POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRATIC PROCESS IN NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF RIVERS STATE)
Abstract
This article investigates Nigeria’s political violence and democratic stability. The article is produced with the understanding that frequent elections are important to democratic values. Thus, political violence has been a key impediment to Nigeria’s democratic stability.
The article contends that Nigeria’s democratic experiment has been under constant attack since the country’s restoration to democratic administration in 1999. However, the joy and exhilaration that greeted the country’s restoration to democracy in 1999 has dissipated, instilling anxiety in the political system.
The technique used is based on secondary data, and insights were pulled heavily from conflict theorists. The report indicated that the achievement of democratic goals or stability is totally dependent on free, fair, and credible elections.
The study also urges, among other things, that politicians not utilize ethnicity and religion to galvanize support and polarize the population through religious deception and ethnic chauvinism, which have in the past heated up feelings and generated communal violence in Nigeria.
Fundamentally, the federal and state governments should publicly reject discrimination based on ‘indigene’ or ‘non-indigene’ status, grant full citizenship to all Nigerians, make them eligible for all political rights, and eventually dissuade inclinations for political violence.
Political violence, democratic stability, Nigeria, election are all keywords.
Introduction
Political violence is one of the markers of a poorly institutionalized political system.
Armed conflict in the form of civil war is the most visible manifestation of such violence. Though elections are meant to be a crucial pillar in a country’s democratic process with the twin goals of political participation and accountability, they are precisely in the greatest and most notable transgressions of these principles.
Nobody wants to lose, and everyone wants to win. It goes without saying that any political critic who says anything considered ‘bad’ about any political office holder should be prepared to face molestation.
An objective analysis of Nigeria’s political journey, according to Adekanye in (Alfa & Otaida, 2012), would indicate that political violence has been a part of the country’s history.
What is new, though, are the changes in the forms, quantity, and consequences of violence. In a hostile and acrimonious environment, no country can grow. Nigeria would have been one of the world’s leading economies if not for the fact that massive resources are channeled into security votes,
conflict resolution, and reconstruction as a result of perennial political violence: because political power is the major source of wealth in Nigeria, the contest for political office is always a ‘do or die’ affair (Ake, 1981 & Tenuche, 2011 in Alfa & Otaida, 2012)
This research investigates political violence and democratic stability in Nigeria against this setting. For ease of analysis, the paper is divided into six sections: introduction, section two examines conceptual and theoretical epistemology,
section three expounds on the historical evolution of political violence in Nigeria, section four examines the causes of political violence, section five examines the effects of political violence on democratic stability, and section six concludes and recommends.
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POLITICAL VIOLENCE AND DEMOCRATIC PROCESS IN NIGERIA (A CASE STUDY OF RIVERS STATE)
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