This thesis uses the political economy approach to examine the relative failure of federalism in post-military Nigeria from 1999 to 2009. Nigeria's federal system is shaped by the country's political economy, which predominantly revolves around oil rents. The central featu re of Nigeria's political economy is the convoluted intimacy between oil and the state. Since the oil boom of the earty 19705, oil has been at the heart of Nigeria's fiscal federalism and, by extension, has been central to the practice of federalism. All sectors of the Nigerian rentier state are dependent upon the oil sector and consequently upon the state. This brings to the fore the link beween Nigeria's oil and the country's practice of federalism. Nigeria, being a distributive state, oversees the distribution of oil rents in the country, and the desire to achieve an equitable distribution has often resulted in the adoption of several fiscal principles dictated by a combination of factors, yet the country's fiscal system has continuously defied political and economic logic. The main argument in this thesis is that the Nigerian rentier state's domination of the economy is at the heart of the ethno·regional socio·economic competition for a share of the national wealth, which is the source of the failure of federalism in Nigeria, particularly in the period immediately following the tennination of military rule in 1999. The inability of the Nigerian federal state to distribute Nigeria's oil wealth effectively has become the .main source of the country's fai lure as a federal state, although the coloniaJJegacy of the Nigerian Federation, the country's comptex ethnic diversity, oil resource abundance, ingrained corruption and decades of military rule, have also in combination contributed to this verdict. None of these individual facto rs can be completely ignored when we try to explain this failure, .===b"e"cause they interact in a complicated fashion such that it is difficult to untangle them. The main conclusion in this thesis is that Nigeria's failure to ensure an equitable distribution of oil·generated revenue epitomises the failure of federalism in Nigeria. The Nigerian federal system is largely flawed and is in serious need of some bold political engineering. Our position in this thesis is that these deficiencies are rooted in the country's unbalanced domestic political economy, which promotes over.ctependency on oil and consequently a predatory leadership. A political restructuring of the oil-rich federation in ways that would grant the constituent units some real political and fi scal autonomy would be a useful reform that might ultimately provide a cure to the ai ling federal system.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:593905 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Babalola, Dele Idowu |
| Publisher | University of Kent |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0018 seconds