Historicizing Nigeria's Crisis of Existential Legitimacy

Abstract

This article undertakes a historical exploration of Nigeria's familiar failure to evolve a national spirit that commands the allegiance of its disparate, multiple ethno-national constituencies. Critically reading Benedict Anderson’s “Imagined Communities” thesis, it demonstrates how Nigerian anti-colonial nationalism failed to forge a sense of national cohesion, saddling a postcolonial Nigerian state with an existential crisis that continues to undermine the country to produce crisis, mediocrity, corruption, and separatist agitations. It argues that while anti-colonial nationalist activities started and progressed through the networks created by colonialism, these activities, when narrowed down and assessed on the basis of their concern with creating a sense of a single Nigerian nationality, fail to measure up to the theory of elaborated in Imagined Communities. Finally, the article offers a polemical reflection on how Nigeria can forge a new national consciousness founded on renegotiation and “the logic of functional legitimacy.”