ETHNIC POLITICS, COLONIAL LEGACY, AND OLD-AGE SECURITY POLICY - THE NIGERIAN CASE IN HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

While many political scientists have considered the state-building functions of public policy in ethnically diverse Third World nations, few have analyzed the role that old age security programs play in this process. Of particular interest are the relative influence of class and status groups on old age security policy, a subject of considerable debate in the literature on the advanced industrial democracies as well. In this article we take Nigeria as a case study in the emergence of public old age security policy and use both historical and comparative evidence to comment on more general theories and debates in the literature. We find that Nigerian policy has been shaped by such factors as: (1) interest group politics (based more on ethnic and regional than class cleavages), (2) the nation's legacy as a former British colony, (3) the shift in structure from being a colony to an independent nation, (4) the level of economic development, and (5) the structure of the labor force. © 1991.