Journal of Research in Peace, Gender and Development Vol. 1(3) pp. 078-090 April 2011
Available online@ http://www.interesjournals.org/JRPGD
Copyright ©2011 International Research Journals
Review
Golden Jubilee of Underdevelopment
Elections Matter for Development
O. B. C Nwankwo (PhD)
Department of Political Science, Anambra State University, Igbariam.
Email: nwankwo62@yahoo.com
Accepted 05 march, 2011
This paper argues the thesis that the establishment of legitimate public authority through the
collective will of the people in a competitive and participative environment creates a more
favourable and enabling environment for basic governance capabilities that can guarantee
development. Observing that the history of elections in Nigeria is a history of primitive
accumulation of votes which made irrelevant the accounting function of election, it argues that
this failure of vertical accountability accounts for mediocre development of the country. The
converse would have propelled leaders to deliver on their promises through adequate processing
of the people’s input into the system, in the expectation of the people’s future support.
Development, it continues, demands high valorisation of votes and the higher the value attached
to votes in any polity, the higher the level of development. The converse is equally true:
underdevelopment in the post independent Nigeria is linked to high de-valorisation of votes which
continuously gave rise to unresponsive leaders that have no fear of people’s sanction, that are
not bordered by people’s negative votes. Elections thus matter for development! It concludes that
Nigeria must re-establish, or in fact establish faith in elections and effective practice of
democracy, here understood as the permeation of political participation and competition in the
political landscape of the polity. This can be achieved through ensuring that the current electoral
reforms and its implementation in 2011 pools have the capacity at least to guarantee high content
and psychological values of votes. This two has the capacity to compel the promissory value and
through enhancing democracy and governance, and finally compel development.
INTRODUCTION
This year 2010, 17 African countries are celebrating the
golden jubilee of their independence. Nigeria is one of
them. As the Union Jack rolled down minutes to midnight
th
of 30 September 1960 and the Green-White-Green
rolled up at that instant, and the floodlights at today’s
Tafawa Balewa Square came on signalling a new dawn,
it was October 1st 1960. Nigeria became independent
from Great Britain. There were hilarious expressions on
the faces of many Nigerians as the new national anthem
was officially played for the first time and the celebration
drums rolled. The driving force of these hilarious
expressions was the expectations of a better life for all
Nigerians. Our fathers and forefathers hoped that the
hitherto siphoned resources of the country by the imperial
master would now be invested to the advantage of the
people. They knew that Nigeria like any other emerging
nation has its problems most significant of which was
structural. However, in that hilarious moment the
problems were bracketed. They believed that with
independence all the country’s problems would gradually
disappear. Indeed, within and without, Nigeria at
independence with her abundant human and material
resources, held lots of promises. To this extent, the
expectations of our forebears were not unfounded.
However, that independence was a mere act of the
parliament, a stroke of the pen that transferred political
control and attendant resources from the colonial master
to the nationalists. Thereafter, the real struggle began.
The nationalists set themselves the task of developing
the new nation politically, socially and economically to
meet the people’s aspirations. Politically, Nigeria went to
independence endowed with representative legislature,
political parties, elections and indeed all the trappings of
western democratic government. It was indeed to many a
model of democratic federalism. In reality, however, it
was a fragile achievement that sooner than later became
Nwakwo 079
challenged by ethnic tensions, lack of general will among
the squabbling and opportunistic representatives of the
people, incompetence of democratic leadership among
others, which permitted the military to take over power.
With the intervention of the military, government became
a matter of force and the foundation for perpetual
mischief was laid. Coups followed each other and finally
culminated in the 30 months civil war that ended in 1970.
With the return to civil rule in 1979, the second military
incursion in 1983 and the present democratic
dispensation that began in 1999, Nigeria at fifty has
experienced a total of 28 years of military dictatorship
and 22 years of civil rule. How effective the military in its
long years of administration of the country has been in
the task of meeting the national dreams as anticipated at
independence, elicits diverse opinions. Effectiveness is
here understood in terms of Government meeting its
responsibilities with available resources to the governed,
in terms of satisfaction of the basic functions of
government by the principal actors, in terms of
substantive outcomes (Nwankwo, 2003). To be on the
safe side, compared to the quantum of resources and
opportunities available to the juntas, they impacted very
little on key substantive outcomes especially human
development indices.
A common feature of all military administrations is that
the people cease to live by any common established rule
on the basis of which the leaders can be held
accountable. As is known, military government with their
capacity to change the rule of the game without fear of
sanctions is not an accountable government. This paper
is therefore, not interested in military administration which
it considers ab initio an aberration. However, let us not
forget that the foundation of unaccountability was already
laid by the politicians and that it was this unaccountability
that permitted military incursion in the first instance. The
civil political class did everything including manipulation
of the constitution to truncate accountability in the face of
incompetence of democratic leadership. The resources
that were expected to serve the people were privatised to
serve individuals in a neo-colonialist garment. This
situation which began in the first Republic continued in
the Second, the so called Third and the present Fourth
Republics even with greater sophistication. As is
discussed in this paper, the greatest instrument of
accountability in a democratic setting is election. In
respect thereto, and to all substantive expectations of the
people, the nation has over these past fifty years
comparatively retrogressed.
In the light of today, empirical evidence suggests that
despite all criticisms, the state of the late colonial and
early post colonial economies of Nigeria were fairly
sufficient as basis for sustained growth and
development of the country. This is not withstanding the
fact that post colonial leaders were recruited from a weak
group: “the petty bureaucratic bourgeoisie which were
inexperienced”. Let us also recall, in the words of Nohlen
and Nuschler (1993), that it was not until independence
was around the corner that African States, nay Nigeria
got constitutions they could call their own and then
started the real act of democratic governance. The
mosaic States which their predecessors few years back
managed to control through divide and rule tactic, force
and claims to racial superiority, “exclusionary
hegemony”(Young, 1994, 218), and that was intolerant of
opposition, was at independence expected to be
democratically managed through a system that they had
not the benefit of experiencing its real working. Williams
(1999, 3) opined that “African Governments inherited the
institutions through which and the boundaries within
which they exercised state authority. They took over or
re-established the forms of territorial administration, the
decentralised
despotism
through
which
their
predecessors had exercised power”. In simple terms,
they not only had too brief an acquaintance with the
virtues of democracy but also lacked the experience and
strength of character to cope with the post independent
challenges. Having no economic base in society, these
leaders “participated in politics only for personal gain.
Their loyalties were not to their classes, for they had
none, but to their stomachs” (Kasozi, 1994, 10). This is
the foundation of the primitive accumulation that is the
bane of the politics of today.
While these leaders may not have initially adopted
brut forces to suppress political opponents as their
colonial masters, they manipulated elections, dispensed
a wide range of rewards and sanctions to be able to
retain their position and keep the masses loyal and
subordinated. The distribution of positions in government
services and public corporations, issuance of licences for
market stalls, permits for agricultural export production,
rights to establish enterprises, distribution of
scholarships, etc were effectively used to grease
machinery for retaining power. In effect, corruption and
clientage became embedded in the society with
devastating effect on all human development indices. The
problem of development from inception can, therefore,
and in the words of Chinua Achebe, be said to be linked
to leadership (Achebe, 1983).
We argue here that the failure not only of democracies
but also socio-economic development in post colonial
Africa is hinged not only on the failure of leadership but
also on the failure of the populace to hold them
accountable in and out of government. The later is the
problem of followership. The two however are
interrelated. No doubt, leadership problematic in Africa,
nay Nigeria is an ensemble of multiple factors but we
hypothesise that at the root of them all is the failure of
vertical accountability that would have made it possible
for the people to keep their leaders committed to their
promises and to change them when they failed to be
responsive to their needs: to change what needed to be
changed. It was this that permitted individuals opposed to
freedom to resort to violent change through coups that
080 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
comparatively worsened the situation. Key instrument in
keeping the leaders responsive is vertical accountability
through elections. There is, therefore, a nexus between
the failure of development and failure of vertical
accountability, between development and elections since
it is through the elections that the leaders are held
accountable to the people. Election therefore matters for
development.
The Nature of Election
By election in this context, we refer to democratic
elections as instrument for freely determining access of
individuals or groups to decision making roles in a given
polity. From a modest definition of democracy as
contestation that is open to participation (Dahl, 1971),
election occupies a central place in any contemporary
democratic system, or as Sartori puts it, “a most essential
part of the workings of a political system”. The criterion of
contestation which Dahl defined as the extent to which his
institutional conditions (see below) are openly available,
publicly employed, and fully guaranteed to at least some
members of the political system, assumes that significant
political decision makers are elected via competition
among multiple candidates and or parties. It is this
multiplicity of contestants that make possible some
meaningful degree of choice. The criterion of participation
defined as “the proportion of population entitled to
participate on a more or less equal plane in controlling and
contesting the conduct of government: to participate, so to
speak, in the system of public contestation” (Dahl, 1971,
4), assumes that all adult members of the political
community have the right to take part in the political
process, most importantly, in the process of electing public
officials (Bova 1997, 113). To the extent that part of the
adult population is excluded from participation or that
individuals or parties are prevented from competing fairly,
to such extent can democracy be said to be absent or
impaired.
Dahl came to these two indicators by isolating the core
ideas in the principles embodied in his three assumptions.
The first, he noted, is that “a key characteristic of
democracy is the continuing responsiveness of the
Government to the preferences of its citizens, considered
as political equals”. The key phrase thereto is
responsiveness on the basis of political equality. The
necessary condition for such a continuous responsiveness
on the basis of political equality is elaborated in his second
assumption, namely, that all full citizens must have the
uninterrupted opportunities not only to formulate
preferences, but also to signify such preferences to others,
and to the government, either acting individually or in an
association with others. His third assumption catalogues a
number of civil and political liberties such as rights of
association, freedom of speech and expression,
opposition, etc. that must be guaranteed
for the realisation of the necessary condition for the
continuing responsiveness. Participation and contestation
in an environment conditioned by these institutional
requirements is the threshold of democracy. Nohlen (1995)
explicitly included in his definition the negative concept of
electoral defeat (Abwahl), to emphasis the control or
accounting function of democratic elections: vertical
accountability. Elected public official that fails to perform,
i.e., that fails to be “responsive”, will be removed by the
people in any free and fair election. Responsiveness is
usually measured in terms of issues of substantive
importance to the people, including the “manners and
morals, the ways of thinking and feeling” that go with the
system. Put in Nigerian parlance, responsiveness is
measured in terms of “dividends of democracy”.
It is important here to note that participation in the
process of selecting public officials formalised in the voting
process is but one part of the whole gamut of democratic
political
participation
which
connotes
ongoing
involvement (through various ways and means) in the
formulation, approval or implementation of public policies.
Examples of such ways and means would include
involvement in political campaigns, party meetings,
membership of community organisations, joining protests,
communicating with legislative representatives, etc. The
truth, however, is that these other forms of political
participation hardly attract up to a quarter of the adult
population. Herein lies the significance of electoral
participation, particularly as formalised in the voting
process: it is the only form of democratic political
participation in which over 50% of the adult populace
usually take part. Above all, election embodies the two
criteria of participation and contestation, so that the
democratic process can be considered to be “indeed
encapsulated in elections and electing (Sartori, 1987, 86).
Whatever else modern democratic governance may be, it
is fundamentally elective. While elections can be
applicable to a number of dictatorial polities, the defining
characteristics of democratic elections are their freeness
and fairness. In fact, free and fair election is one of Dahl’s
eight institutional conditions for democracy. A political
system is then and only then democratic to the extent
that political authority is determined through open, free,
fair and competitive election (Nwankwo, 2005).
Elections in Nigeria: The
Competition and Participation
Experience
with
Indeed for most people, democracy is an abstraction
which only assumes concrete dimensions in elections.
Thus the history of elections in Nigeria is the history of
the nation’s democracy. In other words, participation and
competition are the core issues in any democracy. The
centrality of election in the evolution of any democracy is
hinged on the fact that it embodies the two principles.
Beginning with the introductio principle of election, the
Nwakwo 081
Table: Composition of the Federal House of Representatives 1954
1954 Members of Representative
92 Members represented the North
42 Members represented the West
42 Members represented the East
6 Members represented Southern Cameroons
2 Members represented Lagos (FCT)
Total Membership
184
Table 1: Evolution of Senatorial and Federal Constituencies
Year
1954
1957
1960
1964
1979
1989
1999
No. of Senatorial No. of Federal
Districts
Constituencies
184
52 (+4 senators)
312
40 (+4 senators)
312
52 (+4 senators)
312
95
450
91
593
109
360
Source: Nwankwo, 2003
question of participation in terms of franchise and
representation (composition of the legislature) had
emerged as salient questions. Thus from that beginning
till date one of the principal questions that the nations
electoral system had and has continued to face is
organising representation. It is a question that deals with
creating institutional arrangement that will efficiently and
effectively aggregate conflicting interests and beliefs
present in the society (Nwankwo, 2003). Districting, a
geographical form of representation is an important
aspect of the electoral system which address this issue.
In other words, the primary unit of representation is in
Nigeria is territoriality.
At the inception, a deliberative and advisory body which
was established in 1917 to become the forerunner of the
nation’s legislative assembly had 30 members all of whom
were appointed by the Governor. It had 6 'natives' who
provided for local political feelings and for the indigenous
leaders to develop a sense of identification with the regime
and perhaps gain experience in policy making (Price, 1977 p.
18); two Emirs from the North, the Alafin of Oyo and one
other member each from Calabar Lagos and Benin-Warri
area. The rest members were Europeans. As these were
nominated by the governor they could not be said to be
representatives of the people of Nigeria. The 1922
constitution laid the foundation for formal democratic
participation and competition in 1923. This is to the
relative extent, as earlier noted that it introduced the
principle of election in filling some of the seats in the
legislative council (Hitherto all seats in the council were filled
through appointment by the Governor) and created the
opportunity for the emergence of political parties. With
that, Nigeria blazed the trail to become the first country in
black Africa to have elected legislature. By enlarging the
size of the house from 30 to 46 and the number of
Africans from 6 to 10, the 1922 constitution raised the
representative value of the legislature. This trend
continued with the 1946 constitution which provided for
the direct elections of 4 members of the central
legislature (two each from Lagos and Calabar) and the
indirect election of 24 others by the newly created
regional assemblies. The constitution of 1951 increased
the number of indirectly elected members of the central
legislature to 136 with further easing of participation in
the process (cf. Anyanwu 1999, Nwankwo, 2006, for the
Statistics).
As can be seen from the above, from the introduction
of the principle of election in 1922, there was a gradual
increase in the level of participation of Nigerians in
governance to independence. The composition of the
central legislature in 1954 indicated this trend (see box).
In fact by the time of the nation’s independence, the size
of the House of representative was further enlarged to
312 members elected for a five year term. Noteworthy is
the fact that a total of 167 of these representative came
from the North. The creation of the second chamber first
at the regional levels and by 1958 at the federal level
further enhanced the representation ratio. While the lower
house represented the people as individuals, the upper
house (the senate) represented the same people as
groups: the regions. For the senate 12 members were
selected by each of the regional legislatures to represent
them at the federal level. Both the Upper and the Lower
legislative chambers shared the power to make laws for
the country – not withstanding the superiority of the lower
house in many respects.
For purposes of elections, the country is divided into
several territorial units or constituencies which are
delimited on the basis of population. Since the
introduction of the two chamber legislature in the late
1950s, Nigeria has maintained three main categories of
constituencies which are distinguishable by their sizes:
senatorial, federal, state constituencies. Senatorial
constituencies are used for the election of the members
of the upper House of the National Assembly: the Senate.
Because the seats in the Upper House are filled on the
basis of equality of states, each state of the federation is
divided into equal number of senatorial districts. Federal
constituencies are used to elect members of the lower
House. It is distributed to all the states of the federation
on the basis of their population. State constituencies are
used to elect members of the state Houses of Assembly.
Table 1 shows the historical evolution of senatorial and
federal constituencies in Nigeria.
Under the current constitution, each state,
irrespective of size and population is divided into three
senatorial districts. This, as earlier noted is an expression
of the political equality of states. The FCT is treated as
one senatorial district. Accordingly, Nigeria has today a
total of 109 senatorial districts. The constitution also fixed
the federal constituencies at 360. (Sec. 47 – 49)
082 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
Table 2: Distribution of Constituencies according to States
under the 1999
constitution
Abia
No. of Senatorial
Constituencies
3
No. of Federal
Constituencie
s*
8
Adamawa
3
8
Akwa Ibom
3
10
State
Anambra
3
11
Bauchi
3
12
Bayelsa
3
5
Benue
3
11
Borno
3
10
Cross River
3
8
Delta
3
10
Ebonyi
3
6
Edo
3
9
Ekiti
3
6
Enugu
3
8
Gombe
3
6
Imo
3
10
Jigawa
3
11
Kaduna
3
16
Kano
3
24
Katsina
3
15
Kebbi
3
8
Kogi
3
9
Kwara
3
6
Lagos
3
24
Nasarawa
3
8
Niger
3
10
Ogun
3
9
Ondo
3
8
Osun
3
9
Oyo
3
14
Plateau
3
8
Rivers
3
13
Sokoto
3
11
Taraba
3
6
Yobe
3
6
Zamfara
3
7
FCT
1
2
Total
109
360
Source: Nwankwo, 2003
The number of federal constituencies per state has
implication for the size of the state House of Assembly
who are elected on the basis of state constituencies. The
constitution provides for the state constituency to be
three or four times the number of the federal
constituencies in the state. Table 2 is the distribution of
the various constituencies in the states. For the elections
of the President or Governor the whole federation or the
whole state is counted as one constituency respectively.
The boundaries of constituencies are not defined in
the constitution. However, the constitution defined the
parameters for creating and reviewing them. These
include equality or near equality of the number of people
and that no constituency should lie between two states. It
did not indicate optimal number of people per
constituency. The importance of the equality criteria
cannot be over emphasised since large inequalities in
population will result in inequality in representation.
Within the context of the prevailing divisions in the
country, and the plural decision rule, delimitation exercise
is politically sensitive. Accordingly, the electoral
commission - taken to be partisan neutral - is mandated
with this task of demarcating the boundaries and
reviewing this at least every decade. In addition, such
demarcations can only come into force if the two Federal
Houses approve it.
With the structure of the federation in which states and
local Government enclose people with same or almost
same identific markers, most of the constituencies have a
high degree of homogeneity (In creating states and local
Governments, inter-ethnic ties, historical and cultural
factors, economic feasibility, etc are basic guiding
principles). This is especially the case in the rural areas
where over 60% of the voters are living. The overall effect
of constituency representation and the rule of drawing the
boundaries in such a way that no senatorial district or
federal constituency fall within more than one state, is
that most if not all ethnic groups can be said to be
represented in the national assembly and or in their
respective State Houses of Assemblies.
An important element of the electoral system of
Nigeria is its multiparty basis. The feature is consequent
upon the centrality of political parties in the government
system of Nigeria. Already, as at the time of the nation’s
first national conference, the Ibandan conference of
1949, three political parties had emerged as
spokespersons for the three administrative units. As
spokespersons for the various units, they came to
dominate the political activities in the various units – a
factor that came to be the dominant feature of elections in
Nigeria (Ekinneh, 1997). In the 1954 election, despite the
provision of for direct election into the national legislature,
the NPC which controlled the North used indirect election
to secure 79 of the total of 92 seats allotted the region.
Significantly the AG, the Government party of the West
was defeated in her territory by the NCNC to produce a
total of 61 seats in the parliament. The two major parties
formed a parliamentary coalition. This electoral pattern in
which the preponderance of the Northern based NPC in
Nwakwo 083
Table 3: Major National Elections in Nigeria
Year
Type of Election
1959
Parliamentary elections
No. of Political Winning Party
Parties
4
NPC
1964
Parliamentary election
10
NPC
1992
Parliamentary
and
5
presidential elections
Parliamentary
and
6
presidential elections
Parliamentary elections 2
1993
Presidential elections
2
1998
Parliamentary elections
Parliamentary
and
Presidential elections
Parliamentary
and
Presidential elections
Parliamentary
and
Presidential elections
5
SDP
SDP
(election annulled)
Inconclusive
3
PDP
Over 30
PDP
Over 50
PDP
1979
1983
1999
2003
2007
the national legislature was noticeable and the coalition
between the NPC and NCNC continued to independence.
In fact in the 1959 elections, the NPC secured 134 seats,
NCNC 89, AG 73 while the rest had together 16 seats.
Table 3 is a summary of the country’s major national
elections.
Important to mention is that although the South based
AG and NCNC would have coalesced and formed the
government, this was not to be because of fundamental
difference between the two over the status of Lagos.
Important also was the fact that a southern coalition
would have marginalised the North and laid the
foundation for the disintegration of Nigeria which the
NCNC firmly stood for. This fear of Northern
marginalisation and consequent withdrawal from the
federation receded to the background after the census
result of 1964 that gave the North over half of the
population of Nigeria, the implication of which was the
solidification of Northern dominance of the Federal
legislature. This had profound effect on the election of
1964 as the two South based parties formed electoral
alliance with minor opposition parties from the North
under the aegis of UPGA. NPC aligned with the splinter
group of AG (NNA) and NCNC under the aegis of NNDP
(Ekinneh, 1997, Ezeani, 1987, Ajibola, 1978).
Apart from the multiparty based character, the
description of the electoral system highlighted universality
of franchise, secrecy of voting, the laws on candidacy
(party membership, age, education, etc), the decision
rules – Majority/plurality, the autonomy of the electoral
authority, the constitutional guarantees of democratic
freedoms of association and expression, - the real
existence of alternative sources of information, the fact
that nobody is under any serious threat not to freely
express his or her opinion,- among others (see Nwankwo
NPN
NPN
2006). These have provided the requisite operational
condition for the nation’s electoral processes as to define
Nigeria’s system despite problems as democratic. That
these variables also confer substantial formal empirical
legitimacy on the electoral processes of Nigeria is not
debatable. However, the real question is the extent to
which they are present in a realistic sense as to
guarantee the participative and competitive character of
the process. The law on candidacy is a good starting
point. Various administrations have over the years
tinkered with one aspect or the other of the system as to
impair the competitive and participative character of the
electoral system. The transition of 1999, because of the
crisis situation under which it took place produced fewer
restrictions on contestation than those of the previous
regimes of Babangida and Abacha. Haggard/Kaufmann
(1995, 368) found out that generally “transitions occurring
under crisis conditions produce fewer restrictions on
contestation”. The transition programmes of Babangida
and later Abacha introduced institutional and non
institutional restrictions on candidacy (like barring certain
cadres of politicians with his new breed philosophy)
which impaired democratic character and legitimacy of
the elections. This legacy was eliminated in the transition
of 1999. Indeed by the second election of 2003 and that
of 2007 there were relatively no restriction on
participation and competition.
Constitutionally, however, all elections in Nigeria have
operated on general limitations on candidacy. Currently,
electoral candidacy is subject to membership of a political
party. It requires that all candidates be nominated by
political parties. There are no provisions for independent
candidacy by people interested in active politics but who
are not interested in belonging to any political party, or
even those whose principles and interests are not
084 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
articulated in any of the existing parties to stand for
elections. The recent debate in the National Assembly to
limit the freedom of people from freely forming political
parties has been rejected by the Assembly. Limiting
candidacy to party membership while at the same time
limiting the freedom of individuals to freely form political
parties as canvassed by some members would have
certainly further excluded a significant number of people
from participation. This liberalisation of political parties
can therefore be seen as part of the process of improving
participation.
The age factor is another objective variable of
exclusion. Legally, a person at eighteen may belong to a
political party, but s/he may not contest any election until
s/he is thirty years of age. The third of the categories of
the excluded are public servants. This is to the extent that
they must resign their jobs in order to contest election.
The uncertainty of winning an election and the fear of
loosing ones means of existence at the same time forces
this category of Nigerians out of electoral contests. They
may not even belong to a political party. These
limitations, limited the inclusiveness of competition in
Nigeria. The exclusion on age and education variables
are legitimised by the people as an objective way of
eliminating unsuitable candidates. It was found out (2001
survey) that while most Nigerians are for restrictions on
the basis of educational variable, they do not support
restrictions on the basis of age beyond the level defined
by franchise. With over 65% of the population of Nigeria
under the age limit of thirty and 25% of this between the
ages 18 and 29, with a good number of those above thirty
not belonging to any of the existing parties, and finally
civil servants, teachers, and the like who, for fear of
permanently loosing their means of livelihood desist from
contesting, a substantial part of the population have been
excluded from active participation in politics through
legislation. (see Nwankwo, 2003 for the statistics).
However good intentioned these regulations might be,
they impaired the principles of inclusive contestation.
However, such constitutional limitations are legal as they
existed and cannot be considered as impediments to
participation in the context of this paper.
Generally, Nigeria is not a high achiever in electoral
participation. While it may be true according to Beyme
(1983, 30), that high electoral participation may not in
itself be proof of a well functioning democracy, it definitely
increases the legitimacy not just of the electoral but also
of the entire political system. It stands as the bedrock of
accountability in the polity. Despite extensive educational
programmes of the national electoral authorities before
each election, despite extensive campaigns mounted by
each party, despite the participation of print and
electronic media in the process of awakening people’s
interest in elections, participation in the registration and
voting exercise have varied from one election to another.
In 1979 the voter turnout was as low as 25.8% for the
national Assembly elections and 35.2% for the
presidential elections. In subsequent elections this apathy
of voters in Nigeria has not improved significantly. It
reached its lowest ebb during the transition under the
Abacha regime when about 5% of those registered
exercised their voting right in the National Assembly
elections (Anyanwu, 1999).
The operative phrase above is “those registered”! Fact
is that a good number of Nigerians do not take part in the
revision of voters register. Indeed, the universality of
franchise notwithstanding, the operative franchise of
Nigeria is far below the nominal franchise. The nominal
franchise is defined as the percentage of the voting
population measured against the total population.
Operative franchise refers to the percentage of those who
actually registered. The percentage of those who
registered and voted is defined as effective franchise
Available statistics for 1999 showed that effective
franchise was low. For the National Assembly Elections,
of the 58 Million registered voters only 44% took part in
the electoral process. The number was relatively higher
in the election of the president confirming the greater
importance the people attach to the election. The turnout
reached 52%. Compared on state by state basis,
electoral turnout in that election reached as low as 20%
in Lagos for the National Assembly election and 26% for
the presidential elections in FCT and Kano. (INEC
Report, 1999) In 2003 and 2007 elections, it declined all
the more.
The 2007 elections were much more problematic
because of the fact that people in most of the
constituencies never had the effective opportunity to
express their preference. Effective opportunity is used
here to refer to absence of widespread arbitrary
impediments like wilful intimidation of voters,
absence/hoarding of ballot papers, fraud, and similar
others that would gravely impair the freeness and
fairness of the elections. What emerged from the various
electoral tribunals including the latest in Delta State are
valid indications of subversions by person/persons in
consort with one or the other of the political parties.
Indeed, it was the fallouts of the 2007 elections that laid
the foundation for the current electoral reforms. We are
all living witnesses of the repeat of the same story during
the last Governorship election in Anambra State on
th
February 6 2010 where even the willing voters could not
vote. The implication of the general low turnout is that
many citizens are in reality disenfranchised.
The 2007 elections have gone down in history as
Nigeria’s worst competing with the 1964 elections. The
greatest significance of the 1964 election in the history of
elections in Nigeria was its notoriety for malpractice.
Because the stakes were very high for the two major
contesting groups, each indulged in questionable
electoral practices that shook the nation to its foundation.
This theme is better handled separately. Suffice it to note
that this charade of an election in addition to other
aggravating factors sowed the seed of drift into political
Nwakwo 085
chaos that ended the first Republic. Like in the Plato’s
allegory of the cave, Nigeria, used to the darkness of unfree and unfair elections was dazed by the candle light of
the 1993 election that has been adjudged the most free
and fair comparatively. She could not stand the light and
so ran back into the cave by annulling that election.
Experience wise, Nigeria appears not to have fully learnt
the consequences of not allowing free and fair exercise of
the people’s power in election, which is instability. In
general, absence of free, fair and credible elections for
various reasons articulated above, have been the portion
of Nigeria since independence. This absence, according
to our hypothesis has an intrinsic linkage with the nation’s
underdevelopment.
Between Development and Underdevelopment
Development is here defined as a pattern of social and
structured economic transformations which optimises the
economic and societal benefits available to the people
within a given political community, in this case Nigeria (cf.
Goodland/Ledoc, 1987). It reflects significant changes in
the society and the economy in such a way as to optimise
the level of the benefits to the people, benefits which are
reasonably and equitably distributed. Its ultimate
objective is the creation of prosperity and a high standard
of living in a community. It is a factor of two variables:
economic welfare and qualitative social changes which
enables the community to undertake sustained growth.
Both are the two sides of development problematic. It is
important to emphasise that economic welfare is not the
same as economic growth. The primary objective of
development is the welfare of the people, “the
improvement of life for the entire population of a nation”
while economic growth is “its principal performance test”.
(Goodland/Ledoc, 1987). Although both aspects
constitute integral part of development, empirical data
indicate no rigid link between them. The operative word
here is “rigid link” since both are relevant to each other.
Economic performance in terms of growth can diverge
widely from human development while relative changes
in human development observed in Nigeria since the
1960s did not lead automatically to better economic
performance. It is however, not part of this paper to
investigate the empirical and logical relationship between
them. It suffices for our purpose, to note that both are
central to development and vital for its sustainability.
Measured in terms of the quality of life and the degree
of freedom available to the individual and compared to
the quantum of resources available to the country,
Nigeria has underdeveloped these fifty years.
Underdevelopment is not the opposite of development
which is un-development or the absence of development.
It suggests rather ongoing and indeed serious
exploitation and utilisation of the human and material
resources of a given people to the disadvantage of that
same people. It is negative development in which vital
resources of Nigeria are being utilised to the
disadvantage of Nigerians. Underdevelopment is,
therefore, a worse situation that non-development.
Poor economic performance and poverty in the midst
of rich natural and human resources typify Nigeria these
past fifty years. After an initial post-colonial growth, the
net development indices of the country began declining.
This fact is discernible from the Annual Abstract of
Statistics of the Federal Office of Statistics. While it may
be true that the economy of Nigeria remained vulnerable
to changing international markets, and that rising debts
limited the scope of action of Governments, corrupt
appropriation of limited resources limited equitable
distribution and redistribution
Accordingly, the development of social resources like
education, health services, communication, etc. began to
suffer set back. This was in the face of astronomical rises
in the population and rural urban migration. The overall
effect of all these was that resources could not go round,
thus intensifying inequalities not just among individuals
but also among different ethnic, regional, and parochial
groups. The majority of the people began to depend “on
paltry percolation downward of benefits through layered
patronage relations” (Williams 2000, 4). New social
infrastructure could not be procured, available ones came
to be overused, quality of social deliveries – health,
education, communication, etc. declined, and like any
circular problem, the quantity and quality of input into the
productive sector of the economy declined.
It is known that socio-economic development changes
fundamentally the way individuals and groups relate to
the political process. An advanced level of economic
development tends to reduce socio-economic inequality
and mitigate feelings of relative deprivation and injustices
among lower classes. This in turn reduces the likelihood
of extremist politics and violent conflicts. That violent
conflicts characterise Nigeria’s contemporary polity is a
pointer to the quality of life of the ordinary Nigerian as
most violent conflicts are contingent on wider social and
economic structures arising usually from access and
distribution questions. Violent conflicts including armed
robbery, kidnapping, and the likes in turn end up critically
restricting the degree of freedom available to the
individual. Compared with other Third World countries
like Brazil that began on almost same footing as Nigeria,
Nigeria occupies today the lower rung in the development
ladder. While her compatriots in various parts of the world
have been able to achieve a measure of development
over the last five decades – self-sufficiency in food
production, rapid economic growth, improved living
standards for the greater majority of their populations,
etc. Nigeria has performed abysmally in all these
respects. Instead of continued upward trend that was
seen during the immediate post-independence, the
situation deteriorated and has continued to deteriorate.
These facts can be taken from the various reports and
086 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
development indicators of the various organs of the
United Nations.
Much has been written on the causes. Scholars have
traced the poor socio-economic performance in Africa to
corruption, excessive population growth, ethnic conflicts
and consequent political violence, military intervention in
politics and governance, incompetent leadership,
inappropriate institutional arrangements, competitive
disadvantage in the global economy, etc. Discussing
generally on Africa, Mbaku (Online, 2000) emphasised
poorly designed, weak, and inappropriate institutional
arrangements as the critical determinant of poverty and
underdevelopment in Africa. He observed that the laws
and institutions “promoted opportunism (e.g. corruption
and rent seeking), restricted economic freedoms and,
subsequently, the ability of individuals to engage freely in
exchange impede entrepreneurial activities and
consequently wealth creation, and generally endanger
sustainable development. According to him, the
institutional arrangements that the African countries
adopted at independence enhanced the ability of those
who had captured and evacuated structures of colonial
hegemony to misuse the positions entrusted to them. In
the process, they stunted the emergence of an
indigenous entrepreneurial class and, subsequently, the
creation of wealth that the post-independent society
needed to deal with massive and pervasive poverty
(Mbaku, Online, 2000).
From the above scenario, it appears that the picture of
underdevelopment may not be properly understood
outside its colonial legacy. This has been the dominant
framework of interpretations by scholars of Nigeria and
Africa over the past fifty years. This legacy is that of
suppliers of raw materials to the metropolises. It is in this
dependent role that African economies till date are
embedded in the international market. But even with this
legacy, available estimates show an intensive growth and
development process in Nigeria in the dying days of
colonialism. This we earlier noted even spilt over into the
early post colonial era. The investigation of dynamic
properties of colonial economic development does not fall
within the ambient of this work. It suffices to agree with
the scholars that the colonial economic legacy was the
takeoff point of the independent Nigeria, and that despite
all criticisms, the state of the late colonial and early post
colonial economies in Nigeria, nay Africa, in the light of
today, was fairly sufficient as basis for sustained growth
and development. It is therefore, only fair to conclude that
the socio-economic development problematic in Africa is
a product of double history: the colonial and post colonial.
Colonialism laid the foundation of the contradictions in
the socio-economic relations of the people, while post
colonial decades not so much of bad decisions as bad
implementations by squabbling, incompetent and
opportunistic leaderships naively styled along the line
used by their colonial predecessors, corruption and
misplaced priorities alarmingly exacerbated the problem.
The past fifty years is wasted opportunity.
Indeed instead of continuously pointing accusing
fingers at colonialism and discussing how Europe
underdeveloped
Africa,
discussing
how
Britain
underdeveloped Nigeria, our focus both in the classroom
and in the praxis should henceforth be on how Nigerians
underdeveloped and in fact continues to underdevelop
Nigeria.
Elections and Development: The Nexus
Establishing a nexus between elections and development
begins with distinguishing the two. The one, elections is
political, and procedural (a process) in nature. It consists
of political rules and procedures whose validity depends
on the willingness of the political community to observe
them. The other as understood here is socio-economic,
and an outcome (of a process) embodying issues of
substantive importance to the people (in form of socioeconomic transformation. The nexus between the two is
that the one, the substantive outcome demands the
other, the process. There cannot be the outcome without
the process. There cannot be the bread without the
baking and the bakery. It has been well documented that
the real obstacle to development in Nigeria (Africa) is the
absence of institutional arrangements that effectively
constrain the state and its agents from engaging in
opportunism, and positively engage in activities that
enhance the creation of wealth, improve the ability of all
individuals within the country to participate fully and
effectively in national development and thus quickening
growth in socio-economic development variables. We
had in an earlier paper (Nwankwo, 2009) contended in
the same regard that good governance matters for
development in which our key defining variable was
system-wide accountability mechanism.
Restated
otherwise here, weak, inappropriate system-wide
accountability mechanism engendered through a poorly
executed electoral process is a critical determinant of
underdevelopment in Africa. Election as earlier noted has
a supreme accountability function and it is this function
that links elections to development. The state’s capacity
to reform, to implement reforms, and effect development
depends on the degree this accountability mechanism is
in place.
According to Nwankwo (2009) accountability connotes
expectation or assumption of account giving:
answerability. It constrains the extent to which officials
especially elected ones, can wilfully deviate from their
responsibility. The emphasis on elected officials is based
on the fact that they are supremely and doubly
answerable. On the one hand they are horizontally
accountable to the relative extent that they should take
actions ranging from routine oversight to criminal
Nwakwo 087
sanctions over and against those under them for
purposes of rendering services to the people. Citation
needed here Whether it is invasion of domicile, police
brutality or such other forms of human rights abuses that
are prevalent in Nigeria, or the non execution according
to specification of service delivery and other socioeconomic development programmes, etc. they bespeak
of failure of horizontal accountability. In normal
circumstances, such failures of horizontal accountability
constitute yardstick in vertical accountability, namely,
when the elected officials face the people in periodic
elections. As noted earlier, that is why the negative
concept of electoral defeat was included in the definition
of election, namely to emphasise the control or
accounting function of democratic elections. Elected
public officials that fail to perform, that fail to be
responsive, that fail to be horizontally accountable will be
removed by the people in any free and fair election.
What have happened over the past fifty years in
Nigeria as far as elections are concerned does not
require much elaboration. Simply put we have had
situations where elections never took place or never
really took place! “Never really took place” implies
situations where elections were organised but hardly
deserved the name of democratic election by lacking in
credibility and not being free and fair because of a
syndrome of various factors. Common to all such
situations is that failure of horizontal accountability were
deliberately made irrelevant for vertical accountability
which would have ensured that those that failed to
perform would have been removed from office by the
people. The converse would have propelled leaders to
deliver on their promises through adequate processing of
the people’s input into the system, in the expectation of
the people’s future support.
A major condition that influences positively or
negatively the attitude of the people is the degree of
effectiveness of a regime defined in terms of the extent to
which the regime is able to meet the expectations of the
people within its immediate domain. Meeting the
expectations of the people under a democratic system is
a product of strategic decision making by political actors
within the enabling and restricting institutional
environment. This can be guaranteed in any highly
participative and competitive environment. In such a
situation leaders must have proved themselves to be reelected. Easton’s systems theory is a veritable instrument
in this analysis. Because the elected leaders failed to
transform inputs in terms of development demands by the
people, and knowing fully well that they do not deserve a
further support of the people, but determined to hold on to
power against the people’s wish, elected leaders throughout
the post independent electoral history of Nigeria,
disregarded democratic electoral rules and thus truncated
vertical accountability: the key function of elections. Power
has never really belonged to the people.
Post independence elections in Nigeria have been
characterised by what Ibeanu (2003) referred to as
“primitive accumulation of votes”. By this he meant
winning of votes by all means including the use of
violence and general disregard of the rule of law. To put it
in common man’s language, it is stealing the people’s
mandate. The charades of elections in 2007 are the most
recent examples when results of elections were written
and declared even before the polls were over. If one can
win election without people’s vote, then vote is said not to
have value. If votes do not have value, people’s
confidence in election diminishes. Ibeanu (2007)
distinguished three dimensional values of vote:
promissory,
content
and
psychological
values.
Promissory value of votes is used to refer to the promises
made by those who ask for the people’s vote to deliver
the value of the votes on demand in terms of the
programmes and policies on the basis of which they
would be given the votes. The central question that this
raises is whether the promises made at elections were
kept by the elected over the past fifty years. Content
value has to do with equality of votes. Do the votes of
some count or weigh more than those of the others? Are
the people’s preferences through votes count at all or are
they thrown away when not in compliance with the
preferences of the high and the mighty? Psychological
value refers to the value attached to the votes in the
minds of the voters: the expectation by the voters that
their votes will make a difference.
All elections over the past fifty years have to various
aggravating degrees recorded negative answers on the
three dimensions. The people of Nigeria invested their
votes on the promises of successive elected officials to
deliver “dividends”. They have instead received on
demand a devaluation of their investment – far much
less, when at all, than they were promised. Ordinarily,
they would have changed their investment portfolio by
voting for another. However, they have consistently been
unable to do just that, to effect the necessary change.
This has been so because content wise the votes of
certain persons – presidents, leaders of hegemonic ruling
parties, security agents, etc. counted more in delivering
electoral
outcomes
than
the
people’s
votes.
Consequently, the people lost confidence in votes and
the psychological satisfaction that their votes would
matter declined. Voter-turnout declined systematically. In
other words, the high de-valorisation of votes negatively
impacted the vigour of democracy with consequent
implications for development. The thesis here is that the
higher the value attached to votes in any polity, the
higher the level of development. The converse is equally
true: underdevelopment in the post independent Nigeria
is linked to high de-valorisation of votes which
continuously gave rise to unresponsive leaders that have
no fear of people’s sanction, that are not bordered by
people’s negative votes. They preferred primitive
088 J. Res. Peace Gend. Dev.
accumulation to development since they can and did use
their accumulation to set aside possible sanctions by the
people at the polls.
Primitive accumulation accounts for people’s
impoverishment these past fifty years. The nation’s
golden jubilee is a celebration of this impoverishment.
True the nation has survived as one despite all odds
these past fifty years and this is worth celebrating, but
this survival has been at less than tolerable level. It is
precisely at the level of tolerable existence of the people
as an entity that the development problematic is situated.
The later is not worth celebrating. Yet the celebration of
this unique anniversary offers us an opportunity for
reflection, rethinking and re-planning. Critical to it all is
making elections to matter. Development demands high
valorisation of votes. Nigeria must re-establish, or in fact
establish faith in elections. This can be achieved through
ensuring that the current electoral reforms have the
capacity at least to guarantee content and psychological
values of votes. This two has the capacity to compel the
promissory value and through enhancing democracy and
governance, compel development.
What the established nexus implicates is that the
establishment of legitimate public authority through the
collective will of the people in a competitive and
participative environment creates a more favourable and
enabling environment for basic governance capabilities
that can guarantee development. According to Nwankwo
(2009), not only is the exercise of democratic political and
civil rights intrinsically valuable in expanding the range of
possibilities and choices open to citizens, it is also
instrumentally
valuable
for
identifying
and
operationalising citizen needs and building policies and
institutions that will effectively address them. They are
indispensable for implementing efficient and sustainable
public policies. Simply put, effective practice of
democracy, here understood as the permeation of
political participation and competition in the political
landscape of the polity, is intrinsically linked to socioeconomic development. This linkage is recursive to the
relative extent that every achievement developmentally
impacts the more on democracy for a further impact on
development.
Reflecting on this recursive effect, scholars have over
the years used socio-economic development variables to
develop empirical theories or general frameworks of
democratic development and stability. Such theories
have over the decades provided social scientists from
Aristotle through Montesquieu, Max Weber, Lipset to the
present day with general explanations for the failure or
success of democratic governance. In a field breaking
research, Lipset (1959) investigated the conditions
associated with the existence and stability of democratic
societies from sociological and behavioural standpoint.
He presented a number of hypotheses which he tested
with cross national data from 48 countries explicating the
social conditions which serve to support a democratic
political system. His core conclusion is that “the more well
to do a nation, the greater the chance that it will sustain
democracy”.
Since Lipset this field of research has grown
tremendously. Deutsch (1961 )
found
a
strong
relationship between political participation such as voter
turnout and aggregate measures of socio-economic
development. Curtright (1963) posited a linear
relationship between economic and democratic
developments, indicating that as countries become more
advanced economically they tend to become more
advanced politically. Neubauer (1967) found certain basic
socio-economic development as necessary to elevate
countries to a level at which they can begin to support
complex nation-wide patterns of political interaction, one
of which may be democracy. Dahl (1971) opined that
literacy, education and communication which can be
linked to socio-economic development, increase the
effective demand for democracy. Halliwell (1994) using
data pooled from 125 countries over a period from 1960 –
1985 evaluated the relations between democracy and
economic growth and came to the conclusion that
specific economic variables have overall positive effect
on democracy – a strong tendency for democracy to be
chosen and maintained as a system of governance – and
a differentiated effects of democratic variables on
economic variables. His core measure of democracy in
the analysis is political rights and liberties.
The wealth of literature in this area is immense.
Fundamental to all of them is this attempt to explain how
democratic states evolve overtime, to generalise about
micro-social prerequisites for political democracy. Their
conclusions in the case of most third world countries, nay
Nigeria would all point to one direction: “as poor nations
with massive socioeconomic development needs and
high popular expectations; as poorly integrated nations,
with deep ethnic and/or class divisions; and as politically
underdeveloped nations, with fragile party system, weak
administrative bureaucracies and little experience with
the give-and-take of large scale representative
institutions, third world nations, at their present levels of
development, have little realistic hope of sustaining
democratic institutions” (Diamond, 1988,1). Drawing glib
analogies from such general frameworks and supported
with interpretations of some empirical data, it is usually
argued that most African states have not reached the
threshold of democracy and “to have expected
democracy to flourish would have been historical
blindness” (Chabal, 1986.5). Specifically, Huntington
(1994, 214) argued that by reason of their poverty or the
violence of their politics [third world states were] unlikely
to move in a democratic direction”. Chabal in his own
argument appears to have re-echoed Lipset (1959) who
had earlier posited that given the existence of povertystricken masses, low level of education, an elongated
pyramid of class structure, the prognosis for the
perpetuation of political democracy in Africa was bleak. In
Nwakwo 089
fact Huntington (1994, 218) was convinced that “with few
exceptions, the limits of democratic development in the
world may have been reached”.
Nigeria certainly for Huntington was not part of the few
exceptions. However, while she might like to hide under
these theories to defend or explain her democratic
failures these past fifty years, we note the fact that this
relationship, which these studies focus have been so
much drummed that they are no longer especially
revealing or interesting. In any case these studies do not
significantly explain Nigeria’s failures. We need therefore
not continue to replicate such studies. Thus we focused
here not so much on the extent to which liberal
democracy in Nigeria has been or not been successful,
nor on the extent to which the socio-economic
explanations advanced for its recurrent failures are valid.
We focused rather on the extent to which the variables of
development that explain the nation’s democratic failures
were in fact avoidable. This focus is based on the general
assumption that the real world is not a deterministic one.
As such democracy can emerge and persist under
conditions considered by the scholars as normally
adverse to it. As Lipset (1959,103) rightly observed,
“political democracy exists and has existed (and can still
exist) in variety of circumstances, even though it is most
commonly sustained by a limited cluster of conditions”. In
fact that Nigeria and many other African states have
again and again taken on the challenge of democratising
their political systems, as evidenced from the recent
seemingly sincere electoral reforms in Nigeria, (even in
the face of permanent cleavages and underdevelopment)
sufficiently rejects the deterministic verdict. It is a
sufficient reason and signal for the need to develop
paradigms of democratisation under conditions which are
unsimilar to the one underlying the old: a paradigm of
democratic development under different conditions.
CONCLUSION
To conclude, we begin by summarising. Election and
development though unrelated in various aspects, above
all in terms of process and substance are connected.
Development focuses on issues of substantive
importance to the people. While such issues of
substantive importance that is the realm of development
may appear to lie beyond electoral contestation and
participation, the relation between the two divide is
provided by the fact that under democratic rules, the
electorates’ future options are not foreclosed (Whitehead,
1992). Whoever fails to meet the expectations of the
people loses claim to rule and will certainly be removed
by the people in any democratic elections. Over the past
fifty years in Nigeria, however, the electorates’ future
options have continuously been foreclosed by inept,
irresponsive and irresponsible leaderships. They hold
unto power despite their substantive rejection by the
people. This phenomenon has had negative implications
for development. Measured on key development
indicators, instead of development, Nigeria has
underdeveloped these fifty years. Till date the definition
of poverty by UNDP as deprivation and denial of choices
and opportunities most basic to human development as
well as lack of the ability to make choices and use
available opportunities purposely applies to Nigeria.
Measured on the basis of key indicators like hunger,
malnutrition, illiteracy, disease, life of misery and squalor,
low
life
expectance,
socio-political
instability,
unemployment, infrastructural decay, Nigeria has
remained caught up in detrimental cycle of
underdevelopment over the past fifty years. The
mediocre performance on these indicators is at the
background of the violent conflicts that are afflicting the
country. Despite other possible intervening variables that
may have accounted for the nations mediocre
performance, the situation today would have been far
much different if we had responsive leaders who were
truly responsible to the electorate through free fair and
credible elections.
Development demands high valorisation of votes and
it is in this sense that election matters for development. A
“high political competition can well encourage claims to
deep responsibility. It may also give supporters some, if
rarely much [power] to keep their leaders to their word
(promissory value) by threats of defection. The
stratagems of power can thus become the conventions of
freedom. A culture of political accountability can emerge.
Its calculated moralities can create a community with a
competitive interest in its shared history (Lonsdale,
1981138). Dahl (1971) puts it more concretely: if
oppositions are granted the right to form political parties,
if parties are entitled to participate in elections, if the
elections are fair and free, and if the highest office in the
Government of the State are held by those who win
elections, then competition among political elite makes it
likely that the policies of the Government will respond in
time to the preferences of a majority of voters. Against
the backdrop of the various reforms, even when not deep
enough, 2011 may be the decisive beginning of Nigeria’s
journey to the promised land of development.
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