Wet Underwear: The Perils of Vote -Buying and Bad Governance in Nigeria

Abstract

It was anticipated that the re-emergence of democratic rule in Nigeria in 1999 after a long interregnum of military dictatorship would usher in good governance in the country. However, after over two decades of democratizing, the negative bargain whereby citizens sell their votes (mandate) lured with vote-buying by politicians seems to have conspired to democratically “imprison” the masses to poverty in a serial display of bad governance by ruling mega parties. This paper examined the outstanding issues that facilitate vote-selling by citizens and vote-buying by candidates in the country. The paper is qualitative and descriptive in nature, and relied on secondary sources of data. It adopted the dialectical materialism approach, generally referred to as the Marxian political economy framework to guide data collection and analysis. Data were gathered from libraries and the Internet. The contents of the secondary data collected were dialectically analyzed in line with the objective of the paper. It was found that the retention of the inherited colonial state structure coupled with the economic disadvantageous position of the masses exposed citizens to collide in selling their mandate which gave the ruling elite the impunity to tactically institutionalize bad governance. To this end, among others, the paper recommended and concluded that only a simultaneous structural reform of the state and a deliberate robust human development programme can reverse the peril of vote-buying, which is reflected in the serial bad governance in the Nigerian system.