ABSTRACT
Long before oil became the economic mainstay and fiscal basis of the Nigerian state, the Minority Question in Nigerian politics had fuelled separatist tendencies’ (Tamuno, 1970; Osaghae, 1986) among the diverse (more than 250) ethnic nationalities that made up the country. Thus, the emergence of the minority question is organically linked to the creation of Nigeria as a colonial state (Mustapha, 1986; Nnoli, 1978) by British imperialism. Nigeria’s forcible integration into the international capitalist system became more pronounced after the creation of the three regions in the mid-1940s. The imposition of colonialism as a political form of subordination facilitated the arrest of competing indigenous pre-capitalist modes of production in Nigeria. As pointed out elsewhere:
The contradiction between the colonial state and the ‘new’ Nigerian nation articulated itself, not only in the form of inter-group relations, majority-minority group relations, but more fundamentally over the political contestation for access to resources within the colonial political economy. Capturing the connection between the creation of the colonial state and the evolution of ethnic nationalities, Ikime observes, that:
The politicisation of inter-ethnic group relations often referred to as the
national question,’ is tied to the social relations spawned by the mode of colonial capitalist accumulation and the inequalities sown between ethnic groups by the differential rate of capitalist penetration. In terms of the patron-client relations that sustained this mode of peasant expropriation, and unequal trade, the majority ethnic groups using the advantage of demography and ‘acting politically’, were able to marginalise the other competing minority ethnic groups within the framework of the three regions: Northern, Eastern and Western. Since each of the three regions in Nigeria coincided with a majority ethnic nationality, it established a basis for future distrust, fear of domination and instability in the Nigerian federation.
