Constitutional Design, Ethnic Federalism, and Intergovernmental Conflict in Nigeria

This dissertation provides an original comparative constitutional analysis of how Nigeria's federal constitutional design generates, manages, and perpetuates intergovernmental conflict along ethnic and regional lines. Engaging critically with Lijphart's Consociational Democracy Theory and Horowitz's Ethnic Conflict Theory, the dissertation argues that Nigeria's current constitutional architecture systematically amplifies rather than mediates intergovernmental conflict due to the incongruence between formal federal institutions and the underlying ethnic plurality structure. The dissertation employs a comparative constitutional methodology, analysing Nigeria's 1999 Constitution against a structured comparison of four similarly diverse federal systems including India, Ethiopia, South Africa, and Canada, supplemented by 70 elite interviews with constitutional scholars, governors, legislators, and inter-state dispute lawyers. Causal process tracing and structured constitutional text analysis are the primary analytical tools. The dissertation proposes the Ethnic Federal Congruence Theory (EFCT), which posits that federal stability is maximised when constitutional territorial unit boundaries and institutional power-sharing mechanisms reflect the underlying ethnic and regional cleavage structure. Applying the EFCT to Nigeria, the dissertation identifies systematic incongruence in revenue allocation formulas, state creation boundaries, and federal character implementation that generate chronic intergovernmental conflict. Original contributions include the EFCT theoretical model, a constitutional congruence measurement methodology, and specific constitutional amendment proposals for addressing identified incongruences. Keywords: constitutional design, ethnic federalism, intergovernmental conflict, Nigeria, consociationalism.