1.0 Introduction
Nigeria is an amalgam of diverse ethnic nationalities at varying degrees of political development before colonialism. Some of these nationalities were encapsulated in the major empires and kingdoms that dotted the political landscape of the present Nigeria. Others continued to resist annexation by these empires and kingdoms until the advent of colonial rule which amalgamated all into one entity. Trailing the 1914 amalgamation were cries of domination and marginalization by virtually all ethnic groups thereby calling for self-determination.
These seemingly ethnic-motivated cries and requests for self-determination were underestimated by the Henry Willink Commission of 1957. A decade later, the Yakubu Gowon regime, owing to the foggy political atmosphere in the country, created twelve states out of the four existing regions. This example was followed by virtually all the military regimes after him probably with intention to curry acceptability by the citizens. The exercises which were considered a panacea for the national integration project have had boomerang effects because they have reinforced the problems they were ab initio set out to solve. In a historical discourse of this nature, it is important to attempt to clear possible obstacles to a firm grasp of the unfolding analysis by defining the topical terms to be found herein. The operational concepts in this paper are essentially Politics and National Integration.
Admittedly, scholars, politicians and commentators have traded minds on a generally acceptable definition of the term 'politics'. Politics as defined by Harold Lasswell is an empirical science that studies the shaping and sharing of power about “who gets what, when and how. This appears to suggest that power is pivotal in determining the allocation of resources to the citizenry. M.I. Okwueze does seem to associate himself with the view of the direction of power being determined by the science of politics. As he puts it, “politics is the science of arranging, determining and influencing allocation of power and resources in the life of a people, an organization, a community, nation and the world at large. He further contends that “politics, in its broad and dynamic perspectives, can be seen as a process of adjustment and inter-play of power and interest within the public sphere and the affairs of a society be it on a local, national or international levels. It is perhaps in the context of this that the prompting of states creation in Nigeria can be appreciated.
In the context of this paper, politics is the struggle of a people for uninhibited access to political power, opportunities to contribute to the issues of governance and equitable distribution of national wealth. One of the absurdities of Nigerian federalism well noted in the extant literature as one of the factors responsible for her convoluting character is structural imbalance, created by the British colonial administration that handed over at independence a federation with a preponderant Northern Region, which was about a third of the entire federation both in land mass and population size.
This lopsidedness undoubtedly is a negation of J.S. Mill's law of federal stability, which posits that for a federation to be stable the component parts must be fairly equal in size. Coupled with minorities' fear of marginalization, the quest by Nigerians, most especially the minorities, for the creation of their dream states has reached a crescendo. Thus, continuing fragmentation of the polity at intervals have equally animated sub-nationalities. To keep on demanding and insisting on creation of local government areas; all in an attempt to achieve geo-political balancing.
Ever since 1954, when the minorities in the country first bombarded then colonial government with an avalanche of requests for the creation of their autonomous divisions, in order to ensure equity and justice in an unfolding Nigerian federal structure; the demands for the creation of additional states and localities to the already existing ones by Nigerians have become a common place. From a federal structure of four units in 1960 (federal and three regions), now we have a staggering number of 37 units along with the federal capital territory and 774 local governments (Gboyega, 2003). It needs be reiterated that the experience of ethnic minorities worldwide has shown that several approaches can be adopted to manage the problem. These include:assimilation, ethnocide, genocide, constitutional safeguards, reversal of status and territorial solution, which otherwise is known as, state and locality creation.
…
