ABSTRACT

One of the basic machineries of any representative democratic system is the electoral process. The experience of the western representative democracy in Nigeria can be traced from the Clifford and Macpherson constitutions for years respectively. This was elaborated at independence in the second republic and subsequent periods. Very ugly experience has characterized the activities with the electoral process that constitutes the burning questions in this work within these sparing periods Nigeria political history has been filled with malpractice fraud and therefore violence. The election of the first republic displayed ethnicity in the second republic presidential election is been records its ugly tendencies but in refined form. This time, money and corruption led the race in electoral malpractices of the past and present on the political system. The study finally traces these political problems of the country to basic socio-institutional origins of the ethnicity class, material consciousness and others.