Savagery in Politics

Political practice on the platforms of political parties as a route to political power started in its present form in Nigeria during the last decade of the colonial era. With the twin formation of the Action Group of Nigeria AG and the Northern Peoples'' Congress NPC, events that made the new political parties rivals to the National Council of Nigeria and the Cameroons NCNC, politics and political practice in Nigeria rapidly acquired the characteristics of parochialism on the basis of tribes, planned electoral rigging and fraud, corruption in government and the public service. These features are adversarial to economic development, a project that should rightly be the objective of any group that goes into government, particularly in a country that is so backward as Nigeria. With the formal departure of the British colonialists on October 1, 1960 military politicians ravenously invaded the political terrain on January 15, 1966. In spite of the regular claims to the objective of cleaning up the political field at every successful overthrow of the constitution by successive military dictators, the coup plotters and their civilian collaborators deliberately sustained the politics of exploitation of the people and the kleptocracy that were the hallmarks of the politicians whom they had removed from power. Every military government was composed of the coup makers and the politicians they had excised from constitutional government. In 1999, the military dictators were compelled to retreat from power following the twin deaths of Sani Abacha and Moshood Abiola. The present constitutional polity is still, like before and during the era of military dictatorship, characterised by faulty electoral mechanism and processes in a cosmetic democracy that perpetuates the combination of erstwhile military dictators and their usual civilian collaborators in power. They utilise the platforms of the three ruling political parties as their mutual political base.

In such a political environment that effectively shuts out alternative and new political options from the choices of the improvished Nigerian peoples, kleptocracy in government, corruption by the ruling politicians and exploitation of the people continue as the prominent features of Nigerian political practice. This book offers a new approach that the author believes that politicians with new ideas can use to gain access to political power and initiate the needed rapid economic development of Nigeria. The Democratic Alternative and similar political organisations are called upon to utilise the programme in this book to rescue Nigeria and Nigerians from the clutches and grips of political practitioners whose ideology, objectives, methods and practices in government have continuously denied Nigerians of the immense benefits that are derivable from the abundant national resources with which the country is blessed.