Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and Its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement PDF Download

Author: Victor Oguejiofor Okafor
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313355878
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 207

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Book Description
Nigeria's Stumbling Democracy and its Implications for Africa's Democratic Movement is the first book to recount and analyze Nigeria's controversial general elections of April 2007. Because Nigeria's immense and diverse population of 140 million people and its wealth of natural resources make it a microcosm of Africa, Nigerian politics are an ideal case study and bellwether by which to view and understand African politics and the ongoing democratic experiments on the continent. Ten leading scholars of Nigerian and African politics, variously based in Nigeria, the US, and Europe, contribute original chapters commissioned by Professor Okafor to provide an account at once deep and comprehensive of what went wrong with these disputed presidential, federal, and state elections; together with their implications for the future of the democratic movement, both in Nigeria and in Africa as a whole. Although the 2007 general elections resulted in the first-ever handover of political power from one civilian government to another in the history of Nigeria, by which the two-term Christian president Olusegun Obasanjon was succeeded by a Muslim, Alhaji Musa Yar'Adua, they were condemned by internal and international watchdogs for pervasive vote-rigging, violence, intimidation, and fraud which were, as this book documents, perpetrated by and with the connivance of the nation's security forces. The disappointment of continental hopes that these elections might finally break with Nigeria's history of tainted elections has grave repercussions for the democracy movement not only in Nigeria but throughout Africa-as seen in the knock-on effect upon the disastrous general elections in Kenya later the same year.

Author: Abadir M. Ibrahim
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319183834
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
This book tests many of the assumptions, hypotheses, and conclusions connected with the presumed role of civil society organizations in the democratization of African countries. Taking a comparative approach, it looks at countries that have successfully democratized, those that are stuck between progress and regression, those that have regressed into dictatorship, and those that are currently in transitional flux and evaluates what role, if any, civil society has played in each instance. The countries discussed—South Africa, Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt and Tunisia—represent a diverse set of social and political circumstances and different levels of democratic achievement, providing a rich set of case studies. Each sample state also offers an internal comparison, as each has historically experienced different stages of democratization. Along the course of each case study, the book also considers the effect that other traditionally studied factors, such as culture, colonization, economic development and foreign aid, may have had on individual attempts at democratization. The first extensive work on civil society and democratization in Africa, the book adds new insights to the applicability of democratization theory in a non-Western context, both filling a gap in and adding to the existing universal scholarship. This book will be useful for scholars of political science, economics, sociology and African studies, as well as human rights activists and policy makers in the relevant geographical areas.

Author: E. Ike Udogu
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857203
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 268

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Book Description
This volume explores the notion that African leaders are fundamentally responsible for electoral malfeasance throughout the continent. The quagmire of fixing elections in order to stay in power ad-infinitum has frequently led – and will continue to lead – to political violence, civil wars, internal displacement of citizens, international refugee crises, and economic malaise with its attendant crisis of underdevelopment. This book provides five case studies selected from Anglophone, Francophone and Lusophone Africa that illustrate some variations and similarities in the dilemma of electoral democracy in this epoch of Africa’s democratic experiment. It suggests, among other factors, Colin Powell’s and Abraham Lincoln’s theoretical templates as pointers for African political chiefs in their struggle for democratic consolidation – a successful move that could advance national legitimacy and political stability critical for impressive development in this millennium.

Author: Okechukwu Ibeanu
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 9811660581
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
This book examines the structures and processes of political decision-making and governance in Nigeria. Since Nigeria returned to elected government in 1999, it has been observed that several factors account for the differences between the design of statutory structures and processes of political decision-making and how they operate in reality. In other words, there are wide gaps between statutes and practice of political decision-making. However, the nexus between the two remains largely understudied by political scientists. Instinctively, political scientists assume that informal influences in political decision-making are aberrations, episodic or temporary. This book is designed to interrogate the nexus between the formal and non-formal dimensions of the dynamics of political decision making in Nigeria and also provide evidence about the actual functioning of governmental structures in Nigeria. The thesis of the book is that the non-formal dimension of political decision making as evidenced in rising ethno-political patronages, religious sentiments, clientelism and factionalism, are interacting with formal decision-making structures in ways that largely undermine the latter and, by extension, the democratic system. The book pursues this thesis by examining the roles of actors and institutions including, electoral choices made by voters, legislations, which perhaps is the most fundamental form of political decision-making, policies made by the executive and administration, as well as decision making within political parties, since parties are sites for articulating and aggregating issues on which decisions are to be made.

Author: J. Dibua
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137286652
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
This book deconstructs the neopatrimonial paradigm that has dominated analysis of Nigerian and African development. It shows that by denying agency to Nigerian societies and devaluing indigenous culture and local realities, Eurocentric diffusionism played a significant role in the failure of development planning.

Author: Gashawbeza Bekele
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 1498564526
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This book interrogates contemporary debates, controversies, achievements, challenges, and future prospects of African development and democratization from varied theoretical perspectives. The diverse issues and sub-themes addressed in this volume include tenets of democracy such as democratization, democratic institutions, good governance, term limits, minority rights, and women’s political participation; and dynamics of development such as economic growth, liberalization, development strategies and models, Millennium Development Goals, uneven regional development,sustainable development challenges, transport development and management, and health and development. Featuring established and emerging scholars, this book is a vital resource for scholars, policy makers, and students interested in African politics and development.

Author: E. Ike Udogu
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739186965
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
Sub-Saharan Africa is experiencing an impressive measure of economic revivalism that is driven by both national and international forces at the beginning of the twenty-first century. That political and business leaders in the region are determined that development in this millennium will not mimic the slow pace of growth in the twentieth is a given. Undoubtedly, the rapid spread of information communications technology (ICT) and contemporary investments of China in the region’s growth agenda bear this thesis out. This book, among other things, advances the theory that improving human rights practices and the democracy project—i.e. democratic consolidation in sub-Saharan Africa will create an enabling environment that is critical for stimulating the current inspiring development objectives.

Author: C.O Makame
Publisher: Chegue Publishers
ISBN: 1735222542
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 798

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Book Description
Everyone knows where they were when the first case of Coronavirus in the country was announced but not everyone knows how a virus like Coronavirus reveals so much about the historical, socio-economic and political sacred cows humanity has been breeding for more than a 1000 years and how these have created a free range for the pandemic to graze and unleash mayhem on an unprepared world. This book shatters the easy arrogance of countries with long held beliefs of how their power and economic prowess insulate them from the plagues often associated with the least developed countries in the world. In the run up to the 2020 elections, Americans are waking up to the reality that Democracy is very fragile and held together not by its gleaming skyscrapers but a philosophical framework that can easily be destroyed if the citizens do not protect it. For poor countries perennially unable to shrug off the shackles of corruption and ineptitude holding them back, it lays bare the brutal fact that the knee on their neck today is their own. An open mind is a very rare item but that is what this book asks of its reader. It brings historical facts carefully hidden through centuries of prejudice and misinformation with the intent to force us to confront ourselves, to ask questions we had not dared to imagine and perhaps set us on a path to collective healing, redemption and progress

Author: O. Mudhai
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230621759
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 269

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Book Description
This book examines the claims that new information and communication technologies (ICTs) are catalysts of democratic change in Africa. It takes optimist, pragmatist-realist and pessimist stances on various political actors and institutions, from government units and political parties to civil society organizations and minority groups.

Author: Abudu Rasheed Oki
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 166321915X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 808

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Book Description
Since independence in 1960, Nigeria’s successor leaderships and the private sector manifestly failed to dispense good governance and corporate social responsibility. Both sectors, tacitly aided by foreign institutions and corporations have perverted the ends of government and justice. Ergo, in Barbarism to Decadence, Abudu Rasheed “Richard” Oki offers an encompassing but cursory evaluation of each successor corrupting maladministration, participatory industry roles, and systemic debaucheries, along with the vast derivative adverse impacts on the citizenry. Through research, eyewitness accounts, personal experience, etc., the book presents an assessment of the devastating decades of adventitious effects of otherworldly corruption on the nation, and a look at the overall septic effects of the vice on the rest of other black African nations. Ab initio, it delves in on characteristic fractious leaderships; past immiserating military decades; compromised judiciary/law enforcement; fraudulent elections; decrepit power supply and infrastructure; human health and educational fetidness, duplicitous and complicit local and international media; natural resource curse and colossal environmental pollution; modern-day religious chicanery and radicalized Islamic terrorism; elites’ otherworldly and authoritative brigandage; and ever-present suffocating misfeasance and malfeasance in the private sector. There are also the overall, undermining roles from overseas nations, institutions, and corporations; and, sui generis, China’s hegemonic role. These are part of vast interrelated factors that hermetically immure and immolate her lumpen masses in the bonds of anomie. That correlative societal demise is portrayed in marasmus and spectral looks, along with mass spiritual and mental atrophies. Yet her affluent minority and foreign expropriation of its raw wealth and assets remain at exhilarating boil. The grim hard facts and figures indicate that Nigeria absolutely needs to be set on the right path for the long-term needs of her marred population. Meanwhile, the masses intrinsically remain restive with brutish thoughts, here and there. To wit, the crystallization of that armed mass revolutionary mettle should never be discounted in her future. So, the book provides crosscurrents, and propounds on ways to sustainably adjust her venal course mainstream. Pithily, it seeks to provide a clarion call to jettison present, and block future, serially rogue leaderships for the summum bonum.