Strangers, indigenes and settlers: Contested geographies of citizenship in Nigeria

Abstract.

This paper addresses contested geographies of citizenship in Nigeria. There, a confluence of geo-historical forces (cultural pluralism, colonialism, the political economy of oil and military rule) has promoted the proliferation of competing formal citizenship containers-cum-states. The creation of new states, coupled with an exclusionary ideology, has given rise to fractured and dysfunctional spaces of citizenship in Nigeria. Attention is given to the meanings and experiences associated with these sub-national citizenship containers. The case study is also discussed in the broader terms of national state trajectories and citizenship geographies in Africa, where states are facing restructuring pressures from within and without.

Acknowledgments

The author is grateful to the Guest Editors for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also go to two anonymous reviewers. Sources providing funding to support this research include: the University of Iowa Graduate College, the University of Iowa Student Government, the Association of American Geographers and the Political Geography Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers.

Notes

1. The following are working definitions for terms used with reference to Nigeria. The definitions are based on contemporary usage in mainstream Nigerian society. An ‘indigene’ is a person tracing patrilocal ancestry through a particular area of Nigeria (i.e. local government, state, traditional political domain). A ‘non-indigene’ is anyone resident outside his or her area of patrilocal ancestry. Non-indigenes are further sub-divided into ‘strangers’ and ‘settlers’. ‘Settlers’ are non-indigenes who have lived in an area for a long period of time (for example, five years or more). ‘Strangers’ are those with shorter periods of residence in a place outside their ‘homeland’ (i.e. place of patrilocal ancestry, usually defined by state boundaries).

2. The phrase is Osaghae's (1998).

3. The Third Republic was prematurely aborted in 1993 (Diamond et al., 1997).

4. Major bilateral and multilateral donors have opposed recent rounds of state creation, citing the administrative wastefulness of the process. As new states are created, fresh outlays on construction and other administrative costs are required. State creation has also worked against donors' efforts to reduce the size of Nigeria's bloated civil service (Nigerian Tribune, 30 May 2002, p. 10; Democracy in Nigeria, 2000).

5. For a fuller discussion of Nigeria's economic decline during the 1980s and 1990s, see Lewis (1996) and Osaghae (1998).

6. To be clear, ‘statism’ here does not refer to the proclivity of government to intervene in the private sector.

7. ‘Dual citizenship’ refers to the co-holding of national and state citizenship within Nigeria. All Nigerians are national citizens and all Nigerians are citizens of one and only one of Nigeria's 36 states.