Download or read book Class Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria written by Larry Diamond and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 1988-08-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The overthrow in January 1966 of Nigeria’s First Republic erased what had been regarded as perhaps the most promising prospect for liberal democracy in post-colonial Africa. Marking the sweeping failure of parliamentary institutions across a continent of new nations, it accelerated the slide into a ghastly civil war. Class, Ethnicity and Democracy is the first scholarly study to analyze the evolution, decay, and failure of Nigeria’s First Republic and to weigh this crucial experience against theories of the conditions for stable democratic government. Rejecting explanations that focus on political culture, political institutions, or ethnic competition and conflict, Larry Diamond identifies the root of Nigeria’s democratic failure in the interrelationship between class, ethnic and state structures. This led the emergent dominant class in each region to mobilize and exploit ethnicity and to trample the democratic process in furious competition for state control, since that control was the primary means for accumulating wealth and consolidating class dominance. Tracing the polarization of conflict and the erosion of legitimacy through five major crises, Diamond presents a new methodology for analyzing the persistence and failure of democracies and points to the relationship between state and society as a crucial determinant of the possibility for liberal democracy.
Download or read book This House Has Fallen written by Karl Maier and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: To understand Africa, one must understand Nigeria, and few Americans understand Nigeria better than Karl Maier. This House Has Fallen is a bracing and disturbing report on the state of Africa's most populous, potentially richest, and most dangerously dysfunctional nation. Each year, with depressing consistency, Nigeria is declared the most corrupt state in the entire world. Though Nigeria is a nation into which billions of dollars of oil money flow, its per capita income has fallen dramatically in the past two decades. Military coup follows military coup. A bellwether for Africa, it is a country of rising ethnic tensions and falling standards of living, very possibly on the verge of utter collapse -- a collapse that could dramatically overshadow even the massacres in Rwanda. A brilliant piece of reportage and travel writing, This House Has Fallenlooks into the Nigerian abyss and comes away with insight, profound conclusions, and even some hope. Updated with a new preface by the author.
Download or read book Nigerian Politics written by Rotimi Ajayi and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume engages in an in-depth discussion of Nigerian politics. Written by an expert group of Nigerian researchers, the chapters provide an overarching, Afrocentric view of politics in Nigeria, from pre-colonial history to the current federal system. The book begins with a series of historical chapters analyzing the development of Nigeria from its traditional political institutions through the First Republic. After establishing the necessary historical context, the next few chapters shift the focus to specific political institutions and phenomena, including the National Assembly, local government and governance, party politics, and federalism. The remaining chapters discuss issues that continue to affect Nigerian politics: the debt crisis, oil politics in the Niger Delta, military intervention and civil-military relations, as well as nationalism and inter-group relations. Providing an overview of Nigerian politics that encompasses history, economics, and public administration, this volume will be useful to students and researchers interested in African politics, African studies, democracy, development, history, and legislative studies.
Download or read book Out of Sight written by Jacob D. Kurtzer and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-10-15 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nigeria represents one of the United States’ most important relationships in Africa. Despite U.S. security sector and humanitarian assistance programs, ten years of violent insurgency in northeast Nigeria have led to massive humanitarian needs for more than seven million people, and the crisis shows no signs of abating. Ongoing restrictions by the government of Nigeria on humanitarian action threaten U.S. policy goals of improved humanitarian outcomes and a reduction in the presence of violent terrorist organizations. This report unpacks the challenges for humanitarian actors, the role of the United States and other donor institutions in meeting humanitarian needs, and the effectiveness of the Nigerian government’s response. Jacob D. Kurtzer provides concrete recommendations for mitigating the civilian impact of the conflict in northeast Nigeria.
Download or read book Ill Winds written by Larry Diamond and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: *Shortlisted for the 2020 Arthur Ross Book Award* From America’s leading scholar of democracy, a personal, passionate call to action against the rising authoritarianism that challenges our world order—and the very value of liberty Larry Diamond has made it his life's work to secure democracy's future by understanding its past and by advising dissidents fighting autocracy around the world. Deeply attuned to the cycles of democratic expansion and decay that determine the fates of nations, he watched with mounting unease as illiberal rulers rose in Hungary, Poland, Turkey, the Philippines, and beyond, while China and Russia grew increasingly bold and bullying. Then, with Trump's election at home, the global retreat from freedom spread from democracy's margins to its heart. Ill Winds' core argument is stark: the defense and advancement of democratic ideals relies on U.S. global leadership. If we do not reclaim our traditional place as the keystone of democracy, today's authoritarian swell could become a tsunami, providing an opening for Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and their admirers to turn the twenty-first century into a dark time of despotism. We are at a hinge in history, between a new era of tyranny and an age of democratic renewal. Free governments can defend their values; free citizens can exercise their rights. We can make the internet safe for liberal democracy, exploit the soft, kleptocratic underbelly of dictatorships, and revive America's degraded democracy. Ill Winds offers concrete, deeply informed suggestions to fight polarization, reduce the influence of money in politics, and make every vote count. In 2020, freedom's last line of defense still remains "We the people."
Download or read book Understanding Modern Nigeria written by Toyin Falola and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to the politics and society of post-colonial Nigeria, highlighting the key themes of ethnicity, democracy, and development.
Download or read book The Open Sore of a Continent written by Wole Soyinka and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The events that led up to dissident writer Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995 marked Nigeria's decline from a post-colonial success story to its current military dictatorship. Wole Soyinka, whose own Nigerian passport was confiscated by the Nigerian military in 1994, explores the history and future of Nigeria in a compelling jeremiad that is as intense as it is provocative, learned, and wide-ranging.
Download or read book Democracy in Retreat written by Joshua Kurlantzick and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2013-03-19 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIVSince the end of the Cold War, the assumption among most political theorists has been that as nations develop economically, they will also become more democratic—especially if a vibrant middle class takes root. This assumption underlies the expansion of the European Union and much of American foreign policy, bolstered by such examples as South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and even to some extent Russia. Where democratization has failed or retreated, aberrant conditions take the blame: Islamism, authoritarian Chinese influence, or perhaps the rise of local autocrats./divDIV /divDIVBut what if the failures of democracy are not exceptions? In this thought-provoking study of democratization, Joshua Kurlantzick proposes that the spate of retreating democracies, one after another over the past two decades, is not just a series of exceptions. Instead, it reflects a new and disturbing trend: democracy in worldwide decline. The author investigates the state of democracy in a variety of countries, why the middle class has turned against democracy in some cases, and whether the decline in global democratization is reversible./div
Download or read book Contemporary Nigerian Politics written by A. Carl LeVan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2015, Nigeria's voters cast out the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). Here, A. Carl LeVan traces the political vulnerability of Africa's largest party in the face of elite bargains that facilitated a democratic transition in 1999. These 'pacts' enabled electoral competition but ultimately undermined the party's coherence. LeVan also crucially examines the four critical barriers to Nigeria's democratic consolidation: the terrorism of Boko Haram in the northeast, threats of Igbo secession in the southeast, lingering ethnic resentments and rebellions in the Niger Delta, and farmer-pastoralist conflicts. While the PDP unsuccessfully stoked fears about the opposition's ability to stop Boko Haram's terrorism, the opposition built a winning electoral coalition on economic growth, anti-corruption, and electoral integrity. Drawing on extensive interviews with a number of politicians and generals and civilians and voters, he argues that electoral accountability is essential but insufficient for resolving the representational, distributional, and cultural components of these challenges.
Download or read book Authority Stealing written by Wale Adebanwi and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The post-Cold War world has produced a global consensus on the devastation caused by corruption in society. However, in spite of the growing awareness of the danger that corruption constitutes to democracy and development, and the growing number of anti-corruption agencies in Africa in the last decade, there is yet no elaborate scholarly focus on these agencies, most of which were created in the wake of the recent expansion of multi-party democracy in Africa. As a corrective to this, Authority Stealing chronicles the story of Nuhu Ribadu, arguably Africa''s most courageous and most successful anti-corruption Czar and former head of Nigeria''s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The book places the anti-graft exploits of Ribadu in post-military Nigeria on a larger canvass of the crisis of nationhood in a country in which public office is regarded as an ''eatery.'' This revealing and riveting narrative of one of Africa''s biggest cesspools of graft explains how the systemic or structural crisis which reproduces a thieving ruling class in a typical postcolonial state has pushed a country with an abundance of human and material resources to the bottom of the global human development index. This crisis has also led to the phenomenon of the advance-fee fraud, otherwise known globally as ''Nigerian 419'' or ''Nigerian Scam.'' While focusing on the era of democracy in Nigeria, the book uses biographical, structural and historical perspectives covering fifty years of Nigeria''s existence, illuminating the paradoxes of anti-corruption campaign in Africa. This book, which is based on ethnographic and archival materials, supplemented with interviews with key dramatis personae, will appeal to a variety of audiences and disciplines, including Africanists, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, historians, economists, policy makers, international development experts, criminologists and investigators of international crime syndicates, global anti-graft agencies and activists, and lay readers interested in the issue of corruption around the world. This book is part of the African World Series, edited by Toyin Falola, Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities, University of Texas at Austin. "The reader will find him or herself ... cringing at the extent of debauchery that has enveloped Africa''s most populous state. Adebanwi''s writing appears most fluent and concise when he tackles head-on the corrosive nature of political decadence and corruption, and the multifaceted vision employed by [Nuhu] Ribadu and his contemporaries at the EFCC to rid the nation of this cancer.... [A] salient document depicting an important crusader for justice..." -- Professor Chinua Achebe, author of Things Fall Apart, and David and Marianna Fisher University Professor, Brown University "An excellent, richly detailed source for readers with little knowledge of--but great interest in--the micro-underpinnings of the more visible macro-phenomenon of prebendal politics in Nigeria over the last decade, drawn primarily upon local media reporting and interviews with principals." -- African Studies Review "Will the cesspools of corruption in Nigeria be forever drained and will this great nation discover a path to democratic prosperity? That is the question which confronts us on almost every page of Adebanwi''s searing exposé." -- Richard Joseph, John Evans Professor of International History and Politics, Northwestern University "Authority Stealing documents how discovering, documenting, publicizing, and gesturing at eradicating corruption have constituted the most common methods with which regimes have been compromised, and regime changes have been justified, in Nigeria since independence. When Adebanwi concludes that corruption seems to have become a key instrument of state policy in Nigeria, he cannot be faulted. This book provides the evidence to theorize corruption discourse as the main instrument with which Nigerian rulers invent legitimacy, induce consent from the governed, nurture public goodwill, and sustain continuation. Governance in Nigeria thrives on corruption!" -- Adeleke Adeeko, Humanities Distinguished Professor, The Ohio State University "Readers will be rewarded with a thorough education in the personalities, practices, and political culture that allow billions of dollars of Nigerian state revenues to disappear every year." -- Foreign Affairs "Wale Adebanwi has written an important and illuminating account of Nigeria''s anti-corruption war during Nuhu Ribadu''s courageous leadership of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) ... Adebanwi is good at navigating the thickets of conflicting information that emanated from each high-profile corruption case." -- Journal of Modern African Studies
Download or read book Nigeria s Democratic Experience in the Fourth Republic Since 1999 written by A. Sat Obiyan and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 529 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses various issues that have arisen in the practice of democracy in Nigeria since 1999, focusing on the Obasanjo years (1999-2007). Nigeria's return to democratic rule has been marked by developments such as the implementation of reforms to address perceived economic problems and corruption. The introduction of democracy in the country has also witnessed many challenges, including the difficult relationship between some political chief executives and their deputies; intriguing intergovernmental relations; the rise and resurgence of sub-national groups that pose serious threat to the hegemony of the state; precarious inter-ethnic/inter-sectional relations; attempts to perpetuate the tenure of chief executives through constitutional amendments; and developments in electoral politics and conflicts. The book provides incisive analysis into these issues.
Download or read book The Trouble with Nigeria written by Chinua Achebe and published by Heinemann. This book was released on 1984 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This novel about Nigeria prophesied the 1983 coup.
Download or read book Elections and Governance in Nigeria s Fourth Republic written by Agbu, Osita and published by CODESRIA. This book was released on 2017-05-03 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Elections and Governance in Nigeria’s Fourth Republic is a book about Nigerian politics, governance and democracy. It at once encompasses Nigeria’s post-colonial character, its political economy, party formation since independence, the role of Electoral Commissions, as well as, indepth analyses of the 1999, 2003 and 2007 general elections that involved extensive fieldwork. It also presents aspects of the 2011 and 2015 general elections, while discussing the state of democratic consolidation, and lessons learned for achieving good governance in the country. It is indeed, a must read for students of politics, academics, politicians, statesmen and policy makers, and in fact, stakeholders in the Nigerian democracy project. The book stands out as a well-researched and rich documentary material about elections in Nigeria, and the efforts so far made in growing democracy.
Download or read book Modernization and the Crisis of Development in Africa written by Jeremiah I. Dibua and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2006 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, Jeremiah I. Dibua challenges prevailing notions of Africa's development crisis by drawing attention to the role of modernization as a way of understanding the nature and dynamics of the crisis, and how to overcome the problem of underdevelopment.
Download or read book Democratization in Africa written by Larry Jay Diamond and published by JHU Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 570 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The country-specific chapters serve to underline the differences between African democracy and liberal democracy, yet some authors are at pains to emphasize that whatever their limitations, African democracies are an advance over what had gone before." -- African Studies Review
Download or read book Anatomy of the Niger Delta Crisis written by Victor Ojakorotu and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2010 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anatomy of the Niger Delta crisis: causes, consequences and opportunities for peace is a firm key work providing deep insights into the complex and varied interests that are at play in the Niger Delta of Africa's most populous nation, Nigeria. The nine treatises in this book, unequivocally, identify the primary motivations and major players in the imbroglio that is responsible for the quagmire which the international oil market is faced with today. The bold academic discourses, to a large extent, blame British imperialism, global capitalism and Nigeria's political elites for the situation in the Niger Delta, which has a far reaching global effect. Each of the essays, nonetheless, paints a picture of hope for the distraught communities in the Niger Delta in spite of the dark themes that are the preoccupations of the scholars. That is, if the Nigerian government would approach the Niger Delta crisis with the absolute sincerity that it deserves.
Download or read book Governance and Politics in Post Military Nigeria written by S. Adejumobi and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-12-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection is the product of a National Research Working Group (NRWG) established by Said Adejumobi and supported by the Open Society Initiative for West Africa (OSIWA). It analyzes the progress made in Nigeria since the return to democratic rule in 1999 and the prospects of democratic consolidation in the country.
