Democracy and National Development: The Nigerian Experience

Abstract

A cynical view about democratic governance and a genuine development as an expression of a man conscious control of his resources and destiny is widespread in Nigeria. There is also a prevailing idea that government commitment to strategic planning and administration far national development is synonymous with chicanery and all forms of autocratic practices. This to a large extent defines the contemporary issues in Nigeria post Covid-19 era as, a challenge for Nigerians to rise to the task of Plato’s advice that “unexamined life is not worth living”. It is obvious that Nigeria is undergoing development crisis since 1970s and, solution inform of policies, strategies and political reforms, environmental protection and humanitarian services has failed to provide a right path to genuine national development. The implication is that, in-spite of the attainment of political independence, true development and democratic governance has eluded Nigeria for the past years. This paper on democracy and national development attributed the scenario partly to leadership crisis and organizational inefficiency that jeopardize the right and liberty of ordinary citizens and, efficient administrative task of socio-economic transformation. Discourse of the paper focuses on the practice of democracy and its impact on national development. A review of the previous work on national development programmes and substantive amount of literature has been attempted.  The paper relied essentially on quantitative survey method and secondary source of data to determine the impact of democratic governance on national development. Distributive Justice Theory and the power theory were adopted as the theoretical framework to help clarify issues of democracy and national development. A samples size of 500 was administered and chi-square statistical technique was used to test the hypotheses. The result from the findings shows that: there is a significant relationship between democracy and national development. The paper discovered that Nigeria’s political leadership is fundamentally weak to address the task of national development on democratic principle in the interest of the people. The study therefore, calls for a new leadership with nationalistic vision (development leadership) to address, the current and future challenges of national development in Nigeria.