An Appraisal of Nigerian Federalism and Constitutional Development in the 21st Century

Abstract

The concept of federalism is not new in the political lexicon of many democracies world over, in fact in most modern societies, there has been a practice of some form of federalism or another, and the success or otherwise of the experiment is solely dependent on the level of a society's diversity as well as its complexity or the uniqueness of its historical antecedents as well as political and economic consciousness of the various units of the federal society. The concept therefore may mean different things to different people. The expanse of land mass that was to become Nigeria was inhabited by several independent communities and nations in the pre-colonial milieu. The history of Nigerian constitutional development has therefore shown that the concept of federalism is a child of necessity. It is a coin of many faces, an edifice that is intended to serve the need of various heterogeneous entities that concede to some form of political or economic compromise in running of their governance. It is, in other words, an antidote of the many ills related to the management of diversity and the plurality of competing ethnic identities and nations. This paper attempts to look at the concept of federalism from various perspectives, it examines its features and analyses its diverse trends in the light Nigerian's constitutional history.