FEDERAL CHARACTER LAW AND THE ALLEGORY OF CONTRADICTIONS
Keywords:
Constitution, Power Sharing, Federal Character Principle, Representative BureaucracyAbstract
Behind the deepening divisive ethnic relations spread across Nigeria are cries
against majority ethnic led government inequities, exclusion and suppression of minorities.
The enormous cost of those clashes in terms of lives, properties and revenues losses that the
Nigerian state continues to bear are enormous. The fine-tuning of the Nigeria 1979
Constitution and its modification in 1999 was to warrant the adoption of the power sharing
with the intent of always producing representative bureaucracy and government that
incorporate all ethnic groups. This effort was believed will eliminate inequities, suppression
and imposition that had in the past caused ill will. This paper seeks to answer this question:
has the post-1999 Constitutional power-sharing scheme achieved its objective? The objective
of this paper therefore is to interrogate the practice of the power-sharing scheme to determine
whether it is serving its purpose or if it is an epitome of contradictions. This paper used the
descriptive research method to answer the above stated question in order to realize this
paper’s declared objective. Going through the analysis it is evident that while the FCP law
have attained some level of ethnic inclusion in some of the MDAs, however, it has fallen
short of establishing a representative bureaucracy and inclusive government the law was
meant to engender given some of the contradictions discussed in the paper.
