Politics of State Survival and the Dilemma of Nation-Building in Post-Independence Nigeria

Abstract

The prevalence of a fractionalized international environment coupled with the fractured African geopolitical landscape and Nigeria's colonial antecedents laden with myriad unresolved structural challenges during the emergence of Nigerian statehood provided the vortex of post-colonial state survival inclination for the country. The above is usually associated with a typically hugely populated and ethno-culturally heterogeneous society, and it renders the country fatigued with the burden of nation-building. Thus, the twin-challenges of state-survival and nation-building have occupied and dominated the political and socio-economic affairs of post-independence Nigeria. The notion of state survival is a realist paradigm which compels nation-states to use all the instruments at their disposal to seek the retention of their national identity within the precarious and predatory international system. Nation building, on the other hand, entails the process of forging a common identity and a sense of national empathy, shared values, and cultures constituting a state. This paper contends that while the pursuit of state survival is propelled by the external environment in which Nigeria emerged and intricately subsists, the structural challenges inherited at independence, no doubt raised the task of nation-building. As complimentary as the two challenges featured and influenced the nation's policy commitments towards the local and international environments, a cursory examination of Nigeria's socio-economic and political trajectories since independence reveal that state survival has often been aggressively pursued at the expense of nation-building resulting into structural volatility which inadvertently threatened the nation's survival prospects. The position of this paper is that efforts should be made to balance these two ultimate challenges in the quest to reposition Nigeria towards the path of greatness.