Political Interference in Election Administration and Electoral Irregularities in Nigeria
Main Article Content
Abstract
The extant literature is replete with fine-grained explanations of problems of electoral irregularities in Nigeria. However, how political interference in election administration contributes to these problems has largely remained unacknowledged. The Nigerian Constitution establishes the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) as a relatively autonomous electoral body and, also, empowers the president to appoint its principal officers subject to Senate confirmation. These provisions that allow interested parties to determine INEC membership composition delink INEC’s institutional design from its operational independence and, therefore, incapacitate it from asserting its independence in order to guarantee credible elections in Nigeria. The present study relies on a triangulation of qualitative research techniques such as documentary sources, key informant interviews, and personal observations. Premised on descriptive statistics and content analyses, this study reveals that political interference in INEC membership composition and financing considerably accounts for recurring lethal electoral irregularities; shows that whoever controls the human and financial elements of INEC is in firm control of its operations for favourable electoral outcomes; and suggests the need for voter-determined reforms for a workable electoral system in the context and content of Nigeria.
Article Details
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Authors’ Certification
Basic instructions and copyright notice
Full Publication ethics and malpractice statement of the journal Modern Africa could be found here.
In submitting the manuscript to Modern Africa, the authors certify that:
- They are authorised by their co-authors to enter into these arrangements.
- The submitted manuscript is original and has not been published before (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture, review, thesis or working paper), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication has been approved by all the authors and that the authors have full authority to enter into this agreement.
- They warrant and represent that they have the full power and authority to enter into and execute this agreement and to convey the rights granted herein, and that such rights are not now subject to prior assignment, transfer or other encumbrance. This also applies to the text and photo originals attained from other sources (for which the authors have secured the right to reproduce any material that has already been published or copyrighted elsewhere).
- Their manuscript contains nothing that is unlawful, libellous, or which would, if published, constitute a breach of contract or of confidence or of commitment given to secrecy.
- In the event that the parties to this agreement, either individually or collectively, are held responsible for damages or the costs of a legal process undertaken by a third party as a result of the authors’ actions under points 1, 2, 3, and 4, the authors agree to release the publisher from the claims of the third party and to compensate the publisher for any resulting legal costs.
- Plagiarism is regarded as a serious offence and leads to the rejection of a manuscript.
- Any violation of the above-mentioned rules leads to the rejection of a manuscript.
- They agree to the following license and copyright agreement:
Copyright Agreement
Authors who publish in the journal Modern Africa agree to the following terms:
- The journal is no-fee open access journal. That means all content is free and without charges available at journal webpages. Also, authors are not charged for having their papers published in the journal.
- Authors retain the copyright but grant the journal right of first publication in print and online to the journal Modern Africa. The work is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution - Share Alike, which allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The license is valid for both electronic and paper copies.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal’s published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), provided they add an explicit acknowledgement of its initial publication in the journal Modern Africa.
- Authors grant Modern Africa commercial rights to produce hardcopy volumes of the journal for sale to libraries and individuals, as well as to integrate the work, its title, and its abstract in databases, abstracting and indexing services, and other similar information sources.
- Court of jurisdiction is Hradec Králové, Czech Republic.