BAD GOVERNANCE AS THE BANE OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT IN NIGERIA

The declining capacity of political leadership in Nigeria to recognize systemic risks such as election fraud, terrorist attacks, herder-farmer conflict, armed banditry, and police brutality and put in place the necessary measures to navigate these challenges is a manifestation of governance failure. As a result of this governance failure, socio-economic development in Nigeria has continued to lack remedy. In contrast with the current system in which leadership is attained through bribery, intimidation, and violence, Nigeria needs an epistocratic system of governance that is founded on the pedigree of its political leaders and the education of its voters. It is against the foregoing that this paper beams its searchlight on bad governance and its effects on Nigeria’s socio-economic development. Through the use of secondary sources of data, it argues that understanding the influence of government on Nigeria's socio-economic development would offer a meaningful insight into the gap between the enormous national resources that exist and Nigeria's desire for progress. Theoretically, it adopts Structural Functionalism as its theoretical framework to analyse the incidence of bad governance as the bane of socio-economic development in Nigeria. The paper concludes that bad governance breeds high rate of indiscipline in the society, giving rise to a state of “might is right”, a state of anomie where normlessness holds sway in the society; where public officials connive with contractors to inflate the value of government contracts, while the cost of governance and administration shoot up, with very little to show in terms of projects and programmes, which impact on the average citizen’s wellbeing. It recommends among others that anyone aspiring to lead the nation in whatever capacity must demonstrate the intellectual pedigree to translate knowledge into effective, transparent, and accountable governance with the potential to enhance socio-economic development.