Ethnicity, Political Leadership and National Development in Nigeria: The Contradictions and the Local Government Nexus

This study fundamentally highlights that ethnicity (as a non-pejorative concept) has indeed once contributed remarkably to the leadership highpoints of Nigeria. The current national position however is that ethnicity has been generally sidelined in the open leadership configurations of the country but without definitive positive replacements. Ethnicity (by populist consent) has thus become immensely abhorrent in the national developmental thoughts of the Nigerian nation. Consequently, the paradoxes that mark ethnicity and the Nigerian leadership narrative are greatly deep-rooted and intriguing. Development, which ethnicity was claimed to have stunted, nonetheless currently remains highly elusive. National developmental strides have in this regard also, continued to gravely border on national experimentation. The study adopts logical argumentation as its methodology and the elite theory as theoretical framework to postulate that the country’s political class should see as its most critical function, the creation of an enabling template for the emergence of a truly, ethnically myopic leadership that would eliminate the current contradictions and urgently engender the requisite and self-evident form of national development. The foundation of this new focus the paper concludes should be the local government environment.