In the years following Nigeria's independence in October 1960, its tripartite regional-administrative structure—with the Northern, Western, and Eastern Regions each controlled by an ethnic majority, most of it voting solidly for its “own” ethnic party—soon turned out to be the most destructive of all colonial legacies. The structure, inherited from the early years of colonial rule and “frozen” during the constitutional negotiations of the 1950s, invited all the major political actors to play the card of ethnic politics. Competition and conflict among the three regional power elites soon undermined the stability of parliamentary democracy, as seen most clearly in the state of emergency and the electoral violence in the Western Region in 1962 and 1965, respectively. Aggressive ethnic politics even worsened after the military coup of January 1966, now including the rank and file of an army that began to disintegrate into ethnic factions, leading Nigeria into the Civil War. In many respects, Nigeria's crises during the 1960s formed a violent extension of the decolonization process. It was only during the Civil War that the contours of a new and different political and social order began to emerge. The history of Nigeria as a truly postcolonial state and society began with the end of the war in 1970.

Nigeria's postcolonial order rests on two pillars: a federal political system and oil production as the single most significant source of wealth. When the Civil War began in 1967, both of them were in their infancy; when it ended in 1970, both were solidly established and ever since, they have structured Nigeria's politics and society—and its problems.

This chapter looks at the impact of Nigeria's postcolonial order on structures and political dynamics in Igbo local communities after 1970 and traces some of its more general repercussions in Igbo society. It takes a largely “top-down” perspective. The postcolonial order is understood as a political and socioeconomic framework—an order which stands outside or above the local sphere but has a clearly identifiable impact at various points, especially as regards politics and administration, and more general “repercussions” at other points, particularly in regard to social structures and certain features of everyday life. The first part of this chapter analyzes the role of the federal political system as a system of conflict management and a mechanism of distributing the oil rent.