Has anything changed with illegitimate electoral financing and political power contestation in Nigeria?

Abstract

This paper examines the monetization of politics through the manipulation of the loopholes in the electoral funding architecture of Nigeria. It evaluates whether the ceiling placed on individual and group donations to candidates and political parties by Nigeria’s Electoral Act 2010 (as amended) was adhered to in mobilizing election funds in recent presidential elections. In other words, this paper investigates whether election funding in Nigeria’s recent elections followed the prescribed protocols as indicated in the Electoral Act and the extent to which adherence or otherwise contributed to the monetization of the electoral contests and its implication for electoral integrity. Using data generated from key informant interviews and qualitatively analyzed in the tradition of logical inductive method, the paper finds a contravention of the legal provisions for electoral funding. The various political parties leveraged their political structures to raise funds without due recourse to the prescriptions of the Electoral Act, thus compromising the level-playing ground necessary for electoral integrity. The paper contends that the consolidation of democracy in Nigeria must entail the plugging of the capillaries and streams of illegitimate electoral funding and the establishment of critical institutional framework that would drive adherence to constitutionally prescribed provisions on electoral funding.