Political Party Financing, Corruption and National Security in Nigeria

Abstract

This paper interrogates ways in which political parties raise funds to finance their political campaigns in Nigeria. The basic concern of the study is to examine the connection, if any, between electioneering campaign financing and the purpoted diversion of public funds by public officials particularly in the conduct of the 2015 presedential election in the country. The paper argued that corrupt practices related to election has link to historical antecendents of party politics in Nigeria and could be partly attributed to the nature of power acquisition and its antecedent's previlages. This is evident in the way appointed and elected public officials seems to divert public funds to promote their political ambitions often during the electioneering. Evidence from the qualitative data corroborate this assertion, revealing high cost of election and institutional fragility of election managment body (iNEC) and anti-corruption agencies are possible explanatory factors for what Nigeria witnessed in the last 2015 electioneering campaign.