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Ethnic politics in Nigeria is a colonial creation, following the regionalisation of the country by the Richards Constitution of 1946 and consolidated by the Macpherson and Lyttleton Constitutions, which converted three culturally plural regions into three political units each dominated by a single large nationality. This paper therefore traces ethnic nationalism in the Nigerian electoral process from 1946 to 2023. Adopting an instrumentalist approach supplemented by Ekeh’s theory of the two publics, it analyses the colonial and post-colonial electoral record and the seven general elections held between 1999 and 2023. It argues that ethnic nationalism has simultaneously evolved and endured, and that these are not competing descriptions but two dimensions of one process. What has evolved is the form: the idiom of mobilisation, the technology of transmission, the architecture of coalitions and the constituencies available for mobilisation. What has endured is the function: a political economy in which the State remains the primary allocator of opportunity, making ethnic solidarity the most reliable route to material security. The 2023 general election is the clearest illustration of this duality, and its contested outcome is treated not as a settled fact to be reported but as a phenomenon to be analysed, since contesting electoral legitimacy is itself among the most potent contemporary generators of ethnic grievance.