THE ORIGIN AND DEVELOPMENT OF ETHNIC POLITICS AND ITS IMPACTS ON POST COLONIAL GOVERNANCE IN NIGERIA

Nigeria party politic has been polluted by ethnic chauvinism. This problem is one of the major qualms confronting the progress of liberal democracy in Nigeria since 1960, to the extent that ethnic sentiment has gradually crept in to find a place in every faced of Nigerian political activity. Ethnic sentiment has been one of the factors responsible for most of the inefficiencies and low productivity in Nigeria. The major focus of this paper is to trace the historical origin, growth and development of ethnicity and the effects it has had on post-colonial governance in Nigeria. In the findings of this paper, it was discovered that ethnic sentiment was deliberately introduced and propagated in the polity by the British colonial government to realize colonial and imperialist economic and political objectives. It was also found that since the end of colonialism in 1960, Nigeria has carried forward the spirit of ethnicity into the post-colonial Nigeria, this vice has been discovered to have been responsible for most of the political, administrative, economic, social and cultural maladies in Nigeria. The data that was used to support this argument was got from the secondary method of data acquisition. At the concluding remark, it is suggested that, indigene-settle phenomenon should be strong discouraged while the Federal Character principles be genuinely implemented at the federal, state and local government levels in other to remove the age long ethnic unrest in the governance of Nigeria