The Political Economy of Agricultural Policy Failure in Northern Nigeria: A Historical Institutionalist Analysis

This study advances a historical institutionalist analysis of agricultural policy failure in northern Nigeria, developing a theoretical explanation for the persistent gap between agricultural policy ambitions and outcomes across the North West and North East geopolitical zones from the post-independence period to the present. Nigeria's failure to develop a productive smallholder agricultural sector in the north, despite its enormous land resources and the agricultural dependency of the majority of its population, represents one of the most consequential policy failures in the country's development history. Existing explanations have emphasised technical policy deficiencies, corruption, and resource limitations but have not adequately addressed the political economy structures that continuously reproduce policy failure despite repeated reform efforts. Drawing on historical institutionalism, the political economy of agriculture in Africa literature, and the political settlements approach, the study develops an original framework centring the role of landlocked political economies, pre-colonial agrarian institutions, colonial cash crop distortions, and post-independence distributional politics in establishing path dependencies that constrain effective agricultural policy design. The framework is tested through comparative historical analysis of agricultural policy trajectories in Kano, Zamfara, and Borno states, drawing on archival research, semi-structured elite interviews, and quantitative analysis of agricultural productivity data over six decades. Findings reveal that the political economy of northern agriculture has been consistently structured by the distributional interests of large landholders, trader-exporters, and political elites who benefit from agrarian underdevelopment, creating a stable anti-developmental political settlement that resists reform. Keywords: agricultural policy failure, northern Nigeria, historical institutionalism, political economy, path dependency