Election Violence in T. M. Aluko’s Chief the Honourable Minister

Abstract

This paper identifies the means through which different actors and factors sway election as well as ongoing trends and implications for external partners. The study rests on Karl Marx’s dialectical materialism which gives vivid explanations on election violence in T. M. Aluko’s Chief the Honourable Minister . It introduces analytical frameworks to help understand the causes and consequences during and after election day, and relates these to recent and ongoing electoral processes in Nigeria through a number of telling examples from a novel. Since the Independence era, elections in Nigeria have been characterized by high scale of electoral malpractices, money politics, electoral violence and the use of ethno- religious divide in order to influence the voting patterns of the electorates. Elector al violence is one of the strategies employed by Nigerian politicians during electioneering period. Desperate and power drunk politicians often sponsor unemployed youths and stark illiterates to carry out assaults on their perceived political opponents with a view to manipulating election results to their own advantage.