The region we are concerned with in this study lies in the extreme north eastern part of
Nigeria, a territory extending from the Lake Chad in the north to the Mambilla Plateau in
the south, bordered by the Nigeria – Cameroon boundary in the east. This whole region
was at one time the North Eastern State, one of the six states carved out of the old
Northern Region in 1967 with a total land area of 277,314 sq kilometers and a population
of 18,984,299 peoples. During further state and local government creation exercises, the
North Eastern State was divided into six states and 112 local governments. The states are
Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe, Adamawa and Taraba (Fig. 1). Each state has an Executive
Governor who wields tremendous power and an elected state legislative house. Nigeria’s
population census (2006) gave the population for each of the states as Adamawa
(3,168,101), Bauchi (4,676,465), Borno (4,151,193), Gombe (2,353,879), Taraba
(2,300,736), and Yobe (2,321,591). These states correspond to the old provinces into
which the Northern Region was sub-divided. Each province was composed of Native
Authorities (NAs) created under colonial rule. These NAs were also the remains of the
ancient kingdoms of the pre Jihad and post Jihad periods with some dating back to the 7th
centuries AD. The northeast region is probably the most heterogenous in the Nigerian
Federation in terms of ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. For instance, defunct
Adamawa Province (now Adamawa and Taraba States) recorded the highest percentage of
‘Animists’ in 1963 (Ekanem, 1972) and presently Taraba State has about 73 different
languages spoken as first language, the highest number of languages in the country
(Seibert, 2000). Other states in the region are ethnically diverse as well. The numbers of
languages spoken as first language for the other states are as follows: Adamawa (58),
Gombe (21), Bauchi (60), Borno (28), and Yobe (9).