Events
Zoom/University of Ghana
Organizer:
MIASA
Lecture Sa'eed Husaini: "A Case of Convergence? Party Manifestos and Left/Right Ideology in Nigeria’s Four Republics"
Perspectives in comparative politics see party competition in Africa’s ‘third wave’ democracies as devoid of disagreement on class or economic grounds – and thus as ‘absent’ of left/right ideology. This ‘absence’ thesis finds echo in Nigeria-specific political science literature, as well as in popular perspectives on contemporary politics in Nigeria. Yet, a dearth of economic divergence among governing parties can suggest ideological agreement. Beginning from this premise, this lecture traces the genealogy of economic position-taking among Nigeria’s contemporary governing parties. It does so through examining economic pledges in the manifestos of the parties that took power in Nigeria’s four attempts at electoral democracy (1960–66, 79–83, 93– 94, 99–present). While party discourses in earlier republics demonstrated intense polarization on left/right grounds, the governing parties of Nigeria’s current and fourth republic now converge in their articulation of the desirable level of economic distribution. Evidence of such convergence troubles a strict insistence on the absence of economic ideology among African parties of government.
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