THE ROLE OF ENDLESS POLITICS IN THE UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF AFRICA: THE NIGERIAN CASE

Abstract

There is an agreement in scholarship that a major issue in Africa’s development challenge is the weakness of the state in Africa. While the colonial origin of the state has been the major culprit in that weakness, the political elite in Africa have not done enough to make the state in Africa responsive to the challenges and desires of the people. A major challenge relate to the continuation of politics post elections to the extent that policy and administration are compromised. Whereas politics and policy/administration are closely related even intertwined in many cases, they ought to be clearly demarcated in other not to jeopardize the collective or national interest. Utilising desk search method and public administration framework, this paper seeks to revisit the development challenge in Africa and locates the problem of the weakness of its institutions, policy, and administration in the self-defeating deployment of the instrument of politics. Our finding is that this is the case in Africa generally and we recommend that African governments should observe the politics/administration distinction in other to achieve development