The chapters in this volume tell a sobering tale of a major emerging-market country (by far Africa's most populous) still searching for a viable political order six decades after its independence. Among the largest states that emerged from colonial rule after the Second World War (countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines), none faces such persistent and deep questions as does Nigeria about its future existence as one nation. And in recent years, secessionist calls and pressures have multiplied. Even within Africa, only a few large countries (such as Ethiopia and the Congo) confront anything like these existential challenges to their corporate existence. The tenacity of this most basic question of political order – who and what constitutes the nation – may seem odd for a country that has enjoyed decades of bountiful oil revenue to fund the central state and distribute resources to diverse parts of the country. But, as in many other low-income countries that have become largely dependent on this stream of income, oil has been very much part of the problem.

Anyone taking the long view of Nigeria's political development cannot but be struck by the continuity in the country's essential dilemmas. The core questions of Nigeria's existence – whether it should be one country or several, and if one, how it should be structured as a federation – have been at the centre of constitutional debate since the very inception of Nigerian politics. In fact, this debate dates back not to independence in 1960 (or the 1959 federal elections that paved the way for that), but rather to the birth of competitive party politics in the early 1950s (Diamond 1988). To this overarching and deeply unsettled conundrum can be added numerous others that have endured virtually unabated since the traumatic early post-independence years and that feature prominently in the withering analyses of this volume:

• • the predominance of ethnicity in political calculations, alliances, and electoral mobilization;

• • the complex layering of identity politics along ethnic, sub-ethnic, regional, and religious lines, with the potential for any of these to become a fault line that threatens political stability;

• • the recurrent eruption of these identity cleavages into various forms and levels of deadly violence;

• • the prominence of fraud (and often as well, violence) in elections at all levels;

• • the dominance of distributional questions in political life – which groups are and/or are not getting their ‘fair share of the national cake’;