Political parties and democratic consolidation in Nigeria (1999-2019)
1 Department of Political Science, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago Iwoye, Ogun State, Nigeria.
2 Department of International Relations, Institut Superieur De Management, ISM Adonaï University, Porto-Novo, Republic du Benin.
3 Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Management Science. Lagos State University, Nigeria.
4 Department of Demography and Social Statistics, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State Nigeria.
5 Department of Political Science and International Relations University of Abuja, Nigeria.
6 Department of Sociology, University of Jos, Plateau State, Nigeria.
7 Department of Historical Science, Lobachevsky University, Nizhny Novgorod, Russia.
8 Department of International Relations, Russian University of Peoplew’s Friendship named after Patrice Lumumba, Moscow, Russia.
9 Department of Economics, University of Abuja, Gwagwalada, Nigeria.
Review
International Journal of Multidisciplinary Research Updates, 2023, 06(01), 001–009.
Article DOI: 10.53430/ijmru.2023.6.1.0061
Publication history:
Received on 03 July 2023; revised on 23 August 2023; accepted on 25 August 2023
Abstract:
Democracy has become the most dominant political movement in the world today. The popularity of this political practice has been a worldwide trend over the years. Also, political parties are the engine room of democratic societies and without them; there will be no genuine democracy. Hence, this revealed the importance of political parties when he stated that "modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties". Indeed, the existence of vibrant political parties is a sine qua non for democratic consolidation. Therefore, it is not just the existence of political parties themselves per se, but the existence of vibrant ones in the polity. The degree of democratic consolidation in a country depends largely on the character and conduct of the country's political parties. The research adopts system theory analyses. The aim of this research work is to examine why democracy is not yet consolidated in Nigeria. Information about the subject of discourse was obtained through exploration history, this research solely rely on secondary data such as books, internet material, journals which were textually analyzed. This research work reveals that party system in Nigeria is weak and vulnerable, its future remains precarious and endangered by politicians who through their whims and caprices have become greedy, selfish, dubious, thoughtless and irrational. Nigerian political parties have proven themselves to be undemocratic and anti democratic institutions. It was observed from the research that lack of accountability, inequality, corruption, weak enforcement agencies, god-fatherism among others is limiting democratic consolidation in Nigeria. The research recommends that critical attention needs to be paid to the political parties as institutions that play diverse but central roles in democratic consolidation and that parties need to be re-engineered from mere institutions for acquiring political power to effective institutions that are capable of structuring, mediating and reconciling societal interests and conflict.
Keywords:
Political parties; Democratic consolidation; Democracy; Party systems; Nigerian Politics; God fatherism
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Copyright © 2023 Author(s) retain the copyright of this article. This article is published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Liscense 4.0