Leadership and power sharing in Nigerian federalism: issues and perspectives

Abstract

Federalism is a practical political cum constitutional design for managing complex governmental problems usually associated with ethno-religious and cultural diversity. The abysmal performance of the Nigerian state in the area of development and national integration since independence in 1960 has been attributed mainly to the quality, nature, and character of the nation's leaders. The paper examines the impact of leadership and power-sharing on Nigeria's Federalism, focusing on the issues and perspectives. Exploratory research design, documentary sources, and qualitative descriptive data gathering and analysis methods were adopted. Anchoring our discourse on the Self-Reliance theory, findings amongst others revealed that; the attitudes of Nigeria's political class in their intra-class struggle for political power to consolidate on their primitive accumulation of wealth developed a penchant for aggravating existing cleavages by interpreting politics in terms of survival of ethnic or regional entities. This explains the reasons for the agitation by every region/ethnic group to produce a president or governor at the federal and state levels. The paper recommends, amongst others, that; there should be an emergence of leaders with nationalist appeal who would be more interested in building a nation out of the diverse ethnic and religious nationalities as found presently in Nigeria.