In order to understand how the chiefs mediate between the past, the present, and the future, it is necessary to understand the relation between their control over people and over resources. For most rural communities, the control and management of land is at the heart of control over people. Where such control over land has been whittled away, they have lost their grip over the people. However, in providing an alternative discourse at the local level, they have effectively obviated the imposition of state land law reforms and made the 1974 land ordinances appear subsidiary to customary tenure systems. They have effectively created a political space within which they can maintain their control over people and resources.
State power is contested in the resulting legal and institutional pluralism.
This has led the state to seek to co-opt and bureaucratize the chieftaincy in order to exploit the control it exercises over people and resources in order to capture local communities. To understand how this contest is negotiated, this paper starts with the general characteristics of chieftaincy, it shows how the effective use of rituals and myths are central to notions of governance in a customary setting and then examines the strategies the chiefs use as they face the state. The conclusion re-examines the question of the institution of chieftaincy as an anachronism in the democratization process.