Nigeria’s Democracy: A Cancer in Disguise

Given the inability of any known concept or theory to adequately explain Africa’s democratic experience from the Nigerian context, the rationales behind this paper were to: contrive a new concept befitting Nigerian democracy, develop a theory that describes the country’s democracy, and interrogate the upsetting phenomena surrounding Nigeria’s democracy which culminated into the new type of democracy. A qualitative design was used to collect and analyze related data for the study. The paper created and developed cancerous democracy and cancerous democratic theory (CDT) to capture and explain Nigeria’s democracy. Demonstrating that Nigeria is an illustrative case for other African situations, this study examined pathologies that denied Africans the anticipated dividends of democracy. Results demonstrated that security issues, perennial corruption, mismanagement of diversity, bad governance, and poorly executed federal character principle made Nigeria’s democracy a cancerous type of democracy. Hence, this paper accepted the alternative proposition - the major upsetting phenomena surrounding Nigeria’s democracy are more inclined to prevent her from moving from a stagnated polity to a problem-solving state. Conclusively, Nigeria is not practicing true democracy, because of the interplay of ethno-religious issues and the country’s departure from modern democratic ethos. Therefore, joint efforts should be made to stampede corruption and ethnicity in order to reposition Nigeria to be an egalitarian and developmental state with zero tolerance for the trappings of cancerous democracy.