Nation-Building and the Nigerian Nationhood: Exploring New Communication Dimensions

Abstract

This paper argues that, nationalism and nation-building are different facets of the same coin in which nationalism, an ideologically driven process, served the pre-independent purpose of decolonization and the management of the colonial induced Nigerian nation-state; while as nation-building serves as a postcolonial effort to reconstruct the colonial created nation-state into a fresh aspiration that is the Nigerian nationhood. It posits that Nigeria has made progress in using the mass media to construct a national identity, but has failed to extend the construction of the Nigerian nation-state into a nationhood status due to a missing link in the internal communicative congruities needed in building Nigeria from a nation-state into nationhood. Using the analytical method, based on a critical literature review of extant studies, the paper proposes the exploration of the Burkean theory of Identification and the application of the intercultural communication paradigm, to fix the missing nexus obstructing, since 1960, the successful construction of the Nigerian nationhood.