Nigeria Needs a New Progressive Movement

What Nigeria needs is a progressive social movement that is ideologically robust, domain-extensive, multi-tactical, geographically extensive, and proactively inclusive. This movement needs to emulate the strengths of existing social movements and progressive initiatives while avoiding their weaknesses.

It is generally the case that countries in the ‘Global South’ face more formidable governance and developmental challenges than those in the ‘Global North’. The quality of democratic institutions, enforcement of the rule of law, minimization of unproductive corruption and maintenance of stable economic growth rates is strongly influenced by the nature of capitalist forces and the distribution of power across society. In the case of corruption, for instance, because most countries in the Global South have very large informal sectors, low tax capacity and high poverty rates, political mobilization of coalition partners and masses can be more easily undertaken on the basis of distribution of rents from off-budget expenditure and corruption proceeds than programmatic politics. As a result, liberal democracy in Nigeria, as with the rest of the Global South, tends to involve greater levels of corruption and pork barrel politics.