ABSTRACT
Nigerian postcolonial politics cannot be understood without stressing the significance of ethnicity in the process of power configuration at every level of government. The complex ethno-regional negotiations that dominated the decolonization process foretold the role that communal ideologies would play in the postcolonial period. Students of Nigerian politics agree that the country's two attempts at liberal democracy (1960-66 and 1979-83) failed because of the overwhelming preoccupation of the political class with capturing the distributive agencies of the state through the mobilization of ethnicity (Post and Vickers, 1973; Falola and Ihonvbere, 1985; Joseph, 1987; Diamond, 1988). They also suggest that persistent manipulations of ethno-regional identities contributed significantly to a tragic civil war (1966-70) that claimed the lives of at least a million people. These developments, in turn, entrenched the military as a major player in the recurrent ethno-regional struggles for state power. These exigencies have progressively reduced Nigeria's diverse cultural communities to fortresses of political ethnicity (Ihonvbere, 1994a; Udogu, 1994).
