In Nigeria, regionalism is often seen as something working against national integration, and the word ‘regionalism’ has tended to be used in a negative term to denote divisive tendancies. And this is very different from the situation in Japan where political and economic centralisation is so strong that the study of ‘regionalism’ have received considerable attention in recent years.
The origin of regionalism in Nigeria dated back to the history of the establishment of the country as a political unit. In this paper, the author traced the history of the demarcation of Nigeria's international boundaries.
The emergence of Nigeria as a political unit occurred in two stages. The first stage featured the establisment of the British trading posts and later protectorates along the sea coast and the River Niger. The second stage was the demarcation of boundaries between Nigeria and the neighbouring countries.
During the first stage, Britain succeeded in securing economic and political interest in the Niger delta district, partly because she had established relatively strong trade relations with the people of the district, and partly because the Royal Niger Company had made treaties of protection with the people.
The second stage occurred when the land boundaries were decided upon during the partition of Africa at Berlin in 1885. And in this scramble for territory, the emphasis was on effective occupation.
In both stages, the question of consulting the local people never arose, and in mamy cases, the international boundaries split some ethnic groups into two different countries, or it forced peoples of different languages, different religions, and different outlook to life to amalgamate into one country. The problem of regionalism in Nigeria dates back to this forced amalgamation. However, Nigeria aims at destroying tribal based regionalism in several ways. One of which is the creation of more states.
