DEMOCRACY VS. POPULISM: THE TRANSFORMATION OF POLITICS IN NIGERIA?

Since the return of electoral democracy to Nigeria in 1999, two of the four elected presidents have been former military dictators who have stressed anti-corruption and national security policies in populist campaigns. As military dictators in previous years, they had instigated regimes that had practiced stern military discipline; as populists they have leaned toward these two policies. Reactions to civilian corruption and threats to national security have represented the primary military rationales for military intervention in the past. A popular vote in 2015 for former military dictator General Muhammadu Buhari seems to have represented a continuing preference for populism over democracy. We will examine the new populism in Nigeria, complicated as it is by questions of ethnicity, religion and military identity, with a view to explaining the likely outcome of the first peaceful transference of power from one political party to another in Africa’s most populous country