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Africa’s ethnic politics: demands for new administrative areas

About twenty-five years ago, politics changed in Africa. For years, rulers had manipulated the economy by doing things like creating artificial shortages and restricting import licenses. These tactics were useful to rulers, because they could dole out prized business licenses to reward supporters and consolidate power. But around 1990, many rulers were forced to relinquish these tools. Their economies were crumbling, and they found themselves under the thumb of the International Monetary Fund, which made them stop such bald economic manipulations.

Rulers faced a puzzle: they had to come up with new ways to cultivate support. Some rulers began politicizing land and property rights in new ways, to reward certain groups and punish others. Other rulers began carving up their country’s internal administrative boundaries. New districts were a way to give supporters some administrative autonomy and create opportunities for patronage and graft at the local level. About half of African countries have increased their administrative units by at least 20% since 1990.

Once rulers started splitting subnational districts, people took the cue and began clamoring for their own administrative unit. Lots of these movements had an ethnic dimension, as people brought communal and apparently deep-seated pressures onto governments. There’s a pretty straightforward interpretation of what was going on: once people realized they might get an administrative unit that coincided with their group’s boundaries, they pressed hard for it. People naturally wanted to be part of an ethnically homogenous district.

There was an explosion of this kind of demand in Nigeria in the early 1990s. A seemingly endless number of ethnic minority groups agitated for their own “state,” as they’re known in Nigeria. And yet some leaders found a listless reaction among their ethnic brethren when they launched campaigns for new states. A group that pushed for the Bayelsa state, in the Niger Delta region, had trouble getting even five people to show up at meetings. Advocates for a new Ekiti state, a few hours northeast of Lagos, also found people skeptical.

Campaign leaders didn’t simply harness evident ethnic identities. Through their marketing campaigns, they changed ethnic boundaries.

So these leaders cranked up the public relations machine. They appealed to traditional chiefs for backing. Advocates draped their movements in existing cultural symbols, to help their cause resonate with people. They held carnivals. One campaign composed an anthem to galvanize people. Some activists even held hunger strikes. The movements coalesced.

In these ways, campaign leaders didn’t simply harness evident ethnic identities. Through their marketing campaigns, they changed ethnic boundaries. They got people to deemphasize some of their attachments and gravitate toward a particular ethnic identity. In the Bayelsa and Ekiti states movements, leaders grossly overstated how palpable and significant their associated ethnic identities had been historically. People didn’t seem to mind. But if these movements weren’t really communal groundswells, what were they?

The movements were mostly about would-be government elites trying to obtain patronage resources, which would give them power and opportunities to line their pockets. They found new state campaigns to be useful for building a coalition of supporters. Campaign leaders used ethnic appeals because Nigerian politics (and politics in many African countries) rewards ethnic-based grievances. Thus movements for administrative units were ethnically defined, but not simply due to deep-seated communal marginalization. Rather, political entrepreneurs were conforming to a political opportunity structure that encourages ethnic pleas.

This distinction is important. People often regard Africa’s ethnic politics as something that occurs among evident, stable, cohesive, and “natural” communities, which have long histories of affinity and association. There’s no denying that ethnicity is palpable in African politics, and that ethnic groups have been a key form of social organization historically. But, on the one hand, colonial powers imposed an artificial degree of fixity on ethnic identities. And, on the other hand, ethnic identities are fluid and regularly reconfigured. The story of ethnic movements for new administrative units isn’t so much about cultural marginalization as it is about how political entrepreneurs build coalitions in Africa.

Featured image credit: House of Representatives of Nigeria by Shiraz Chakera. CC-BY-SA-2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

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