Abstract
The African Union (AU) has been pursuing one of its primary objectives of promoting democratic principles and institutions by ensuring good governance through the curbing of corruption and ensuring free and fair elections through monitoring of elections in order to ensure sustainable political development. It is uncertain whether the democratic approach has rubbed off on its anti-corruption initiatives, given the recent performance of most AU member states especially Nigeria on many global surveys of corruption, development and governance evaluation indexes. The paper, therefore, examined the extent to which the AU’s stance on democratic promotion has impacted on political development in Nigeria. The integration theory was adopted as the framework of analysis for the paper. The paper is both qualitative and quantitative which relied on data sourced from questionnaires and interviews as well as secondary sources, while content analysis was adopted for data analysis. The findings acknowledged AU’s efforts in promoting political development in Nigeria through its different anti-corruption and election monitoring frameworks. But in spite of the slight improvements of Nigeria on different corruption perception indexes, and fragile democratic system, corruption and electoral fraud still persists in the governance of Nigeria and many AU member states. The paper further shows inter alia that the AU’s anti- corruption initiatives have not effectively reflected the adopted measures due to uncommon democratic practices in Nigeria. The paper contended that Nigerian government in collaboration with African Union should endeavour to uphold democracy in its purest form in order to ensure and sustain political development in the country.
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.19361817
Writers:
Anas Gambo Leko
Department of Political Science,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
Phone Number: 08033247924
ORCID ID:
https://orcid.org/0009-0002-3178-9342
Prof. S.A Ibrahim
Department of Political Science,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
Prof. Eugene T. Aliegba
Department of Political Science,
Faculty of Social Sciences,
Nasarawa State University, Keffi.
Corresponding Author’s Email:
Anasgambodull@yahoo.com