Conflict of Party Politics and Challenges of Governance in Nigeria. An Overview Since the Start of the Fourth Republic in 1999 (PDF)

Scientific Essay from the year 2021 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Region: Africa, , language: English, abstract: Political Parties are one of the fundamentals of Democratic governance, and it's been adjudged the best form of government that allows equal opportunities for participation and representation all over the world. In 1999, Nigeria kick-started the journey of the Fourth Republic of democratic governance uninterrupted in the case of other civilized democracies of the world. Consequently, this work examined the conflicts in political parties and its challenges on governance in the country.

The study adopted the descriptive approach of analysis, and made of the strategic conflict theory, the study observed that a strong and stable political party under the rule of law will guarantee good governance, accountability transparency and many more under the law. This study further observed that the political parties in Nigeria have moved some steps forward, a lot needs to be done in the areas of incessant defections/ party switching/ cross carpeting of party members from one party to another. The work also observed that the political parties need to separate party leadership from governmental leadership; the two cannot be under the leadership of one elected government official in the name of party leader. This is the result of constant conflict in the struggle to control the headship of a political party between elected officials who may have abandoned governance and other party big wigs that leads to incessant defections by those who lost out of the struggle. The study concludes that for democracy to be fully functional in Nigeria, the political parties must strengthen the party institutions and make elected leaders answerable to the party, by this act the party will remain supreme and its ideologies and manifestos must be carried out to the latter by elected representatives at all levels of governance.