EXECUTIVE-LEGISLATIVE RELATIONS AND GOVERNANCE TRAJECTORIES IN NIGERIA

THE ROAD NOT TAKEN

Abstract

The need to underscore the challenges of contemporary governance in political society has become increasingly crucial. Globally, poor quality of governance manifests in social, economic, cultural, administrative and political dimensions. There is ample evidence showing decline in the democratic quality of Nigeria’s political systems via the executive-legislative relations, as a result of the power tussle and sphere of influence of the governing elites. Since Nigeria’s independence from the colonialists on October 1, 1960, the political landscape has witnessed a series of altercations caused by the morbid desire of members of the political class to outdo one another in the search for power. The situation assumed a worrisome dimension with the return of democratic governance in 1999. Thus, the study examined executive-legislative relations and governance trajectories in Nigeria. Specifically, it examined the conflicts of interests arising from executive-legislative relationship, considered as two traditional contenders for power and authority in post-colonial Nigerian state. Our methodology was basically content analysis as a result of the theoretical nature of the study. The theoretical construct was based on the Marxian theory of the state, and noted among others that the contestations and co-operations between these arms of government attest to the struggle for the independence of these institutions, which expresses the decentralization of state power along functional lines. To this end, the study posits for a cohabitation of the two which has the potential to establish new executive-legislative relations independent of a president-party or a party-government symbiosis for a good society.