Government is acknowledged worldwide to be a necessity. But it is a necessity that creates its own problem, that of how to limit the arbitrariness inherent in power and to ensure that it is used for the good of society. This is the essence of Constitutionalism. Sadly enough, in a large majority of African States, these modest expectations of liberal Constitutionalism have gone unfulfilled. Whereas Africa entered its decades of independence amidst great confidence about her socio-political future, the story of the last four decades has been one of dashed hopes, unrealized dreams and unfulfilled promises, coups, dictatorship, wars and sectarian crisis. In the search for a viable political order she has been experimenting with some Euro-American inspired concepts, ideas and institutions. The paper posits that borrowed ideas, institutions and political values have had difficulty in establishing themselves effectively here because non-universal values are hardly successfully transplanted from one cultural milieu to another. The lesson to pick from this is that in the search for political stability African states should look inward and backward. The paper argues that in pre-colonial Yorubaland there existed a kind of traditional constitutionalism, with it complex system of checks and balances, social structures, accountability and representation defined less in terms of selection procedures and more in terms of the affinity of the ruler to the ruled, all of which played a pervasive role in checking arbitrariness and abuse of power. The paper concludes that contemporary African states have a lot to learn from these in their quest for stability, good governance and constitutionalism.