious rotation of government key positions, with fair resource allocation among ethnic groups and/or states. Nonethele