This book revisits one of the oldest subjects in the analysis of African politics: ethnicity and the magnitude of its damage to political cohesion and nation-building. As long as countries such as Nigeria remain politically unstable, analysts will continue to dwell on this practical issue and seek solutions to it. The rationale for returning to the problem of ethnicity in E. C. Ejiogu's work is the application of Harry Eckstein and Ted Gurr's thesis on the classification of regimes and states, known as the ‘congruence-consonance’ model, to account for instability in Nigeria.

As Ejiogu sets out the ‘internal variations’ in Nigerian society, we are drawn less to the value of the thesis than to the explanatory value of history. The past, retold here in various chapters, is well known, and it constitutes what Ejiogu regards as the roots of the contemporary problem. Long-established groups such as the Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa-Fulani – the three examples that he uses in Chapters Four, Five, and Six – rely on ‘authority patterns’ that worked for them in the past but are difficult to reconcile with modern politics. He focuses on their peculiarities, shaped as they are by environment, history, and politics. He recounts the familiar story of governance and strategies of domination during the colonial period in Chapters Seven, Eight, and Nine. The military coups of the 1960s (Chapter Ten) added more complications to an already volatile political space. The conclusion, repeating various parts in the preceding chapters, underscores the evidence of instability, while the post-script presents examples from other African countries to argue that the Nigerian experience is not peculiar.

The core argument of the book is that instability is chronic. As he presents cases of poor governmental performance, Ejiogu links his data back to a predictable outcome: political instability. The reasons he provides are the complexities of the nationalities that make up the modern state; colonial rule and its legacies; poverty and underdevelopment; and religious diversity. Each of these, he explains, puts pressure on political actors to act in ways that destroy the overall system. His catalogue of the factors that induce instability is correct.

However, the arguments need to be further complicated. First, direct correlations are usually difficult to establish, as in the connection between plurality and instability. Most nations are plural, by the very nature of creating modern, heterogeneous nation-states. Second, outcome and symptoms are not always easy to delineate. Thus, while the book sees such variables as ethnicity and their associated older authority patterns as causing instability, so too could they be seen to be the symptoms of instability itself. To be clearer, ethnicity can trigger instability, but instability can also trigger and complicate ethnic politics. Third, leadership is a key factor in the African case. Only in rare cases, as in that of Julius Nyerere of Tanzania and Nelson Mandela of South Africa, do we have leaders who rise above ethnic and religious identities. Analysis must equally dwell on why it is difficult for good leaders to emerge and, when they do, why they are ineffective. Finally, the motivation for seeking and using power is less to manage resources than to steal public money. Corruption damages politics at all levels, and it too creates instability. It is imaginable that if accountability were part of the ongoing democratic process, the number of those seeking wealth through politics would decline. In the case of Nigeria, which is the focus of this book, not only is the scale of corruption staggering, theft by office holders is so commonplace that they do so without shame or apology when caught.

There are mistakes that need to be corrected in any subsequent edition. The maps that open this book are poorly done, disregarding proportion and scale. As the maps are borrowed from older literature, they reproduce some discarded names and spellings such as ‘savana negro’, ‘Jekri’ for Itsekiri, and ‘Sobo’ for Urhobo. The Niger Basin is also used interchangeably with Nigeria, creating some confusion. While it is true that the sources of political instability have been much debated, we have yet to exhaust the topic. Reminders of its root causes are necessary, if only to warn us that, without dealing with this problem, it is harder to deal with a much bigger one: underdevelopment.