Keywords: Imperative, Consociational Governance, Elite Cooperation, Nigerian Experience, Polity.

Abstract

Despite the 25 years of uninterrupted civilian rule, the 4th Republic cannot be said to be stable because of deep-seated issues including political corruptions, regional agitations, insecurity and the need for electoral reforms. The objective of the paper is to justify the strides in consociational governance in Nigeria, the need for it to persist and why it should be developed, expanded and sustained in present day Nigeria. Nigeria being a plural society with many segmented cleavages need to tread the part of consociationalism. The consociational democracy model attempts to account for the phenomenon of the stable yet fragmented’ democracies. Adopting consociational model approach where inspiration was drawn, the paper notes that this modification of pluralist version of democracy/governance stressed the role ascribed to the political elites in spite of existence of social cleavages. The consociational model is preferred where political stake is high like Nigeria; it becomes more appropriate option than the government versus opposition pattern. The paper utilized secondary sources of data collection such as reports, libraries, journals, newspapers, television, books and the internet document search. The Games Theory was used to analyze the work. Here we were able to know why political stake is so high in Nigeria because it is a zero sum game. It explains also the indulgence in thuggery, killings, manipulation, rigging and other electoral malpractices. The paper concluded that team-work, which consociationalism encourages should be practiced. Mutual veto, grant coalition, segmental autonomy and proportionality principle should all be implemented for more united and stable country.

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Published: 2025

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