Democracy is consolidated when the three organs of government (especially the legislature), channel their functions towards socioeconomic and political advancement. These advancements especially the aspects of employment creation, provision of good road networks, electricity, pipe borne water and other infrastructural developments, would alleviate hardship on the citizenry. Most of these amenities are provided with the assistance of the legislature. The presence of these, suggests a real democratic consolidation. Therefore, this paper examines democratic consolidation and challenges of legislative politics in Nigeria from 1999-2011. Methodologically, data for this paper were generated mainly from secondary sources of recorded human documents. Accordingly, democracy in Nigeria cannot be consolidated amidst high level legislative bickering and hooliganism that characterized the nation's parliament. Hence, it is a game of selfishness versus furtherance of one's economic aggrandizement amongst the legislators, living the innocent citizens to die in cold blood with irrelevant bills passed almost on daily basis. As such, members of the National Assembly are not helping the country in any way due to the fact that 28% of Nigeria's overhead cost is been spent on them, thereby leaving most sectors of the economy to suffer untold setback. Finally, the paper suggests that a true federation, institutional rebuilding and effective distribution of social welfare, should be adopted and practiced as conditions for democratic consolidation in Nigeria today.
The study was necessitated by the high rate of poverty in Nigeria regardless of the foreign aids inflow into the country from 2010 to 2020. Whereas the country received foreign aids which could have resulted in poverty alleviation within the period of this study, she antithetically witnessed increase in poverty rate to the extent that the World Bank in May 2018 reported that Nigeria had emerged poverty capital of the world. According to the National Bureau of Statistics’ report, over 82.9 million persons, representing about 40.1 percent of the total population, were considered poor by national standards as at 2019. The poverty challenge inspite of the foreign aids inflow into Nigeria therefore necessitated the question on how sectoral allocation of foreign aids contributed to poverty alleviation in Nigeria from 2010 to 2020. Anchored on the Big Push Theory, the study adopted ex-post facto research design and documentary method for data collection. Qualitative descriptive method was used for data analysis. Among other things, the study found out that sectoral allocation of foreign aid resources did not contribute to poverty alleviation in Nigeria from 2010 to 2020 as those sectors critical for poverty alleviation did not receive massive investments. On the contrary, the foreign aids were split among numerous (consumption) sub-heads which rendered the aids incapable of contributing to poverty alleviation in the country. In view of the findings, the study therefore recommended the need to channel future foreign aids inflow into projects with high capital returns or the productive sectors of the economy in order to achieve a positive outcome on poverty alleviation.
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