Federal Character and Affirmative Action

The Nigerian federal
character principle was first introduced in the 1979 Constitution (and
retained in the 1999 Constitution) as practical solution of Nigeria’s
perennial ethnic conflict. Unfortunately, the good intentions of the
makers of the 1979 Constitution regarding the provision of federal
character were misunderstood, abused and thwarted over the years by
military regimes and largely also by their democratic successors since
1999. The principle has been left to take different interpretations and
to be applied arbitrarily by any government in power. In fact, both to
the policy-makers and many Nigerian scholars, the principle should be
applied as “affirmative action” and “quota system”. Some scholars even
confuse it with the principle of federalism. Nigeria’s federal character
in none of these. The distinction of federal character from the other
principles, but especially from affirmative action (in the case, the
American version, from where the concept of affirmative action
originated), constitutes the central thrust of this work. A critical
re-examination of its original constitutional intentions and meaning as a
principle of “ethnic engineering” on the one hand, and as a version of
“consociational democracy”, on the other hand, has been carried out so
as to redirect and otherwise laudable principle from being a divisive
factor to a unifying one from which it was intended.