Evaluation of Hegemonic Struggle and Violent Extremism in Nigerian Politics: Analysis of Selected Cases

Nigeria state has since independence been confronted by one form of political crisis to the other, which analysts and scholars attributed to the absence of rule of law, governance failure, corruption, class conflict, and unhealthy competitive interest within the ruling class. No necessary attention has been given to factors such as separate ethnic identities, and regional primordial tendencies to contest for and capture state power and use the power to promote their interest over that of others, which may have enthroned a pattern of conflict and sustained crisis in the polity. It is against this backdrop that this paper examines the factor of accommodating divergent interests, perceived hegemony, and violent tendency in Nigerian politics. The paper examined Nigeria's political records in newspapers, journals, textbooks, monographs, and transcripts from offline and online sources to establish that recurrent violent political extremism in Nigeria is a consequence of the perceived hegemony of one group over the others. Further findings showed that the colonial tendency of fractionalization of the elites through regionalization of politics in turn reinforced ethnicity/regionalism; and these sentiments often arose in elections, authoritative resource distributions, and appointments to privileged positions. Also, the colonial legacy ended up producing a weakly United State. The paper, therefore, joined the call for a balanced federation governed by rule of law and for national dialogue where all genuine geopolitical concerns could be addressed.