Federalism, centrism, and the crisis of the Nigerian academy

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on the crisis of the academy in Nigerian federalism. It begins by departing from the literature that conceptualizes the crisis of African universities in terms of state incorporation of the academy. The article draws attention to the necessity of differentiating federal polities from unitary systems and presents federations as being distinct for their assignment of university education competence to make for jurisdictional pluralism. Drawing on the fiscal and comparative federalism literatures, it traces the crisis of the academy partly to federal erasure of jurisdictional authority of the states, and partly to a fiscal regime of distributive revenue pool and the associated lack of consequences for opportunistic behaviour. It shows that the erasure of jurisdictional pluralism exposes the entire university system to adverse developments at the centre. It also shows that opportunistic behaviour weakens public institutions and undermines the capacity of the universities to deliver services.

KEYWORDS:

• Federalism
• university education
• jurisdictional pluralism
• centralized revenue pool
• opportunistic behaviour

Acknowledgement

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the International Political Science Association Research Committee 28 panel on Traditional and Emerging Federations, during the 27th World Congress of Political Science, Buenos Aires, July 15–19, 2023, and at the 39th Annual Conference of the Association of Global South Studies, Halifax, October 9–11, 2022. I thank the discussants and members of the audience for their critical comments. I also thank this journal’s anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions for improvement on an earlier version of the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).