| সংক্ষিপ্ত: | <p>Ghana’s 1992 Constitution entrenches Fundamental Human Rights and Freedoms, some of which do not exist in the customary law of the tribal polities with whom the state shares citizens. The state’s efforts to assert this liberal identity as the people’s; and the tribal polities’ commensurate efforts to resist the erosion of the socio-political identity they have chosen for themselves and their subjects; create tensions that, unmanaged, are apt to culminate in destructive conflict. My thesis casts the state-tribe friction in terms of a struggle over sovereignty and seeks a theoretical strategy to address that challenge. </p>
<p>I compare three philosophical constructs: federalism, bicameralism, and constitutional pluralism. I draw on Nigeria’s experience to conclude that though federalism might preserve the citizen-subject’s tribal identity, it does so at the cost of her statal one. Based on Botswana’s experience, I reject bicameralism for over-aligning state and tribe, thereby distorting the latter, and, thus, robbing the citizen-subject of her native lens for navigating the world. </p>
<p>Rather than obsess about being the only entity making a sovereignty claim in the territory, constitutional pluralism (CP) teaches the state to concentrate on amplifying its effectiveness to match the scope of its normative claim, so as to render implausible all competing sovereignty claims. This new focus allows the state to tolerate its rivals and even optimise their existence thereby offering the citizen-subject equal access to both her statal and tribal identities. I therefore endorse it.</p>
<p>I craft a Ghanaian theory of CP which values the inter-order friction and establishes thereon a model of competition and collaboration in which the state gains both the benefit of the strengths and legitimacy of tribal authority, and, through its competing remedies, the power to trigger and mould the evolution of customary law rights regimes into a connotationally-compliant body of law.</p>
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