USE OF STATE RESOURCES IN FINANCING ELECTIONEERING CAMPAIGNS IN NIGERIA

AN APPRAISAL OF THE 2015 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS

Abstract

The exercise of franchise and fielding of candidates for electoral positions in most democracies are costing fortunes for candidates and political parties. Funding electoral campaigns has become critical and determines, to a long extent, who contests elections in developing countries. In spite of several check rules and measures, access to state treasury had facilitated funding of political activities and programmes, especially those in power. To that end, this paper seeks to examine how the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) financed their campaigns for the 2015 General Elections in Nigeria. It further seeks to determine the accepted sources of funding for political campaigns while appraising the on-going probe of abuse of arms(security) vote by the Jonathan’s government. It also examines the sources of fund available to other political parties. The paper is centred on the postulations of Thomas Ferguson's Investment theory of party competition which is predicated on the power of money in prosecuting electioneering campaigns thus seeing investors as more important than voters in the scheme of electioneering affairs. It made use of secondary sources of data that were analyzed content-wise along an in-depth espouse of related literature. In the end, the paper surmised that there was a sharp increase in the cost of running presidential campaigns and that lots of state resources were deployed by both the ruling and opposition parties (at their spheres of rulership) in the 2015 elections.