Power, Politics, and Information Control in Nigerian Federal Bureaucracy: A Critical Institutional Analysis

This study critically analyses the intersections of power, politics, and information control in Nigeria's federal bureaucracy, examining how political authority shapes information access, classification decisions, and records management policy in ways that affect governance quality and democratic accountability. The study deploys a critical institutionalist methodology combining historical documentary analysis (1999 to 2024), discourse analysis of federal information management policies, and fifty-five in-depth interviews with retired and serving senior civil servants, information managers, and governance scholars. Foucault's Power-Knowledge nexus, the New Institutional Theory, and the Information Control Framework provide the theoretical architecture. The study identifies four distinct mechanisms through which political authority influences information management outcomes in the federal bureaucracy: selective disclosure, strategic ambiguity in policy language, bureaucratic gatekeeping, and digitalisation resistance motivated by accountability avoidance. Each mechanism is theorised with original conceptual elaboration and illustrated with empirical case narratives. The study makes a dual original contribution: it advances critical archival theory through an empirically grounded Nigerian bureaucratic context and provides substantive empirical evidence of information-politics intersections previously documented only anecdotally. Recommendations target the Freedom of Information Act reform process and the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission. Keywords: power, information control, federal bureaucracy, critical institutionalism, Nigeria