Democratic Culture and the Challenges of Good Governance in Nigeria

Abstract

The extant political culture in any given social formation to some extent, conditions largely the nature of government and subsequently the behaviour of citizenry and survival of the state. Consequently, in a democratic system, the political culture supportive and sustainable to stable democracy is the civic culture which emphasizes citizen's active participation in the political process. This paper, therefore, argues that the extent to which political culture in Nigeria is bankrupt and parochial will be solved from revisiting the demographic cultural ethics of the nation. The paper adopts structural functionalism by Almond & Powell (1966), as popularized by Donald Struck (1968), and Defleur, (1977). as the theoretical framework of analysis. The theory perceives governance within the context of society as a system that is made up of interdependent parts tending towards stability. That an understanding of any part of the society requires an analysis of its relationship to other parts and the contributions to the maintenance and development of society. It assumes that good governance is a consequence of a functional relationship between the arms of government midwife by a good democratic culture. The paper adopts qualitative analysis and generated data only from secondary sources like published and unpublished articles, thesis, and textbooks.  Analysis of data reveals that the hurries arising therefrom, stunts sustainable political engineering and constraints good governance in the country even as the paper recommends amongst other things, a review of the 1999 constitution as amended to address issues such as revenue allocation based on resource control/derivation principle, to ensure the practice of true federalism.