CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1   Background to the Study

The major challenge of Nigeria’s democratic process is electoral malpractice. Electrical malpractices are usually committed by the politicians with the connivance of political parties, national electoral body, security agencies etc. This collaboration often supports manipulation of electrical results for selfish interest.

Electoral process in many respects can be seen as the lynchpin of democracy as it plays a key role in safeguarding the quality of elections in a democratic state. Democracy involves far more than holding of free and fair elections, yet if credible election are not a sufficient condition for democracy, they nevertheless remain a condition for any country to be considered democratic.

The Nigerian state is a victim of high level corruption, bad governance, political instability and a cyclical legitimacy crisis. National economic growth is retarded and the political environment is uncertain.

The countries authoritarian leadership faces a legitimacy crisis and political intrigues in an ethnically different polity where ethnic competition for resources drove much of the pervasive corruption and oligarchy thereby creating a room for political gladiators to constantly manipulate the people and political process to advance their own selfish agenda while the country remains pauperized and people wallowing in abject poverty thus, obstructing political and economic stability and its growth as well, this constantly leads to weak legitimacy as the citizens lack faith in their political leaders and as to the political system/structure.

Political culture was and is still low since the people perceived it as irrelevant to their lives and in the absence of support from the civil society, the effective power of government was eroded and the patron client relationship became the order of the day in time took a prime role over the formal aspect of politics such as the rule of law well functioning political party and credible electoral systems. In other to break this and bring back censured good governance, accountability and transparency must be guaranteed which in turn would promote political and economic growth of Nigeria.

Claud Ake (1995) locates the genre of these problems in the incumbents’ political and social conditions in developing counties which manifests in poor planning and implementation, lack of entrepreneurial abilities, the stiffening of market forces, falling of commodity price and unfavourable terms, poverty of ideas, the dependency syndrome, corruption and indiscipline. The lack of participation and consensus building which Mayer et al (1996) called lack of a sense of national community is a factor which hinders national political and economic growth.

Meaningful development and political stability require the collective identity of citizenry and where this is lacking, development programmes are regarded with suspicion indifference or even hostility and at best exploitation result, something to be taken advantage of rather than something to be committed to. Lack of accountability and transparency becomes the order of the day as corruption as an efficiency are concealed as observed with the spate of abandoned projects.

The African state which we know that Nigeria is not an exception in the words of Ayittey (2006) has evolved into a predatory monster or a gangster state that uses a corrupt system of regulation and control to pillage and rob the productive class (the peasantry). It is common knowledge that heads of States, ministers and highly placed African government officials, had the treasury and misuse their positions in government to extort commissions on foreign loan contract scheme, foreign aid and inflate contracts to cronies for kickbacks. These are the very people who are supposed to protect the peasants; are again engaged in institutionalized looting, this governance have produced a baneful structure in an environment that endangers growth in the political system as the people yearn for elusive dividend of good  governance.

The history of Nigeria painted with the absence of moral and ethnic values in the conduct of ruling elites that has adversely affect political and economic growth because it gives the people the feeling of less security and bias judgement over the social structure or system.

As corruption ‘impacts negatively on economic growth, it is also politically destabilizing, corruption and abuse of power have long been features of Nigeria’s economic and political landscape. The National Planning Committee has identified systematic corruption which engenders low level of transparency and accountability as the major source of failure.

Scholars have described Nigeria as an unfinished state (Joseph et al 1996) and as truculent African in the midst of abundant human material resources which are propelled in virtuous cycle of poverty and autocracy.

With enormous wealth, from oil resources and enormous economic, political and social strength, Nigeria was qualified to be called Giant of Africa and Nigeria was brought to its knees by twenty years of corrupt military leadership, which left a legacy of executive dominance and political corruption in this hand of the so called god father and thus governance was viewed as an instrument of their enrichment.

From my point of view,   I think electoral malpractices originated (started) because of social deprivation with violence as the only way to dominate power the ruling class with little or no knowledge of politics and economies seized power via electoral malpractices since powers or offices were gained without the vote of the masses office holders feel accountable to nobody but to themselves, they appoint ministers, commissioners and government parastatals who are either their brother or someone they can manipulate; since most times in the history of Nigeria government parastatals have no idea of what they have been appointed to do it in turn hampers the economic and political growth of the country since people see government as means of enriching themselves.

Kesselman et al (1996) blamed economic and political decline on three principal factors:

1.   Scarce resources

2.   Weak Legitimacy

3.   Patron Client 

Which is commonly known as god fatherism politics a typical example is in the case of Chimaroke Mbadinuju and Chief Emeka Offor as his god father which in turn hampered the economic growth of Anamabra State, the civil servants were not paid and this resulted to a six months strike action and politically, it reduced participation of individuals, since they felt their vote were not needed. Again, the case between Andy Ubah and Chris Ngige is also another example of how electoral malpractices endanger the growth of the nation.

Since electoral malpractices (rigging of results) require a great deal of money, people who gain political posts via electoral malpractices would first want to gain what they have lost during elections and it is now a business, since gubernatorial and presidential elections or any other office in Nigeria which election is the only way to pick out its holder is now a business venture, what good could such office holder bring?, bearing in mind that he/she has to pay the godfather (if any) before attending to the state .