Africa Is Already Ethnopublic in Form—It Must Now Become Ethnopublic in Governance
Sahelian Co-Governance, Nigeria’s Structural Impasse, and the Case for a Continent-Wide Test-Drive of Ethnopublicanism
BY: OMOLAJA MAKINEE
Africa’s central political crisis is not ethnic diversity. It is the mismatch between ethnopublic reality and colonial governance form. Across the continent, African societies are organically plural—ethnically, culturally, linguistically, and historically interwoven—yet they continue to be governed through bureaucratic, centralised, winner-takes-all State architectures inherited from colonial administration. The result is predictable and persistent: ethnic rivalry, political instability, economic fragmentation, and a perpetual struggle over State capture.
What Africa requires is not the invention of a new social order, but the formalisation of the one that already exists. Africa is ethnopublic in appearance; it must now become ethnopublic in governance.
Ethnopublicanism does not dissolve ethnic identity, nor does it elevate one ethnic group over another. Instead, it institutionalises interdependence, embedding equality of authority across ethnic groups through commicratic commissioning-rules and populocratic legitimacy. Nowhere is this contrast clearer than in the comparison between the Sahelian States and Nigeria.
1. The Sahel: Ethnopublican Governance in Practice, Despite Colonial Borders
The Sahelian region—stretching across Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, and beyond—offers one of the clearest contemporary archetypes of ethnopublican logic in action, even under severe material constraints and ongoing colonial disruption. These States are not ethnically homogenous. On the contrary, they are mosaics of Tuareg, Fulani, Songhai, Hausa, Kanuri, and numerous other peoples—many of whom were artificially split across multiple colonial jurisdictions.
Yet despite these imposed borders, Sahelian societies retain a commicratic instinct of co-governance. Authority is negotiated horizontally. Leadership legitimacy flows from collective consent, moral authority, and communal responsibility, not from bureaucratic abstraction. Military juntas aside, the deeper social structure remains ethnopublic: no single ethnic group claims civilisational supremacy over others; governance is understood as shared custodianship of survival.
What the Sahel demonstrates is critical:
Ethnopublicanism does not require ethnic purity, nor does it require the erasure of difference. It requires structured equality of authority.
The Sahel States are already ethnopublic in purpose. Their challenge is not ethnic integration—it is the absence of a formal constitutional framework that elevates this reality into institutional permanence. Installing StateLords as ethnic-neutral judicial custodians representing each major civilisational bloc would stabilise governance, reduce internal contestation, and formalise the commicratic logic already in operation.
2. Nigeria: Ethnopublic in Demography, Bureaucratic in Governance
Nigeria presents the opposite case: ethnopublic in appearance, republic in structure.
The Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo peoples coexist within one of Africa’s largest States, yet their political interaction is governed through a colonial-bureaucratic apparatus that centralises power and transforms diversity into competition. Federalism, rotation, zoning, and power-sharing have been attempted, but these mechanisms remain bureaucratic patches, not structural solutions.
In Nigeria, ethnicity becomes politicised precisely because the State is unitary in authority but plural in composition. The presidency becomes a prize. Federal power becomes a zero-sum contest. Representation becomes symbolic rather than reciprocal. The result is chronic mistrust, elite capture, and perpetual instability.
What Nigeria requires is structurally simple yet transformational:
- Install Statelords from each of the three major civilisational blocs—Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo—not as ethnic champions, but as judicial custodians of balance.
- Reconstitute the State into the four ethnopublican arms of government:
- Statelords (Judicial–Supervisory Arm).
- Secretariat (Executive Arm).
- Economy-Arm (Labour, production, and trade).
- Citizenry-Arm (Populocratic law-making and social regulation).
- Bind all arms through commissioning-rules, ensuring equality of authority, reciprocal accountability, and non-hierarchical governance.
Under an ethnopublican arrangement, the persistent Biafra conflict dissolves not through suppression, concession, or endless negotiation, but through structural equality of authority. By instituting a Statelord for each of Nigeria’s three major ethnic blocs—Igbo, Yoruba, and Hausa–Fulani—governance ceases to be a zero-sum ethnic contest. No group is compelled to rally behind a presidential candidate merely because that candidate shares its ethnic identity, since ethnic representation is constitutionally guaranteed at the highest supervisory level of the State.
The Secretary-of-Head-State becomes an administrative coordinator rather than an ethnic prize, while each Statelord is empowered to realise the development priorities, cultural protections, and collective will of their own ethnopublic equally and without subordination. In this structure, Igbo aspirations no longer require secession to be heard, Yoruba interests no longer require political dominance to be secured, and Hausa–Fulani authority no longer depends on numerical leverage. What emerges is a win-win civilisational settlement: unity without assimilation, sovereignty without separation, and cooperation without ethnic anxiety.
For the first time since post-colonial statehood, Nigeria would experience genuine national cohesion—not imposed from above, but organically restored by correcting the structural fragmentation imported from abroad.
Such a transition would convert Nigeria’s ethnic plurality from a political liability into a civilisational advantage. Overnight, Nigeria would move from managing division to orchestrating interdependence—reclaiming not only the title of “Giant of Africa,” but becoming a stabilising ethnopublic anchor capable of rivalling and coordinating with the Sahelian bloc.
3. Colonial Borders and the Ethnic Fragmentation of Africa
Nigeria and the Sahel are not anomalies. They are archetypes of a continental condition.
Across Africa, colonial borders fractured ethnic nations into multiple artificial States:
- The Ewe divided between Ghana and Togo.
- The Yoruba across Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Sierra Leone.
- The Somali divided across Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Djibouti.
- The Bakongo split among Angola, Congo, and the DRC.
- The Hausa across Nigeria, Niger, and Ghana.
- The Maasai across Kenya and Tanzania.
- The Tuareg across Mali, Niger, Algeria, and Libya.
These divisions did not eliminate ethnopublic reality. They merely displaced it beneath bureaucratic nationalism. Africans continue to live ethnopublicly, trade ethnopublicly, intermarry ethnopublicly, and organise socially ethnopublicly—while being governed bureaucratically under republic nationality.
This contradiction is the root of Africa’s political dysfunction.
4. Why Africa Must Test-Drive Ethnopublicanism
Ethnopublicanism does not necessarily require redrawing borders or dissolving States. It requires re-engineering governance logic to match social reality.
Every African State already qualifies for ethnopublican governance because:
- They are ethnically plural.
- They rely on interdependent economies.
- They possess communal moral traditions.
- They function socially through horizontal legitimacy.
To test-drive ethnopublicanism, African States must:
- Recognise ethnic groups as civilisational stakeholders, not political rivals.
- Install Statelords to represent moral-judicial balance, not executive power.
- Shift from bureaucratic desk-rule to commicratic commissioning-rule.
- Embed populocratic participation where citizens co-author law, not merely obey it.
This transition does not weaken the State. It stabilises it with afrocentric personality. It does not encourage secession. It neutralises it by removing the incentive for domination.
5. Why Africa Can Never Be a Republic — and Why That Is Not a Failure but a Civilisational Truth
It must be stated plainly, without euphemism or diplomatic evasion: no African nation can ever be a republic in the Western sense, and every attempt to force republican statehood onto African soil has produced instability, fragmentation, and perpetual crisis. This is not because Africa contains multiple ethnic groups—on the contrary, plurality itself is not the problem. The United Kingdom stands as a clear counterexample: Welsh, Scottish, Irish, and English peoples coexist under a unified State without existential collapse, and similar plural republican arrangements exist elsewhere in the world.
The African problem lies elsewhere and far deeper.
Africa is not a continent of assembled ethnic minorities learning to live together under a new political experiment. Africa is a continent of ancient, fully developed ethno-governed civilisations, each of which possessed its own systems of law, economy, spirituality, diplomacy, and inter-ethnic coordination long before colonial interruption. These ethnic systems were not primitive, nor were they isolated. They were already ethnopublican in orientation—governing themselves internally while maintaining reciprocal, interdependent relations with neighbouring peoples.
Colonialism shattered this reality not by introducing diversity, but by fragmenting continuity. Ethnic civilisations that had governed themselves for centuries were arbitrarily partitioned into republican statehoods designed for entirely different historical conditions. The republican model presumes a population that has not yet crystallised into self-contained civilisational units—as though African ethno-governance were a population still forming a national identity around abstract citizenship. Africa does not fit this premise. Its peoples did not need to be invented into nations; they already were nations.
Thus, Africa’s persistent crisis is not ethnic plurality—it is ethnic dismemberment. It is the forced enclosure of complete ethno-governed societies into republican containers that neither recognise their authority nor reflect their interdependent reality. The result is a permanent structural contradiction: Africa is ethnopublic in appearance but republican in structure, communal in social life but bureaucratic in governance, horizontal in culture but vertical in law.
In that fragmented state of affairs, no matter how meticulously African States imitate Western republican forms—constitutions, parliaments, elections, courts—the outcome remains the same. The system cannot stabilise because it is alien to the material and civilisational conditions it is imposed upon. Republicanism in Africa does not fail due to corruption alone; it fails because it misdiagnoses the nature of African society.
Africa does not need to become republican in appearance—that can never be achieved under the current colonial partitions. What Africa requires is far more fundamental: a return to ethnopublican governance in structure and practice. This does not mean reversing history or dissolving modern States. It means reviving the ancestral logic of governance that already understood plurality as strength, authority as reciprocal, and power as shared custodianship rather than domination.
This manifesto therefore does not propose reforming African republics. It proposes transcending them. It asserts that Africa’s future stability, prosperity, and unity depend not on perfecting borrowed republican models, but on reconstituting governance around the ethnopublic reality that never disappeared.
Fragmentation is Africa’s wound; ethnopublican governance is its cure.
Conclusion: Africa’s Governance Future Is Not Western—It Is Indigenous and Ethnopublic
Africa does not need to imitate Western republics, nor does it need to revive ancient kingdoms in symbolic form. It needs to formalise its own civilisational logic.
The Sahel shows us what ethnopublic governance looks like in practice, if completed in formal structure. Nigeria shows us the cost of ignoring it. Across the continent, Africa’s ethnic plurality is not the problem—it is the solution waiting for constitutional recognition.
Ethnopublicanism offers Africa its most realistic path forward: a governance system rooted in unity without uniformity, authority without hierarchy, and power without domination.
Africa is already ethnopublic. Now it must govern like it.
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