Political Scientists and Nation-Building: The Nigeria’s Experience

Nation-building is so crucial a project that requires the services of many actors to achieve. It embodies such elements as national integration, poverty reduction through employment generation, robust economic development through industrialization, as well as infrastructural revolution through good governance. The actors involved in it have different and very important roles to play. Unfortunately, over the years, especially in Nigeria, the role of political scientists in nation-building has been surreptitiously scuffled through a deliberate constitutional design to permeate an unsavory political exclusionism in addition to the crude stereotypic mentality built around them by Nigerians. Against this backdrop, the paper asked: what role(s) should political scientists play in the overall project of nation-building in Nigeria? Among other things, the work discovered that the role of political scientists in the project of nation-building is to offer genuine political leadership which remains the panacea for resolving other problems inherent in the society. Consequently, the study recommended that justice in Plato’s sense be observed if nationbuilding would be made less difficult in Nigeria.