THE STATE AND THE PROBLEMS OF DEMOCRACY IN NIGERIA

The Nigerian state today is nothing more than a rentier state whose neo-colonial capitalistmode and social relations were not substantially modified by the rapid transfonnation from the production of agricultural commodities (palm oil, rubber, tin, cereals, etc.) to petroleum as the main source of capital accumulation. The unpredictability and volatility of the rentier economy has over the years been the central factor in all regime changes and democratic developments since independence. While in the core developed countries the . state historically evolved some measures of 'relative autonomy' from the economically dominant class and fractions, the state in Nigeria fuses class power and political power together. Thus the on-going struggle for state power through the process ofdemocracy is simultaneously a struggle for the means of distribution and consumption which only power can confer. This paper therefore examines the structure of the Nigerian state and the attendant constraint it poses for the practice and sustainability of democracy and democratic institutions. The paper sums up the conclusion that the state in Nigeria is anti-thetical to the survival ofdemocracy since the,state has become politicised and instrumentalised into a partisan state that is at once the arena and object ofparticularist conflicts