Nigeria, April 9 -- Professor Humphrey Nwosu's legacy

Domesticating the electoral process

As a political scientist, Professor Nwosu understood that the character of electoral competition in Nigeria is such that the outcome of any election will almost always be contested. This is because in societies like ours, political power is the major means of production, distribution and exchange and for that, whoever controls political power, controls everything, including the power to turn a pauper into a billionaire and to turn a billionaire into a pauper. The struggle for political power therefore is often anarchic, tending towards the Hobbesian state of nature, with a pervasive fear that whichever group captures state power will use it to priv...