From "Authoritarian Rule" to "Democracy" in Nigeria: Citizens' Welfare a Myth or Reality.

What does democracy do or fail to do about the welfare of Nigerians? Does it matter for the performance of democracy? This paper seeks to determine the mutual impact of democracy and welfare of citizens in Nigeria. Given the state of democracy and available data, it seems that politicians at the state and local government levels are more concerned about their personal interests than those of citizens. We then problematise theoretical western democracy, sold to Nigeria, as with many other third world formerly colonized territories, after independence, but refused during colonialism, at the least for lacking in development and failing to take local conditions into consideration. Implied here are both the institutional and behavioural deficiencies that run democracy dry. The question is, is democracy affecting welfare of citizens positively? To respond in the negative as we do, means more than just a simple answer. Why is it so? With a focus on 1999 to date, a major assumption in this paper is that both the performance and stability of democracy consist in its responsiveness to the welfare citizens. Without any allusion or references to any saintly model of democracy somewhere to be copied, it is argued that the lack of involvement of citizens in election of leaders has created in political elites the loss of all sense of accountability to citizens. Besides, having found oil revenue as the sustaining power for the state, the individual tax paying citizen has been relegated, as against traditions of respect for the tax payer in more established democracies, where the running of the state is dependent on the tax payer's money. The gap between the volume of resource allocation and development projects at the state and local government levels, as well as the ostentatiousness of politicians seem to have led us to conclude that politicians are only feeding fat on citizens' welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]