THE IMPACT OF FOREIGN DEMOCRATIC ASSISTANCE IN NIGERIA: A CRITICAL EVALUATION OF ITS EFFECT FROM 1999-2023

Abstract

Democratic governance is the acceptable form of government universally. Nigeria has been one of the major receipts of foreign democratic in recent times dating back to the democratic process, with hundreds of billions of dollars and other non-monetary measures from democratic promoters since 1999 till 2023 and Nigerian democratic elections failing to deliver increased stability and development, we ask to what extent is Nigeria’s democratic experience since 1999 a reflection of the objectives of foreign democratic assistance to the country, this paper will help policy makers and academicians to understand that the threatened fragile democratic experiment in Nigeria is due to the irregularities associated with the elections and not on the enormity of fund from foreign donors. This paper adopted the realistic theory of change by Anderson as its theoretical framework a modification of Carol (2008) change model theory,  the paper employed personal oral interviews and secondary sources of data to analysis of data qualitatively, using tables and simple percentages we show that irrespective of democratic assistance from international partners to Nigeria between 1999-2023 her political development has remained gloomy. The findings show that Nigeria’s effort towards democratic consolidations is still not a reflection of the objective(s) of FDA because her electoral integrity is still threatened by many factors such as the attitude of political leaders, electoral corruption and so on. However, the study recommends that for FDA to be successful, there is need for change in the value oriented of the political elite, the war on corruption must be pursued with vigour, government at all levels need to be serious or pay more attention to problem of poverty and greater harmonization and alignment in democratization assistance is desirable