A Genealogical Theory of Nigerian Constitutionalism: Power, Identity, and Constitutional Continuity from Colonial Rule to the Fourth Republic

Nigerian constitutionalism has been shaped by a succession of constitutional documents from the 1914 Lugard Constitution through the independence constitutions of 1960 and 1963 to the military-era constitutions and the 1999 Constitution. A genealogical theoretical examination of how colonial power structures, ethnic identity politics, and military governance norms have been reproduced within successive Nigerian constitutional arrangements is absent from the comparative constitutional law literature. This study applies Foucauldian Genealogical Analysis to examine Nigerian constitutionalism as a domain of power-knowledge production, tracing the continuities and ruptures in constitutional arrangements from 1914 to 2023. The methodology combines archival doctrinal analysis of all major Nigerian constitutional instruments, historical political documents, colonial office records held at the National Archives in London, and post-independence constitutional conference proceedings, with a systematic constitutional text comparative analysis examining the reproduction of specific institutional arrangements across constitutional generations. The study's original theoretical contribution is a Genealogical Theory of Nigerian Constitutionalism that explains contemporary constitutional governance failures as products of power structures embedded in colonial and military constitutional moments. The Foucauldian Power-Knowledge Framework and Postcolonial Constitutional Theory provide the theoretical reference. Findings provide a theoretically grounded historical account of Nigerian constitutional development with implications for transformative constitutionalism reform proposals. Keywords: Nigerian constitutionalism, genealogy, Foucault, colonial law, constitutional history.