Political parties and democratic consolidation in Nigeria (1999-2019)

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.