EFFECTS OF ELECTORAL VIOLENCE ON THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF KOGI STATE (2015-2020)

EFFECTS OF ELECTORAL VIOLENCE ON THE POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT OF KOGI STATE (2015-2020)

Background of the study

Elections are regarded as the beating heart of any democracy. Jinadu (2019) asserts that election is the official process of selecting a person for public office or adopting or rejecting a political position which  is usually done in any democratic environment where people can be elected to various positions for a certain period of time. Although the importance of elections in a democratic form of government cannot be overstated, the process of choosing representatives of the people into public offices is becoming increasingly complex in many countries throughout the world, particularly in developing countries such as Nigeria.

According to Uhunmwbangho (2018), election violence is a repeating phenomena in the never-ending narrative of violence in Nigerian democracy, which began in the First Republic and continues to the present fourth democratic regime. According to Albert (2017), electoral violence encompasses all types of coordinated threats aiming at frightening, hurting, or blackmailing a political stakeholder or opponent prior to, during, or after an election with the objective of determining, delaying, or influencing a political process. According to Ogundiya and Baba (2015), electoral violence includes all types of riots, protests, party conflicts, political assassinations, looting, arson, thuggery, and abduction that occur before, during, and after elections. On that point, Nigeria has not had the good fortune to hold free, fair, and credible elections. Nigeria's current fourth republic presidential democracy has seen six presidential elections, all of which have been marred by violence before, during, and after the polls. Since independence, the trends that interacted with the people to create election results in Nigeria have not been thoroughly analyzed and explained. These trends differ and have been related to the core cause of the election violence.

Similarly, a truly representative form of government must rely on the integrity of elections as an honest, secret, and accurate manner of assessing popular will at every level of government. This implies that there must be agreement on the terms of the election game. Mackenzie (1964) supports this point by arguing that one of the four conditions for a free election is: a general acceptance throughout the political community of certain, rather vague rules of the game, which limit the struggle for power because of some unspoken sentiment that if the rules are not followed more or less faithfully, the game itself will vanish amid the wreckage of the entire system. As a result, the resilience of the electoral system as the general technique and process of selecting individuals within a democratic system into top executive and legislative positions in a specified polity is one of the preparatory stages to a real democratic government (Bello-Imam, 2015). In this regard, Nigerian politicians do not follow the appropriate rules of the political game known as an election. Politicians' eagerness to gain political power drives them to use all means available to attain their goal, regardless of the regulations. This action eventually leads to them attacking everyone who stands in their way, which leads to violence.

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