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Political Parties And Democratic Consolidation In Nigeria’s Fourth Republic: 1999-2015
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Nigerians were full of hopes and expectations that hard earned
democracy will usher in improvements in standards of living, good
governance, improvement in security and what Mohammed (2013) described
as freeing of natural resources from the iron fist and jaw of greedy
officials to that of enterprising and efficient social services delivery
in health, education, sports and prevention of modern day slavery such
as human trafficking as well as rehabilitation of infrastructural
facilities, poverty alleviation and reduction in unemployment,
inequality and improvement in general socio-economic development.
Disturbingly, seventeen years after the inception of the present
democratic dispensation, the political landscape is yet to show clear
evidence of good governance. Elections and electoral processes are
subverted; there have been wide scale of political violence and killing
in many parts of the country; upsurge in ethnic militia groups who make
life unbearable for the citizenry; general insecurity and high profile
terrorism in the northern part of the country as well as kidnapping and
bunkering of the petroleum pipelines in the southern part of the country
which obviously have become a major threat to her democratic process
and consolidation (Adeosun, 2014).
A true democracy is a
sine qua non for the development of all sectors of any country’s
economy. However, democracy incorporates the exploitative and
allienative tendencies often demonstrated by the capitalists against the
downtrodden. Democracy, from an empirical view point could mean “a
socioeconomic and political formation that grants the hoi polloi (common
people) the irreducible instrument of determining and participating
effectively in the day-to-day smooth governance of their countryâ€. That
is, the general transformative and re-structuring powers of that state
are vested in the hands of the electorates (Golden, 2010).
The rudiments of a true democracy are good governance, fair and
legitimate elections, justice, equity, accountability, transparency,
responsible leadership, political education of the masses, respect for
the rule of law and importantly corporation among the different branches
of government. Regrettably, the practice of the so-called democracy in
the 21st Century Nigeria is intrinsically characterized by electoral
frauds orchestrated by political parties (Obidimma & Obidimma,
2015).
Moreover, mainstream rhetoric in Nigeria media and
popular discourses of the polity is often centred on the claim that
Nigeria is “consolidating its democracyâ€. The evidence on the ground,
however, contradicts this claim (Momoh, 2013). It is perhaps most
appropriate to liken the relationship between political parties and the
sustenance of democratic rule in a particular society to that which
exists between the umbilical cord and the foetus (Yagboyaju, 2012).
Political
parties are at the heart of examining the health of any form of
democracy (Orji, 2013), for example, maintains that ‘to talk, today,
about democracy, is to talk about a system of competitive political
parties. Their roles and activities are critical in any assessment of
democratic practice. With the transition to civil rule in 1999
(Signalling the commencement of the fourth republic), political parties
had the mandate to produce the right calibre of people to govern (Momoh,
2013). One of the most complex and critical institutions of democracy
is the political party (ies) (Omotola, 2009). Therefore this research
study seeks to critically explore political parties and democratic
consolidation in Nigeria’s fourth republic.
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