This study examines the relationship among gender, democracy, and national development in Nigeria. This translates to a discussion of the possible linkages among gender identity, gendered representation, and national development in the country. Beyond the typical gender theorization, this article squarely focuses on women’s political representation within the Nigerian state and the power implications of the inherent challenges. The work reechoes the issue of underdevelopment as a societal phenomenon. The methodology of the contribution is normative argumentation. The theoretical framework is the power theory. The study concludes that the disarticulations between gendered representation and democracy have invariably led to contentious national development in Nigeria.

This paper has critically examined the relationship between energy security and sustainable development in Nigeria. We applied elite theory as theoretical framework for the study. We further adopted as methodology, the critical mode of research. The paper highlights that energy security prospects in Nigeria would require beneficial specificities in the form of incremental modeling. Furthermore, the study underscored the most critical challenge to energy security in the Nigerian state as the character of national politics, as dictated by the elite. The paper has furthermore, highlighted the plausibilities in the solar energy option for Nigeria's energy-mix in particular and in an overall context, the country's energy security. Energy security and sustainable development the paper concludes are positively interrelated. The realization of this laudable position requires all institutions and communities to renew and reinvent themselves, and begin to listen and resonate with each other, whereby individual members and the group as a whole, would begin to operate with a heightened level of energy and sense of future possibility. Consequently, they begin to function as an intentional vehicle for an emerging future. It is such an emerging future of energy security the paper concludes, that guarantees sustainable development.

This study examined the issue of budgeting in the Nigerian public sector. The methodology of the study is qualitative. Secondary sources of data are also utilized in the analysis. The general objective of the paper is to examine the issue of budgeting for change in the Nigerian public sector. The specific objectives include (i) to conduct a theoretical exposition on public sector budgeting -in Nigeria (ii) interrogate the empirical issues in the national budgetary processes in the country and (iii) make proposals on the way forward in budgeting for change in the Nigerian nation. Findings of the study indicate that the national budgetary processes in Nigeria are characterized by procedural indiscipline and crises of implementation. We highlighted in the study that the national budget could be deployed as a profound instrument of change in a specific nation's political economy. Furthermore, we underscored in the work the position of the national budget as a social contract compilation necessitating inclusiveness in its procedures, implementation and overall values.

We have principally examined in this study the dialectics of the political economy and the trouble with Nigeria. We have analyzed how the political economy has constituted a specific segment of the trouble with the Nigerian postcolonial state. The Nigerian narrative is depicted in the study as a saga of corrupt practices. The Nigerian state has further been characterized in the analysis as a vacuous entity for the feeding of the greed of the elite, as the result becomes a political economy of inefficiencies and disorder. Hence, the trouble with Nigeria in a way, hinges on the siege laid on the political economy by an unrepentant elite, which blatantly continues to articulate, implement and defend self-serving policies as public policies. The political economy challenge in Nigeria it was concluded is for the elite in generic categorization, to arrive at the realization, that the elephantine Nigerian state cannot possibly be propelled in the forward direction, while ignoring the co-citizenship-status of the masses of the state.

Local governments in many parts of Africa are yet to be fully accepted as important levels of government by political actors at the central and sub-central levels. This gives rise to the contradictory scenario whereby, such political actors at the central and sub-central levels remain the apostles of centralization on one hand and exponents of democracy as a model of national government on the other hand. Nigeria is the most populous African country. This marginalization of the local government in the democratic process is prevalent in Nigeria. Invariably, the pervasive effect of this condition, as it negatively affects the availability of dividends of democracy to the African citizen, is worrisome. In the meantime, the continent of Europe is perceived in the study as having possibly taken local government to a model level of local self-governance, through its European Charter of Local Self-Government. Europe is thus, seen in this study as a region conceivably in the lead in situating the local government, within its proper democratic context. The theoretical framework of deliberative democracy is adopted in the study to challenge African states to embrace local selfgovernance as a critical component of democratization.