Ilú ni bàbá omo
The community is the father of the child.
~ Yoruba Proverb
The Government That Is Not on the Map
There is a government operating in Nigeria that does not appear in the Federal Official Gazette. It has no budget line in the Appropriations Act, no minister sworn in before the President or commissioner taking an oath of allegiance before the Governor. It does not hold press conferences, and its decisions are never appealed to the Court of Appeal. Yet for the majority of Nigerians, the farmer in Benue adjudicating a boundary dispute before the village head, the market woman in Ibadan whose trade association sets the opening prices, the young man in Kano whose quarrel with a neighbour is resolved at the mosque before it becomes a police matter, this is the government that actually governs. It is older than Nigeria. In many quarters, it is more legitimate than the institutions that claim sovereignty over it.
Nigeria is not an ungoverned space. It is a multiple-governed one, in which the institutions with the deepest roots and the most reliable daily performance are the ones that receive no constitutional recognition, no budget allocation, and no serious engagement from the political class. The problem of Nigerian governance is the mismatch between where governance claims to reside and where it actually operates.
Across six decades of independent statehood, successive governments have designed their programmes as though Nigerian society were an administrative tabula rasa with a population waiting to receive the state’s interventions, possessing no prior governance architecture of its own. Agricultural extension programmes ignore the community elder who actually allocates land use. Land titling schemes collide with custodial inheritance systems that predate the British survey. Public health campaigns bypass the religious and cultural intermediaries through whom information actually travels. In each case, the formal policy met an informal reality it had not anticipated and lost.
Informal Order
To understand informal governance in Nigeria is first to understand that it was not always informal. The institutions now characterised as traditional or customary were, for centuries before colonialism, the formal governance architecture of the societies they ordered. The Oyo Empire administered its territories through a sophisticated constitutional arrangement involving the Alaafin, the Oyo Mesi council, and the Ogboni society. Each of them, checking the authority of the others in ways that Montesquieu would have recognised. The Sokoto Caliphate governed through a layered Islamic jurisprudence as textually grounded and institutionally articulated as any European legal system of its era. The council systems of the Igbo, the Efik merchant courts at Calabar, the Itsekiri trading governance structures too. They were governance systems of a high order.
What colonialism accomplished was the delegitimation of these systems as systems. The policy of indirect rule preserved the external forms of indigenous authority while subordinating their content to colonial administrative purposes. The Warrant Chief imposed on Igbo communities that had no chiefly tradition, the Emirate courts permitted to operate so long as they served colonial revenue extraction, the customary law codified and fossilised by British judges who did not understand it. They were acts of transformation that produced something new, a governance order in which the formal colonial text was written over an indigenous text it could not fully erase.
At independence, the post-colonial Nigerian state inherited this new system and deepened its contradictions. The constitutional order of 1960, 1963, 1979, and 1999 consistently vested sovereign authority in formal institutions modelled on Westminster and Washington while the daily business of social order, dispute resolution, resource allocation, and community solidarity continued to be conducted through institutions those constitutions did not recognise. The Local Government Reform of 1976 weakened the one tier of formal government that had maintained some organic relationship with community structures, replacing locally embedded authority with a uniform administrative template that was simultaneously too remote and too underfunded to perform the functions it had displaced.
The result is a governance landscape of extraordinary complexity. Formal state institutions claim comprehensive authority. Informal institutions exercise comprehensive practice. And Nigerian citizens navigate a daily negotiation whose rules were never written and whose outcomes are never predictable.
What Informal Governance Actually Does
The term informal governance tends to evoke a deficit. Something like the absence of formal rules, the substitution of relationship for procedure. This perspective is intellectually dishonest when applied to Nigeria’s indigenous institutions. What the village council, the market association, the community development committee, and the age-grade society actually do systematically, consistently, and with a legitimacy most formal state institutions cannot approach, is the full range of governance functions: rule-making, dispute resolution, resource allocation, social insurance, and the maintenance of collective identity.
Consider dispute resolution. In communities across Yorubaland, the Oba’s palace remains the first and often final recourse for land disputes, marital conflicts, and commercial disagreements because the Oba’s judgment is socially enforceable in ways that court orders frequently are not. A magistrate’s ruling requires a bailiff, a court order, and the willingness of the state’s enforcement apparatus to act. A judgment delivered by the baale of the community in which both parties live is enforced by the social fabric itself. By the knowledge that non-compliance will cost the losing party their standing in the markets, ceremonies, and mutual aid networks through which daily life is conducted. While this might sound primitive, it is an efficient system.
Or consider the esusu and ajo system. The rotating credit associations that provide financial services to millions of Nigerians who remain unbanked. These are precisely organised, with clear rules of contribution, transparent rotation schedules, and social sanction mechanisms for default whose enforcement costs are negligible because the enforcement mechanism is the same social network that provides the credit. The Central Bank’s financial inclusion initiatives have spent years trying to extend credit to Nigeria’s informal economy. The ajo system has been doing it, at scale, for centuries and at lower transaction costs, with higher repayment rates, and with no government subsidy.
The same pattern appears in food security. In farming communities in Benue and Plateau States, it is the community grain council that determines the timing of planting, the distribution of seed varieties, the allocation of communal labour, and the storage arrangements that carry communities through the hunger season. These functions are performed with a sophistication born of generations of accumulated knowledge about local soil conditions, rainfall patterns, pest cycles, and social vulnerability. No government extension programme currently operating in Nigeria replicates this institutional knowledge. Most do not know it exists.
Why the State Refuses to See
The persistence of this blindness is political. Recognising the authority of informal institutions creates a problem for the political class as it introduces competitors. A governor who accepts that the Alaafin of Oyo performs functions the state cannot replicate must also accept that the Alaafin is a political actor whose cooperation must be sought. It is easier to treat these figures as cultural ornaments, to drape them in protocol at state ceremonies and ignore their institutional authority in the actual work of governance.
There is also a rent dimension to this invisibility. The gap between formal governance and informal reality creates the discretionary space in which patronage networks operate. A land administration system that officially vests all urban land in the state but practically defers to a web of informal claims and traditional authority creates the conditions under which governors and their intermediaries can extract rents from those seeking to navigate the gap. Formalising informal arrangements like recognising customary land rights, integrating traditional authority into policy delivery would collapse the ambiguity from which those rents are drawn. This is not an abstract concern. In every Nigerian state, the most politically sensitive governance questions are precisely those where the gap between formal authority and informal reality is most commercially exploitable.
The intellectual framework of Nigeria’s policy elite has compounded both problems. Development economics, as taught in Nigerian universities and reinforced by the World Bank programmes that have shaped the country’s policy architecture, has historically treated formalisation as progress and informality as deficit. When the language of formalisation is deployed without attention to power, it tends to formalise the claims of those with political access at the expense of those whose claims rest only on community recognition. The informal institution is replaced by a formal structure that serves different interests.
The consequence is a perverse equilibrium. The state lacks the capacity to govern through its formal institutions. The informal institutions that could fill this gap are excluded from formal recognition. The exclusion creates conditions for rent extraction, which gives political actors an interest in maintaining the gap. And citizens, caught between an ineffective formal state and an effective but unrecognised informal order, develop the rational civic disengagement that makes reform still harder.
The Case for Integration
The argument here is not that Nigeria should abandon the project of functional formal institutions. It is that the project will fail, as it has repeatedly failed, if it proceeds on the assumption that formal institutions can be built from scratch on top of a society that is already governed, and governed, in its own way, effectively.
Legitimacy is not built through constitutional amendments or electoral cycles. It is done through the daily experience of governance. Whether the seed arrives when promised, whether the dispute was resolved fairly, whether the road connects the farm to the market before the harvest rots. The institutions that most reliably deliver these daily experiences in Nigeria are not the formal state institutions. A governance philosophy adequate to Nigeria’s actual condition must begin from a different premise than those that have guided policy since 1960. It is not how do we replace informal institutions with formal ones, but how do we build a governance architecture that honours both, integrates where integration is possible, and clearly assigns authority where it is not.
The examples exist for those willing to look. Rwanda’s formal integration of gacaca community courts into its post-genocide justice process produced a processed caseload in the millions. These are outcomes no purely formal system could have approached. In Nigeria’s own history, mobile money accelerated across rural communities when fintech companies began partnering with market associations and community leaders who supplied the social trust infrastructure that formal banking could not independently generate. The most effective COVID-19 interventions in 2020 were those conducted through religious and community networks, not through the formal local government apparatus. The same pattern in every case. Formal interventions succeed when they align with informal authority structures, and fail when they compete with them. In practical terms, this means constitutional recognition for traditional dispute resolution; agricultural policy co-designed with community governance structures rather than delivered over them; land reform grounded in serious engagement with the customary tenure systems that actually regulate land use. We must understand what exists before assuming that formal titling can replace it.
The Nigeria That Is Already Governing Itself
The sentence Nigerian governance reformers have not been willing to say publicly, though its implications are everywhere in the evidence, is that the country they have been trying to build already has its foundation.
If the problem is a mismatch between where the state claims authority and where governance actually operates, then the solution is not, primarily, to build more state capacity. It is to align the state’s architecture with the governance reality it inhabits. A commissioner for agriculture who designs programmes in genuine partnership with community grain councils exercises a different kind of power from one who issues directives from the State Capital. The programmes he designs will work better. But the power he exercises will feel, to those accustomed to the old arrangement, like less. This is ultimately a question of what kind of state Nigeria wants to be.
In the Yoruba political tradition, there is an understanding embedded in the proverb with which this essay opened, ilú ni bàbá omo loosely translated as the community is the father of the child. Authority does not originate in the state and radiate outward. It originates in communities and is delegated, conditionally, to whatever institutions (formal or informal, ancient or modern) demonstrate the capacity and the commitment to serve collective life. The Alaafin governed Oyo not because he claimed sovereignty but because his governance earned obedience. These are not quaint historical observations. They are political principles of enduring relevance, encoded in the institutional memory of communities that have been governing themselves for longer than the Nigerian state has existed.
When Nigeria’s political class is finally ready to look, not downward at communities from the vantage of formal authority, but horizontally, as equals who hold different pieces of the governance puzzle, it will find that the work remaining is not to lay the foundation. It is to build honestly upon what is already there.