The patterns of political career movements of Nigerian cabinet ministers, 1999–2017

ABSTRACT

This article examines the patterns of political career movements in the Nigerian federal system using the sample of federal cabinet ministers from 1999 to 2017. The result shows that most Nigerian ministers are politically inexperienced, with a large proportion of party-affiliated technocrats among them. For politically experienced ministers, the dominant pattern of career movements is a unidirectional one leading from the state to the federal level, while any movement back is rare. We argue that, among other things, this pattern is an outcome of the federal character principle stated in the Nigerian constitution, according to which the cabinet has to include a minister from each of the current 36 states. This requirement leads to disruption of political careers and hinders politicians from moving across territorial levels.

KEYWORDS:

• Political career movement
• federal system
• cabinet ministers
• Nigeria
• Africa
• ethnic power-sharing

Acknowledgments

Elena Semenova thanks Dr. Leila Demarest for the generous sharing of her knowledge of Nigerian politics at the stage of article planning and her comments and suggestions at the stage of data collection and analysis.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In Africa, the systems of the Comoros, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, and Nigeria have federal/regionalized features.

2 Researchers disagree about the classification of the Nigerian political regime. For instance, the Regimes of the world measure used in the Variety of Democracies Project (v-dem 2023) defined the Nigerian political regime as an electoral autocracy from 1999 until 2012 and from 2020 until now. The period from 2012 until 2020 was defined as electoral democracy. Other researchers define the current Nigerian system as authoritarian, albeit with competitive features (e.g., Suberu 2023, 244).

3 Scholars on West European multilevel systems also highlight the effect of Europeanization on the development of career movement patterns (e.g., Edinger and Jahr 2015). As this factor does not apply to our case, we did not discuss this literature here.

4 See Section 192(3) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.

5 See Section 68(1) (a, d, & e) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.

6 See Sections 66 (1) (f), 107 (1) (f), 137 (1) (g), and 182 (1) (g) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.

7 See Section 134 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999.

8 See Section 179 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999.

9 See Sections 14(3&4), 147(3), 171(5), and 192(2) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999.

10 See Sections 147(3) of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999.

11 The data set includes the ministers being in the office during each monthly observation point. In other words, any ministers who might be in the office between two observation points were not included in the dataset (Raleigh and Wigmore-Shepherd 2022).

12 He was released of his position because of corruption allegations after a year in this position.

13 For instance, the current President Bola Tinubu intends to increase the number of federal ministers to 48 (compared to 33 ministers appointed by President Jonathan in 2011) and 560 commissioners in 27 federal states (Olatunji et al. 2023).