Governance and Politics in Nigeria: The IBB and OBJ Year

Description

Good books on comparative studies are hardly available in the literature on politics and governance in Nigeria. The motivation to fill this gap and therefore sustain the value of comparative knowledge of contemporary governance and politics in Nigeria constitutes a major basis of this book.

It is this intellectual and experiential urge which agitate scholars in comparing archetypal systems or regimes such as socialism or communism with capitalism or liberal democracy; authoritarianism with democracy; historic empires or monarchy with republican political systems. It is in this manner too that subject matters such as federalism, party system and public administration can be studied comparatively with beneficial scholarship in different regimes.

Governance and Politics in Nigeria: The IBB and OBJ Years has been put together in the satisfaction that the essays individually and collectively will provide meaningful insight, hindsight and foresight about the problem with Nigerian governance and politics.

All the contributions taken together, this book is a good example of comparative studies and by extension a challenge or invitation to scholars and other intellectual observers of the Nigerian development process to begin to address comparatively the regimes and leaderships that have succeeded one another in contemporary Nigerian history.

The Editor, Professor Sam Oyovbaire is a well-known scholar-activist of Nigerian government and politics. Retired voluntarily from routine university establishment, he has been a consultant in governance and public policy.

Sam Oyovbaire studied at the University of London and University of Manchester in the U.K. for his graduate and post-graduate degrees in economics, history and politics. He taught at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria and at the University of Benin for over two decades. A member of many high ranking panels of experts on public policy particularly in the period since 1977, he is vastly researched in areas of comparative political structures and processes, social change and the political economy of development in post-colonial societies, public finance, federalism and democratic transitions in Africa. He is credited with five books, authored or edited, and over 65 notable journal articles.

He has served in a number of public bodies such as in the governing councils of universities and colleges of education, the National Institute for Policy and Strategic Studies, and the Centre for Advanced Social Science. He was a Special Advisor in the Presidency (1987-1993; and 2003) and also Minister of Information and Culture. He combines intellectual and academic research work with active involvement in politics.