➜ geographical distribution of power federal with 36 states and the capital territory of abuja ➜ relationship between legislature and executive presidential ➜ executive president, limited to two terms of 4 years ➜ executive election system two-ballot majority, though a candidate must win 25% of the vote in 2/3 of states to win in the first round ➜ legislature bicameral: house of representatives (lower house), senate (upper house) ➜ legislative election system single-member-district plurality for house of representatives, plurality for senate (3 per state) ➜ party system transitional, with recent elections indicating formation of a two-party system ➜ judiciary supreme court
Nigeria is the largest country in Africa, with more than 180 million people, and it is also Africa’s largest economy, with a GDP of over $400 billion in 2018, according to the International Monetary Fund. Nigeria is increasingly asserting itself on the world stage as a voice for Africa’s interests, and often takes a leadership role in issues requiring joint African action in the African Union (AU) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). Yet these statistics amount to only roughly $2,000 per year in GDP per capita, and Nigeria is dealing with the problems typical of developing countries: a very high rate of extreme poverty, lack of access to basic services such as clean water and electricity, endemic violence between conflicting groups within the society, and low rates of literacy. Furthermore, Nigeria has repeatedly attempted to build a democratic regime, with limited success due to the struggles of economic development, rampant government corruption, and the frequent intervention of the military. In 2015, for the first time in Nigeria’s history, an election was held in which the opposition party won, and the ruling party stepped down from power without incident. Whether this represents a turning point in Nigeria’s democratic history, or is simply an aberration against the larger trends is yet to be seen.
Since the advent of the Fourth Republic (1999–present), Nigeria has been a federal state, with thirty-six states united by a central national government in the capital city, Abuja. Nigeria drafted and ratified a new constitution in 1999 after the death of the most recent military dictator to have taken power in a coup, Sani Abacha. This constitution is the eighth since 1914. Nigeria achieved independence from Britain, its former colonial master, in 1960, but since then, the military has been the only truly national institutional force uniting the country. Nigeria is deeply divided linguistically, ethnically (more than 250 distinct ethnicities are identified within the country), and religiously (there is an intense Muslim–Christian divide, with many other Nigerians practicing traditional indigenous religions). During attempts at forming a republic, when one group would take power, the leaders would frequently abuse their power with impunity, enriching themselves with the nation’s oil wealth. Complaints from disaffected groups out of power and the threat of violence led the military to intervene in frequent coups d’état, promising a new, clean, fair, and corruption-free government. To this point, none of these leaders has fulfilled those promises, but recent elections in the Fourth Republic are showing early promising signs of the emergence of constitutionalism and democracy.
Nigeria is located in West Africa along the Atlantic coast. This made Nigeria easily accessible to European powers during the early phases of the “Scramble for Africa,” in which European powers colonized nearly the entire continent between 1860 and 1910. Before the scramble, Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, was a major slave trading point of access. British forces formally occupied Nigeria in 1885 and imposed colonial rule.
TIP
Nigeria’s history of British colonization continues to shape its modern policy concerns, especially the difficulty in building a national identity from a large number of diverse and conflicting groups who have little in common with one another.
Internally, Nigeria can be divided into six general regions, which are each largely disconnected from one another, divided by major rivers, mountains, and highlands, without much infrastructure linking them. As a result, there has always been tremendous ethnic and linguistic diversity. Nigeria is the only country in the AP Comparative Government and Politics curriculum that begs the “national question.” In each previous country example there has been a shared political history, political culture, language, and other factors that basically unite most of the population into a single nation, at least as a large majority. For Nigeria, there is little that unites its citizens as a nation other than the history of British colonialism, and the struggle to remain united since independence. Nigeria is essentially divided into the following regions:
| Country | Corruption Perception Score, 2013 (out of 100) | Corruption Perception Ranking, 2013 (out of 175) | Corruption Perception Score, 2014 (out of 100) | Corruption Perception Ranking, 2014 (out of 175) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Britain | 76 | #14 | 78 | #14 |
| Russia | 28 | #127 | 27 | #136 |
| China | 40 | #80 | 36 | #100 |
| Mexico | 34 | #106 | 35 | #103 |
| Iran | 25 | #144 (tied) | 27 | #136 (tied) |
| Nigeria | 25 | #144 (tied) | 27 | #136 (tied) |
Nigeria’s history can be divided into three major periods: precolonial (1500–1860), colonial (1860–1960), and independence (1960–present). Modern independent Nigeria has experienced a great deal of political turmoil, with four separate attempts at republican government, regularly interrupted by military coups, and counter-coups in some cases.
This era was characterized by the rule of a number of West African empires, including the Edo-Benin Empire in the northwest, the Songhai Empire in the north, the Igbo Kingdom in the south, and various Hausa-Fulani kingdoms, often ruling simultaneously in different parts of the country, none of which ever exercised uniform rule over the whole territory of today’s Nigeria.
Many of these empires were heavily influenced by trade and diplomacy with North African and Middle Eastern powers, bringing the influence of Islam to Nigeria. Elites, especially in the north, were often educated in Arabic and learned the Shari’ah as part of their formal training for leadership. The power and wealth of each of these empires was closely related to the trans-Atlantic slave trade, capturing and selling members of rival groups into slavery to European powers for labor in the Americas. After the Napoleonic period, most European countries banned slavery and the slave trade, greatly diminishing the demand for the main resource sustaining these African empires.
This brief period of the diminished influence of European powers was quickly ended by the “Scramble for Africa” in which Britain, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, and Portugal quickly colonized the entire continent in competition for control of Africa’s natural resources. Nigeria was quickly established as firmly within the British “sphere of influence,” as the Edo Empire collapsed without European demand for slaves. A great deal of slave trading continued in Nigeria, though nominally illegal for Europeans to participate in, and there is still debate today about whether the British occupation of Nigeria was benevolent in its intent to fully end the enduring slave trading, or was fully motivated by the desire for wealth and power.
The British imposed an authoritarian system of rule with British administrators at the top of the power structure, and cooperative local chiefs given benefits to comply. With British influence also came missionaries, who brought Christianity into Nigeria in the nineteenth century. Nigerians who converted to Christianity gained access to perhaps the largest enduring benefit that came with British colonization, a formal education. The effect is still seen today, as Nigeria has one of the most educated populations in Africa (though they are still far behind other middle-income and developed states). In modern Nigeria, southerners (who were closest to early British influence) are much more likely to be Christians and English speakers than northerners.
After a series of military campaigns in the late 1800s, the British formally united their various colonial holdings of the region into a single entity called “Nigeria” in 1914. This is the first moment of the political unification of the modern country, and importantly, it happened under the direction of a foreign power, rather than as a result of domestic political demands and events (as occurred in the other countries of study).
During World War II, Nigerians fought for Britain in its North African campaigns against German forces, and the demands for industrial military goods helped the formation of larger labor unions in Nigeria. Gradually after the war, the unions became the basis of political organizations demanding additional local sovereignty from the British, particularly as local autonomous states apart from other ethnic groups of the colony. These gradual pressures, combined with British sympathy for the ideals of self-government and recognition of Nigerian contributions to the war effort, eventually led to a long process toward independence. Conferences and Congresses were called from the 1940s through 1960, organizing the processes to give Nigeria increasing self-governing authority, with full self-government granted in 1957 and independence granted in 1960 by a British Act of Parliament. It was around this time period that commercial explorers from the multinational oil companies British Petroleum (BP) and Royal Dutch Shell discovered large deposits of crude oil around the Niger Delta.
Nigeria’s political history since independence can be characterized as unstable, vacillating between attempts at constitutional democracy and intervention by the military through frequent coups d’état.
After a declaration of independence in 1963, Nigeria organized as a federal republic in three regions, each dominated by the region’s largest tribe—the Hausa-Fulani in the north, Igbo in the east, and Yoruba in the west. The structure of government mimicked the British parliamentary system, with a single parliamentary house exercising nearly all political authority. Political parties and election rhetoric closely mirrored trial ethnic politics and values. The early dominance of the North region created substantial resentment in the southern East and West regions. In 1966, the Nigerian military’s southern generals organized a coup d’état in which they assassinated the prime minister and leading North region officials, taking control of all institutions of the government and thereby ending the First Republic.
After the coup, northern military forces defected from the Nigerian military, and staged a counter-coup against the new military government, installing a new northern Supreme Commander of the Nigerian Armed Forces. The southern Igbo state, Biafra, seceded in 1967, attempting to take full control of the oil royalties paid by BP and Shell. The Nigerian military government enacted a blockade against all trade coming in and out of Biafra, then moved forces into Biafra to retake control of the oil operations. Without the ability to fund an armed conflict, Biafra was locked in a losing stalemate for the next several years, causing a humanitarian disaster of starvation within Biafra. While many foreign groups and NGOs attempted to help relieve the humanitarian crisis, the British government gave crucial support to the Nigerian military, which launched a final offensive to retake the territory and end the war in 1969 to 1970. The reunification of the country set the stage for further national conflicts over guilt in the killing and starvation of more than two million people (which many Igbo characterized as genocide), and the competition for political control over oil.
The Republic of Biafra, 1967–1970
Between 1966 and 1979, a military government dominated by northern generals ruled Nigeria. In 1976, General Murtala Muhammad (a northerner) was assassinated and succeeded by a southerner, General Olusegun Obasanjo. Obasanjo imposed a transition process to end military rule and create a new republican constitution. While the First Republic mimicked the British parliamentary system, the Second Republic mirrored the American constitution’s system of federalism and presidential government, in an effort to reduce tensions between the ethnic groups and regions through limited local autonomy, and make it more likely that a president could govern with popular legitimacy in a nationwide election. Political parties could not be completely regional. They needed to register in at least two-thirds of Nigeria’s nineteen states, and each state was guaranteed a representative in the national government’s cabinet. In 1983, General Muhammadu Buhari overthrew the government in a coup d’état, alleging corruption and administrative incompetence. He jailed many of the members of the government and took control as the military leader of the new government.
Much like in Russia, Mexico, and Iran, the collapse of oil prices in the 1980s made it extremely difficult for Nigeria’s government to continue paying its obligations, particularly the salaries of the military and government officials. In this context, Ibrahim Babangida peacefully overthrew Buhari’s regime, imposing an economic reform agenda promising to fix the economic crisis. Babangida worked with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure a loan in exchange for structural adjustment of Nigeria’s public debt through increasing taxes and reducing government spending in austerity programs; subjecting Nigerian businesses to market supply-and-demand prices (rather than government price controls); and devaluing the Nigerian currency to make Nigerian exports more competitive. Structural adjustment worked to grow the Nigerian economy, but the wages of average Nigerians fell due to the austerity measures, and Babangida reversed course on his economic initiatives in 1988.
Babangida began the transition process to create a new republican government and hold elections after an attempted coup in 1990, but Babangida banned the existence of all political parties except for two he had personally created. All Nigerians were encouraged to join one of the two parties, and an election was held in 1993. The result of the election was not to Babangida’s liking, and he refused to allow the announcement of the results, annulling the elections, and declaring a new election would be held later in the year. Nationwide protests and strikes ground the country’s economy to a halt, and Babangida stepped down to hand power to a coalition government of the two parties he had created.
The Third Republic was the shortest lived of all, lasting not even three months. The government was unable to manage the political turmoil in the absence of Babangida, and the military once again stepped in, this time in the person of Defense Minister General Sani Abacha. Abacha carried out a program of radical economic development, ending Babangida’s privatization initiatives, increasing Nigeria’s foreign cash reserves, and reducing Nigeria’s debt and rate of inflation, all while oil prices remained low in the 1990s. This aggressive reform was coupled with brutal political repression. Babangida was notorious for massive human rights abuses, including the assassinations of critical journalists and opposition leaders, but Abacha is known as the most brutal of all of Nigeria’s leaders. Abacha jailed the elected government for treason. He publicly executed civil society voices opposed to his economic development agenda, most famously the nonviolent environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa, who had called for Shell to clean up after the indiscriminate dumping associated with their oil operations in the Niger Delta. Saro-Wiwa was only one of numerous public executions under Sani Abacha. Abacha’s family also stole at least $5 billion from the Nigerian treasury, an amount that ranks among the highest dollar figures of corruption in world history, though this number is disputed by many current Nigerian political leaders.
When Abacha died of a heart attack in 1998, it was called “the coup from heaven” by many Nigerian democracy activists. Whether heaven was truly responsible or not is debatable. There are numerous salacious rumors surrounding the cause of the heart attack, which involve accounts involving encounters with Indian prostitutes, excessive use of Viagra, and poisoning by political rivals.
After Abacha’s death, his successor, General Abubakar, called for the creation of a new democratic republic, reviving the structure of the constitution of the Second Republic, with federalism (now with thirty-six states and a Federal District in Abuja), and a presidential government. An election was held in 1999, with the former military leader Olusegun Obasanjo winning the presidency as a civilian, now officially retired from military service. Obasanjo and his People’s Democratic Party attempted to balance the regional and religious interests of the north and south, running tickets with both northern Islamic and southern Christian candidates. The PDP also used their position in power to build a new, less ethnically based patron-client network of support that could guarantee their stay in power. Obasanjo was reelected in 2003, and attempted to have Congress amend the Constitution to allow him to run for a third term in 2007. The Congress resisted his initiative, and Obasanjo stepped aside, supporting as his successor a northern Muslim civilian, Umaru Yar’Adua. While the 2007 election was rife with irregularities and allegations of corruption, the peaceful transition between Obasanjo and Yar’Adua was the first time in Nigeria’s independent history that a civilian transferred power to another civilian.
Nearly all of Nigeria’s major political leaders were either current or former military generals, even in the current republic.
Yar’Adua suffered from health problems throughout his brief presidency, and died in 2010, placing the vice president at the time, Goodluck Jonathan, into the presidency. Jonathan’s presidency continued the typical patterns of corruption and patron-clientelism the PDP had become known for, and he was narrowly reelected in 2011, albeit with fewer allegations of election rigging than had come in 2007. In the 2015 election, Jonathan and the PDP were pitted against a newly organized opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), which unified three smaller previous opposition parties. They backed Muhammadu Buhari, the former coup and military leader from 1983 to 1985, as their candidate. International election observers found the 2015 election to be the freest and fairest yet in the Fourth Republic. Buhari won a clear majority of the vote, Goodluck Jonathan conceded the election results, and stepped down without incident. This marked the first time in Nigeria’s history that a transition of power occurred through democratic election.
Nigeria is the most diverse and fractured society of all those studied in the AP Comparative Government and Politics course. Nigerians are dealing with problems typical of developing countries, and they are still in the early stages of developing a democratic identity.
There are more than 250 identifiable ethnic groups in Nigeria, none of which makes up a majority of the population. There are three large, dominant tribes directing most of the political activity in Nigeria (the Hausa-Fulani, Igbo, and Yoruba, detailed earlier in the section on geographic influences), and they don’t have much in common. Each tribe has its own identity, history, language, and religious practices. There is very little contact between Nigerians of different ethnic backgrounds. They are unlikely to speak a common language other than English, the official language of the country. Even so, English is only commonly spoken in Nigeria’s cities, not in the rural areas, where 75 percent of Nigerians live. Primarily wealthier and more educated people speak English, while other Nigerians speak one of over 500 different languages locally.
Nigeria is increasingly divided on a coinciding cleavage between the north and south centering on the religious divide between Muslims (concentrated in the north), and Christians (concentrated in the south). This divide dates back to the influence of Islam in the precolonial northern empires, and the introduction of Christianity by the British, who conducted most of their business in the south along the coast and in cities. The north values Islamic political and legal traditions, including Shari’ah law. In the mid-2000s, all twelve northern states implemented Shari’ah into their local court systems, to great controversy. One noteworthy case of a woman named Amina Lawal typified the divide. As Nigeria prepared to host the Miss World contest in Lagos (a southern, urban, and predominantly Christian city), a court in the northern state of Kaduna sentenced Amina Lawal to death by stoning for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. No charges were ever brought against the alleged father, as he did not bear a baby as “proof” of his infidelity. Miss World contestants boycotted Nigeria in opposition to the sentence, and Christians resented the negative international attention the northern states had invited. In the end, an appellate court reversed the sentence, but the divide is still evident.
Again coinciding with ethnic and religious cleavages, the north–south divide separates Muslims from Christians, and the Hausa-Fulani from the Igbo and the Yoruba, along with the other various ethnic groups. The north is located in dry highlands, with a mostly rural agrarian economy and culture. The south is where most of the oil is located, and it benefited the most from British education and economic development. The south is much more urbanized, with more of its residents living in cities and earning higher incomes than Nigerians in the north. Southern tribes, especially those living on or around lands with large oil deposits, are often resentful of how much of the natural wealth their tribe once owned now goes to the central government, funding government activities in the northern regions. The Biafran Civil War was the strongest example of this conflict, but political arguments over oil money between the north and south are still a regular feature of Nigerian politics. The 2011 and 2015 elections displayed this regional divide relatively clearly. In 2011, all twelve of the northern Shari’ah states (plus one additional northern state) voted for Buhari of the APC, while all but one of the remaining nineteen southern states voted for Jonathan of the PDP. In 2015, Buhari held all of the northern states once again, while picking up a few states in the west and the Middle Belt. The southeastern states all voted for Jonathan.
Nigeria’s civil society has developed independently, despite the strong themes of patron-clientelism in Nigerian public life. The state has never really had the capacity to control the behavior of civil society groups, except for the most brutal and violent efforts, such as the political assassinations carried out under the Babangida and Abacha regimes. Some of these civil society groups have attempted to build a greater sense of broad Nigerian national identity, and tackle common problems of all citizens in the country, such as the Alliance for Credible Elections, and the Gender and Development Action. Other groups exacerbate the ethnic, religious, and regional divides that plague Nigerian politics, most notably and problematically Boko Haram (which translates to “against Western education”), an Islamic jihadist group, who has used terrorism and kidnapping to attempt to stop the expansion of education and economic opportunities to women and girls. Boko Haram’s roughly 10,000 fighters controlled a large territory across the northeast of Nigeria at one point, and remains a problem for the Nigerian military today.
While Nigerian civil society is essentially free to develop independently, most Nigerians do not participate actively in it because of the pressures of widespread poverty and the relative lack of education.
While there are many organizations freely operating in Nigerian civil society, there is a relatively small percentage of Nigerians participating in these organizations and political activity in general. This is likely due to the high rate of poverty in Nigeria, which preoccupies most Nigerians with daily concerns of living and working, rather than worrying over broader political problems outside of their own lives. The Nigerian government estimates poverty at roughly 33 percent of the population, though 82 percent of the population lives on less than the equivalent of $2 per day.
During periods of military rule, protests were not generally tolerated, though the reach of the state to control and suppress protests was relatively low compared to other countries. Since 1999, protest activity has increased dramatically in Nigeria, for all manner of political causes. Much of the protest activity centers on the oil industry, though the preferences of the protesters vary widely. Oil workers for both multinational operations and domestic companies frequently strike for a variety of reasons. In 2014, Nigeria’s two major oil workers unions both went on strike demanding improvements to Nigeria’s roads, whose poor conditions were making fuel delivery costly and difficult. A separate union went on strike in 2015 claiming that their workers’ salaries had not been paid in twenty-two months.
In 2012, President Goodluck Jonathan, faced with a difficult government budget situation, decided to end the government’s subsidies on fuel, saving the government $8 billion per year, but doubling fuel prices for regular Nigerians overnight. Waves of protests erupted across the country, eventually resulting in violent clashes with police that killed sixteen people and wounded over 200. The protests forced the government to reverse the decision and restore the subsidies. It is estimated that roughly 80 percent of the wealth generated by Nigeria’s vast oil reserves benefits only the top 1 percent of the population. For many poor Nigerians, cheap gasoline is viewed as the only benefit they receive for living in an oil-rich nation. Their willingness to participate in protest has a strong influence on government policy.
Nigeria is still in the early phases of a democratic transition. Its constitutions and political institutions were regularly reshaped and personalized based on the preferences of the military leader of the day, but are increasingly showing signs of formalization and institutionalization. Freedom House currently characterizes Nigeria as “partly free.” Nigeria ranks 109 out of 167 countries studied in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, classifying it as a hybrid regime. Perhaps transitional democracy would be the most accurate term to describe the current Nigerian regime. Whether the 2015 election is a step toward further reform and democratic consolidation is still to be seen.
The political party structure of Nigeria has changed repeatedly with each regime change from republic to military rule, and from military leader to military leader. The party structure is still forming since the 1999 constitution, but the main competition seems loosely shaped around a north–south regional party alignment based on the results of the 2011, 2015, and 2019 elections.
Nigeria’s coinciding cleavages are reflected in the current political party divide, with northern Hausa-Fulani Muslims supporting the All Progressives Congress, and southern Igbo Christians supporting the People’s Democratic Party.
The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was formed in 1998 just after the transition away from military rule into democracy was announced. The party formed around the presidential candidacy of the former military ruler, Olusegun Obasanjo. It quickly moved to build a national, rather than regional base of support by including both northern and southern candidates on its national ticket, and recruiting members from all parts of the country into the patron-client network of support. The party behaved in many ways like a dominant party, expressing limited commitment to any comprehensive political ideology, but rather taking whatever steps might be necessary to preserve the party’s position of power. It held power in Nigeria from 1999 to 2015, albeit with highly questionable election fairness in some cases. Part of the party’s national appeal was an understanding between northern and southern leaders early on that leaders from the north and south would alternate “turns” in power, beginning with the southerner Obasanjo. When northerner Umaru Yar’Adua was chosen to succeed Obasanjo with a southerner as his vice-presidential running mate, it seemed that the party would hold to this promise. Yar’Adua’s death, however, put the southerner Goodluck Jonathan in the presidency, and when he decided to run again in 2011, many northern Muslims felt betrayed by the PDP. This has played a large role in unifying the opposition into a new party.
While not fully ideological in nature, the PDP has generally favored center-right economic policies, which have moved Nigeria in a neoliberal economic direction, reducing the role of the government in economic decision making, and privatizing a growing segment of the economy. At the same time, the PDP under President Obasanjo has supported many welfare-state initiatives, including the creation of the Nigerian Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) to give all Nigerians access to basic health services. The PDP tends to be socially conservative (but perhaps less so than the average Nigerian), and in 2007 went as far as to make homosexuality a criminal act, with prison sentences for up to five years possible. When the wave of northern states adopted Shari’ah law into their legal systems, the PDP national government chose to tolerate the change rather than force repeal, but insisted that the laws must only apply to Muslims, in an appeal to religious toleration.
Before 2013, the opposition parties against the PDP were numerous, highly regionally and ethnically based, and disorganized. The second place presidential candidate in Nigeria’s elections had never received more than one-third of the vote. In 2013, three of Nigeria’s opposition parties, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC), and the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) joined forces to take on the PDP for the 2015 elections. The parties did not share much in common ideologically, or in their regional base of support, but revived an old theme in Nigerian history of Hausa-Fulani and Yoruba cooperation when their interests coincided. Their candidate, Muhammadu Buhari, won 54 percent of the vote against Jonathan’s 45 percent, marking the first election victory for an opposition party in Nigeria’s history.
The party campaigned on a left-leaning platform encouraging government intervention to regulate the market on behalf of the poor, but was more socially conservative in its rhetoric than the PDP, likely because of the party’s northern Islamic base among the Hausa-Fulani.
At the national level, Nigeria elects a president and vice president in a nationwide vote. It also elects two legislative houses, the House of Representatives and the Senate, in elections held within each state and the federal capital. Because of the volatility of the data from Nigeria’s official records—which may have been manipulated in some years more than others—the degree to which Nigerians participate in elections and their sense of political efficacy is not settled science. While the voting age population turnout was over 65 percent in 2003’s presidential election, it was below 50 percent in both 2007 and 2011, and dipped all the way down to 32 percent in 2015 and 35 percent in 2019. Nigerians also vote at the state level for a governor and a state legislature, and for local officials such as the mayor of their city or village.
Nigeria’s election system is similar to that of the United States in many ways, such as direct election of the president, representation based on population in SMD constituencies in the House of Representatives, and an equal number of seats for every state in the Senate.
Nigeria’s president is elected directly by Nigerian voters to a four-year term, and the Constitution allows up to two terms. The election lasts only one round with victory going to whichever candidate receives the most votes (regardless of whether it is a majority or not), though Nigeria has a unique requirement. In order to declare a winner after the first round, the candidate must receive at least 25 percent of the vote in at least two-thirds of the states. This requirement was put into Nigeria’s constitution in 1999 to prevent regional parties with exclusive appeal in the north or south from winning, and then exercising power in a way that would divide the country. Conduct of the voting was usually fraught with irregularities: the failure of ballots to arrive at certain polling stations; early closures of polling places with lines of voters still waiting to cast a vote; or ballots printed either missing a party logo (crucial for the illiterate voters), or missing a particular candidate altogether. By comparison to early elections, 2011 and 2015 came with relatively mild complaints, and international observers considered both to be basically reflective of the will of Nigerian voters.
| Election | Winning Candidate and Party | Percent of Vote Received | Runner-up Candidate and Party | Percent of Vote Received |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | Obasanjo (PDP) | 63% | Falae (AD) | 37% |
| 2003 | Obasanjo (PDP) | 62% | Buhari (ANPP) | 32% |
| 2007 | Yar’Adua (PDP) | 70% | Buhari (ANPP) | 19% |
| 2011 | Jonathan (PDP) | 59% | Buhari (CPC) | 32% |
| 2015 | Buhari (APC) | 54% | Jonathan (PDP) | 45% |
| 2019 | Buhari (APC) | 56% | Abubakar (PDP) | 41% |
Nigeria is divided into 360 single-member-district (SMD) constituencies. The constituencies are within Nigeria’s states, with each state receiving a number of constituencies based on their population relative to other states, so larger states receive more representation. In each constituency, political parties may field a single candidate, though no party is allowed to run a candidate in the presidential election unless they receive at least 5 percent of the vote in at least two-thirds of the states in legislative races from the previous election. This strongly discourages the formation of small parties around legislative candidates who are exclusively regionally or ethnically based, as the party needs to cooperate nationally to field candidates across the country if they want to qualify for the next presidential election. Nigeria can be considered a first-past-the-post election system since the winning candidate is the one with the most votes, not necessarily a majority. The PDP won electoral majorities in the House of Representatives in every race from 1999 to 2011, but lost to the APC in 2015 and again in 2019.
While Nigeria’s House of Representatives gives representation to each state based roughly on population, the Senate gives each state representation equally. Each of the thirty-six states elects three Senators, and the Federal Capital Territory of Abuja also elects one, for a total of 109 Senators. The states are divided into three electoral districts, each electing the candidate with the most votes in a first-past-the-post system. Like the House, the PDP won every Senate majority between 1999 and 2011, but lost their majority to the APC in 2015 and 2019.
| Election | PDP Seats in the House | Other Parties’ Seats in the House | PDP Seats in the Senate | Other Parties’ Seats in the Senate |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 206 | 154 | 59 | 50 |
| 2003 | 223 | 137 | 76 | 33 |
| 2007 | 260 | 100 | 85 | 24 |
| 2011 | 203 | 157 | 71 | 38 |
| 2015 | 125 | 235 | 49 | 60 |
| 2019 | 115 | 245 | 41 | 68 |
During periods of military rule, Nigerian interest groups played a crucial role in the formation of national policy, as they were often the only mechanism through which people could participate in the formation of policy. The most influential groups were professional in nature, such as the Nigerian Bar Association, Nigerian Medical Association, and other similar groups that mainly advocated for the interests of the people in the associated profession (doctors, lawyers, engineers, etc.). It was definitively a state corporatist system that brought interest groups under the umbrella of state support in exchange for benefits.
Today’s Nigeria has a wide array of interest groups making demands of the political system on a wide range of issues, though they are limited in their ability to achieve their objectives by the corrupt culture around Nigeria’s politics. Modern Nigeria is probably closer to pluralism than to state corporatism because of the general freedom of association, though there is still limited participation across the Nigerian population, because of the extent of poverty and illiteracy among the large majority of people in rural areas. These current interests fall into four major categories:
While Sani Abacha attempted to close down nearly all independent media outlets during his rule, Nigeria has retained a developed and independent press. Nigeria’s media is broad and diverse in its coverage and perspective on political issues, but mostly in the south and the cities where economic development has been strongest. In the less-developed rural north, there is less access to television or print media, despite the relative freedom of speech and the press the government allows. At times, especially under military rule, the state has attempted to control and censor the media in order to present its own perspective and version of events, but it usually lacked the capacity to control coverage, especially with a large presence of foreign news companies, such as CNN, BBC, and The New York Times, to name a few. Middle-class Nigerians usually have access to satellite television and international news channels, in addition to domestic news broadcasts. Currently, about two-thirds of Nigerians say they access a news media source at least once a day, with the rate highest among men (73 percent) and those in urban areas (72 percent). Radio is the most common form of news accessed, with word-of-mouth the second most common, an indication of the relative lack of development in Nigeria compared to the other countries of study.
The Internet and mobile technology are revolutionizing Nigerian media much as they are in other countries. More than 80 percent of Nigerians now own a mobile phone, and about 60 percent say they use the Internet to read blogs and share news stories.
News coverage in Nigeria has shown a willingness to criticize all manner of government policy and behavior. Investigative reporting is common. The Nigerian domestic media drove most of the coverage of the irregularities and fraud allegations during the 2007 election, and regularly gave a prominent voice to dissident professors and political activists suspicious of the numbers they analyzed in each state’s vote result. Political cartoons and caricatures making fun of powerful politicians are a regular feature of the media, as well, though the targets of the criticism sometimes accuse their critics of using ethnic slurs and stereotypes.
The institutions of Nigeria are outlined in the Constitution of 1999 with a model of separation of powers, checks and balances, and federalism, but only in theory. In practice, like many developing countries, a tremendous amount of power flows through the chief executive, Nigeria’s president, and other institutions do not typically function as any real check on his power.
Though Nigeria’s constitution specifies many restraints and checks on the power of the president, practically, the president carries tremendous power with little to stand in his way.
The president of Nigeria serves a four-year term and may be reelected to a second term. He acts as the unified head of state and head of government, performing both ceremonial duties and overseeing the national bureaucratic administration. The Constitution grants the president the power to:
The most significant power of the president lies in the power to appoint nearly all of Nigeria’s public officials, and to do so without any consent from the legislature or any other body, including Nigeria’s state-owned companies and many local offices. This allows the president to create a massive patron-client network of loyalists dependent on him for very good paying jobs, with opportunities for corruption to supplement their salaries.
The bicameral National Assembly, which includes the House of Representatives and the Senate, is made up of members chosen to four-year terms in elections held at the same time as the presidential election. In order to pass legislation, both houses must pass the bill, making the legislature bicameral functionally, as well as structurally. The Assembly may pass a bill over the president’s veto or delay if they pass it with a two-thirds majority in both houses. The two houses possess identical legislative powers, with two exceptions: the Senate can impeach judges and executive commissions (but the president must first recommend their impeachment), and it is the Senate that confirms the president’s cabinet and top-level court nominations. They have no such confirmation power with most other presidential appointments.
While the Assembly is theoretically the legislative branch of the government, it has been notoriously slow in carrying out this function; in terms of governance, it has been characterized as “being in a learning process” since 1999. The president has not been especially cooperative, either, as many bills passed by the PDP majority in 2007 were still awaiting President Jonathan’s signature or veto at the time he left office in 2015. When President Obasanjo attempted to alter the Constitution to run for a third term, the legislature (of his own party) stood against him amid widespread outcry from democracy interest groups and protesters, but this has been only one among very few instances of the legislature acting as a presidential check.
Nigeria is organized as a federal system, with thirty-six states and the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. The states have constitutional authority over many issues of local concern, and voters directly elect their state governors and state legislatures. Given that the extensive ethnic divisions in Nigeria are regionally concentrated, a federal system makes a great deal of sense. It allows each regional ethnic group to maintain some local sovereignty and make policies based on local preferences. Historically, two major factors, usually characterized by Nigerians simply as “soldiers and oil,” have tended to undermine the degree of local control of the state governments.
Military leaders of Nigeria, after seizing power in a coup, usually attempted to consolidate power over the state governments, either by asserting their authority to control the outcomes of local elections or abolishing elections altogether. This is not much of a concern now, since the last military government of Nigeria ended in 1998 with the death of Sani Abacha. Oil, however, remains a point of contention in the federal system. While the rights to Nigeria’s subsoil resources are completely owned by the national government, many state governments and citizens in oil-rich regions believe their state and people should be entitled to the lion’s share of the profits generated from oil extracted from their region. Meanwhile, citizens and governments in the states without much oil believe it is the responsibility of the national government to make sure all Nigerians benefit equally from the nation’s oil resources. Determining the proper formula for the federal government to distribute the national oil revenues to state governments is a frequent source of political conflict in the country, and the national government’s complete ownership and control of the oil revenues gives the national government significant power over the states.
Furthermore, in a country with a weak national identity to begin with, federalism has served to further weaken and undermine the national identity of citizens, as state boundaries are largely drawn along ethnic and religious lines. These separate state governments emphasize and exacerbate existing ethnic and religious conflicts; each group is free to pursue its own local policy agenda without regard for compromise or cooperation with other groups. Regardless, federalism is central to the character of modern Nigeria and enshrined in the 1999 Constitution.
Nigeria’s courts are divided into a state and federal system, with state laws applied in state jurisdictions, and federal laws in federal jurisdictions. The system mirrors the British model of lower-level courts that can appeal up to higher levels, with common law precedent guiding the interpretation of laws. The top of the national court system is the Supreme Court, which is the court of last resort over all appeals for both the state and federal systems. There are up to twenty-one justices on the Supreme Court at any time, based on the recommendation of a judicial commission to the president. The court is empowered with judicial review to declare actions of the president or the National Assembly unconstitutional, but the power is not commonly exercised. Although the judiciary was well trained and independent during the late stages of British colonial rule and remained strong after independence, military rule ravaged the courts’ strength. Many military-affiliated cronies were appointed into positions as judges with little or no legal training. The courts have been and remain under significant pressure from the executive and the legislature, and like many other governing institutions in Nigeria, suffer from corruption and inefficiency. There is a high frequency of court officials asking for bribes to expedite decisions in trials, or to give favorable rulings.
Nigeria’s judiciary mirrors the British system of common law, but the system has been complicated by the emergence of local Shari’ah courts in northern states.
Nigeria’s dual federal-state court system is further complicated by the creation of Shari’ah courts in twelve northern states, which run parallel to the state courts. While their application is limited to Muslims, they have generated controversy both inside and outside Nigeria. The case of Amina Lawal (detailed in the section on religious cleavage) generated international outcry, as did the case of Mubarak Bala, a convert to atheism who was declared “mentally ill” by a Shari’ah court and was forcibly committed to a psychiatric ward and drugged as a “treatment.” Despite the harsh punishments allowable under Shari’ah law for all manner of offenses, to this point, there has only been one execution resulting from a Shari’ah court case. To deal with some of the scrutiny surrounding these courts, Nigeria created a Sharia Court of Appeals at the federal level to review local court decisions. This decision was highly controversial, as many Nigerians believed the fusion of religious authority in the federal structure was unconstitutional.
Nigeria’s bureaucracy was established under the British colonial model, allowing Nigerians to work in the lowest levels, overseen by British administrators. The civil service remained intact after independence, but has grown into a bloated apparatus of the patron-client network to provide jobs for political loyalists and return favors. Although corruption and patron-client systems exist in other countries as well, the problem is so entrenched in Nigeria that scholars use the term prebendalism to describe it. Not unlike other elements of the Nigerian state, the bureaucracy is bloated, inefficient, and generally regarded as highly corrupt.
The bureaucracy has been notorious for many decades for its corruption and inefficiency. The term “prebendalism” describes how many Nigerian bureaucrats treat their post as a “prebend” they may use to full personal advantage in soliciting bribes.
One of the largest segments of the Nigerian bureaucracy today is not the civil service, but parastatal agencies and companies. These are technically privately owned, but they are overseen and staffed at the top levels by appointees of the president, making them effectively part of the state and the patron-client network of patrimonialism. One example of these parastatals is the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), formerly the Nigerian Electric Power Authority (NEPA). Problems of electricity availability and frequent power outages, not to mention an extraordinarily difficult process to pay a monthly bill, regularly frustrate Nigerian citizens. NEPA was often mocked in Nigerian culture as an acronym for “Never Expect Power Always.” When the government announced the name change to PHCN, Nigerians on social media quickly rushed to create new acronyms, such as “Please Hold Candle Nearby” and “Problem Has Changed Name.” The government would pour millions of dollars into supposed improvements meant to change these problems with little result, perhaps because of mismanagement, internal corruption, or outright theft in the PHCN.
The government attempted to solve the problems at PHCN in 2013 with a privatization scheme in which the company was broken into at least seventeen subsidiary local companies, with billions of dollars invested to create new infrastructure. Since the reform, Nigeria is generating even less electricity, estimated to be as little as 1.5 percent of total Nigerian demand for electricity. It is still common to see a large number of generators outside commercial spaces, all running to keep power to the computers and machinery necessary to do the day’s business.
PHCN is one of many similar cases of inefficient and corrupt parastatal institutions. Others exist in the oil and gas sectors, telecommunications, mortgage banking, and many more.
Not surprisingly, the military is an influential and powerful political force in Nigeria. During the periods of military rule, its highest-ranking officer acted as the Supreme Military Commander in charge of all political policymaking. Other high-ranking military officials took posts across all levels of government, requiring a necessary distinction between the “military in government” who were the decision makers, and the “military in barracks” who were expected to follow the orders of the government. Military rulers, wary of the possibility that they themselves could be the victim of the next coup, would often appoint influential rival generals to high office in government (where they could make themselves rich through corruption), and keep them away from their armies.
Today’s Nigerian military remains the best place for a young Nigerian man to advance his economic prospects legitimately and prove his talents, with the possible exception of a university education in petroleum engineering, or leaving the country altogether. It is also the sole truly national institution that brings diverse Nigerians together for a single purpose. It is about 500,000 active troops strong, with modest funding at about $7 billion per year.
When he gave his inaugural address in 1999, President Obasanjo, a former general, complained of the loss of professionalism and effectiveness of Nigeria’s military that he saw as a direct result of military rule. Obasanjo enacted reforms to force the retirement of military officials who had held government posts in prior military regimes, and enlisted a more ethnically diverse group into the top officer ranks. He also solicited international support to upgrade the equipment and training of the military to help focus it on its primary function, providing security to Nigerians.
While it is true that the military has not since attempted to retake political power since these reforms, the military’s capability to provide security is currently in question. The Boko Haram insurgency, with about 10,000 fighters, has been active in northern Nigeria at high strength since 2010. So far, at least 13,000 civilians have been killed by the group, and over 1.5 million Nigerians have been displaced due to the violence, mostly in the northeast. Most notoriously, the group kidnapped 276 schoolgirls in 2014, announcing the intention to sell them into slavery. The military was generally unable to deal with this insurgency, and by 2014, Boko Haram occupied and controlled a large territory in the northeast. Threats of violence from Boko Haram surrounding the 2015 election prompted the Independent National Election Committee to delay the election by six weeks (although some suspected the decision was politically motivated to buy the PDP time to get into a better position to win).
British and American authorities, in the aftermath of Nigeria’s failures to fight Boko Haram, have expressed frustration with the ill-preparedness of the Nigerian military, which they attributed to funds being “skimmed off the top” of the military’s budgets, and the reluctance and fear among Nigerian soldiers to engage an enemy they do not feel prepared to fight.
Nigeria’s public policy concerns are evidence of its status as a developing country. The country requires resources to answer its problems: high economic inequality, low per capita incomes, low rates of literacy, and problems with HIV/AIDS, to name a few. Oil may seem like an easy solution to find the funding for these problems, yet oil sometimes seems to cause more problems than it solves.
Oil brings tremendous wealth into Nigeria, accounting for as much as 46 percent of Nigeria’s GDP when sectors related to the oil industry are factored in. However, this dependence on oil as the sole resource of focus has turned Nigeria into a rentier state, dependent upon the activities of foreign corporations such as Shell and BP to fund the state’s operations. This is sometimes referred to as the “resource curse,” when a single resource brings both a blessing of massive wealth, but the curse of concentration of economic control in the hands of the state, corruption, and lack of development in other sectors of the economy. For example, in 2017, Nigeria’s exports consisted of 76 percent crude oil, 14 percent petroleum gas, 1.7 percent refined petroleum, and everything else made up the remaining 8.3 percent.
There has been a great deal of rhetoric around privatizing Nigeria’s multiplicity of parastatal interests, and diversifying Nigeria’s economy, but to this point, very little progress has been made. The problem of corruption seems closely related to control of the revenues from oil. One study estimated corruption in Nigeria to account for 20 percent of GDP. In 2013, the governor of Nigeria’s Central Bank submitted a letter and a 300-page report to President Jonathan explaining that he believed the state oil company, the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC), had failed to account for and transfer to the state roughly $20 billion. By his analysis, the NNPC was using subcontracting for work that wasn’t actually being performed, “swap deals” that undervalued the company’s assets, and manipulation of the popular government subsidies for fuel in order to steal a tremendous amount of money. President Jonathan dismissed his claims and fired him from the post.
Oil and the economy around it has also motivated a number of non-state militant movements, most notably the Movement to Emancipate the Niger Delta (MEND). MEND claims that its cause is to deliver the benefits of oil revenues to the localized community that actually lives on top of the oil in the Niger Delta, and to secure reparations from the government for the environmental damage related to the industry’s operations. MEND claims that the Niger Delta can no longer sustain a family’s livelihood since the environmental degradation has made the land impossible to farm or fish on. MEND conducts campaigns of guerilla warfare, sabotage, kidnapping, and theft against multinational oil companies and their employees, and occasionally against civilian targets outside of the Delta region. The Nigerian government has waged a military campaign against MEND, ranging from small operations that apprehend MEND militants while they are stealing oil from pipelines, up to targeted airstrikes at the locations of known MEND leaders. The Niger Delta has been a troubled region in conflict since MEND’s formation in 2004.
Federalism was first introduced in Nigeria with the concept of “three regions” present in the British Nigerian Constitution in 1946. It has remained part of the system, though in different forms, ever since. Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversity lends itself to a devolved power structure, and in 1999, the Constitution was created with thirty-six states drawn with consideration toward the lines generally separating major ethnic groups from one another. For most of Nigeria’s history, federalism hasn’t really functioned much as a true division of power, either because of repressive military rulers who made states effectively meaningless, or because of the tremendous amount of federal wealth concentrated in the president’s patron-client network, giving him tremendous influence over state policymakers.
The federal structure in Nigeria is also problematic for other reasons central to Nigerian politics. One is the level of corruption endemic in the Nigerian political system. Nigeria’s federalism creates an entire second level of political officials who have access to state funds and take some of the money off the top, or who insist on bribes before performing their jobs. Second is the vesting of power at a local level into an ethnocentric majority group, which may be inclined to trample on the rights of minority groups within its state. The Shari’ah courts have given some limited evidence of this possibility, though there have not been very many non-Muslims subjected to its judgments so far. There has been, however, a great deal of religious violence in divided Christian and Muslim communities surrounding the imposition of Shari’ah into state laws, especially in the early 2000s in states such as Kaduna with large Christian minorities.
Nigeria has been in the process of building a democratic regime since the death of the last military ruler, Sani Abacha. This has been a difficult path, and Nigeria’s political elites have shown limited commitment to the values of democracy, though 2015 may be a watershed moment.
The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was created in 1998 to oversee the elections that would bring Nigeria into the Fourth Republic, and has been in charge of elections ever since. The INEC has been criticized for decisions that often benefited the government, despite its “independent” moniker. In 2003, millions of people were recorded to have voted several times, including five million false ballots discovered by police in Lagos. Some parts of the country reported that few or no polling sites were open, yet the Commission reported hundreds of thousands of votes cast from those areas. The incredibly high official turnout rate of 69.3 percent of all eligible voters is also highly suspicious.
By most accounts, 2007 was even worse. European observers described the election as “the worst they had ever seen anywhere in the world,” with rampant “vote rigging, theft of ballot boxes, and intimidation.” One observer noted a region he visited that had 500 registered voters, yet over 2,000 votes were counted in the official results. One major candidate, former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, was barred from running by the INEC on the grounds that there were pending fraud charges against him. No such power is given to the INEC by the Constitution, and the Supreme Court ruled that they had acted inappropriately. Their decision was late enough, however, that Abubakar’s name still failed to appear on many Nigerians’ ballots.
In 2010, President Jonathan appointed a new chairman of the INEC, Attahiru Jega. Jega solicited funding to overhaul Nigeria’s voter registration lists, and the 2011 election did not have nearly as many complaints about fraud as the previous elections. Later, Nigeria introduced a biometric national ID card that would be required when voting. While the 2015 election was delayed in some areas due to machines’ difficulty reading the cards, the cards seem to have substantially reduced the role of ballot box stuffing and fraud in Nigeria’s elections, and may have contributed to the first transfer of power through election in Nigeria’s history.
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a union of fifteen West African countries who have agreed to create a free-trade zone and explore further opportunities for economic integration. The goals of the union include economic goals such as expanding transportation infrastructure across national boundaries to make trade more efficient, creating a common market, and harmonizing their fiscal policies to make government budgets more transparent and responsible. They also include mutual cooperation on security matters, such as peacekeeping. One of the major undertakings of ECOWAS is a subset called the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ), which aims to unify monetary policy among its six members, and create a common currency, usually referred to as the eco. While the eco was planned to roll out in 2015, there have been repeated delays in its implementation, mainly due to ten criteria of economic targets the member states need to reach under the terms of the agreement before the currency can be used. These targets involve low rates of inflation, low government budget deficits, and others that none of the members, including Nigeria, have been able to reach consistently.
ECOWAS has meant the loss of some sovereignty over trade policy, but it gives Nigeria an opportunity to expand the export of manufactured goods, perhaps helping to eventually diversify Nigeria’s oil intensive export market. Nigeria is assured a leading role in ECOWAS going forward, as it has the largest population and GDP of the members. In fact, even the combined population and GDP of the other fourteen countries does not equal Nigeria’s.
*Note: Terms with an asterisk (*) are those that consistently appear on the AP Comparative Government and Politics exam as tested concepts.
Nigeria’s political culture is deeply shaped by which of the following historical phenomena?
Compared to the other countries of study, Nigeria has
Prebendalism in Nigeria refers to
Which of the following does Nigeria have in common with Mexico?
The presidential election of 2015 represented a turning point in Nigeria’s history because it marked the first time
The 2011 and 2015 elections demonstrated a divide between which of the following groups of voters in Nigeria?
Which of the following is true about voter turnout in Nigerian elections?
Nigeria’s Senate election system
The media in Nigeria
Which of the following accurately describes a difference between the Nigerian and Iranian presidents?