Patronage politics and state creation in Nigeria

Abstract

Nigerians have been engaged in continuous debates and agitations for the creation of new states. Advocates contend that such an initiative has the potential to enhance governance and foster development at the sub-national level. Even when the state creation exercise appears to have failed to address the underlying issues of national and subnational challenges, the agitations remains endless. This paper therefore explores the political elites' rationale for state creation in Nigeria. The paper advanced neopatrimonialism as a theoretical lens to navigate the nature of Nigerian states that make them vulnerable to being used as prebends by the political elites in Nigeria. The paper theorized the existence of formal, codified rules or routine design but the state actors deviate from the general codified laws to personal and informal practices as an instrument of state reengineering. The paper utilized narrative review as a methodological approach to draw data from arrays of extensive secondary datasets. The paper established a very strong positive relationship between state creation and patronage politics in Nigeria because the neo-patrimonial state orients the political elites to see public offices or created states as prebends to be appropriated for private gains. The paper, therefore, recommends that the government should not embark on the creation of states except where it’s extremely vital for socio-cultural or regional balancing.