Suchergebnisse

Hailed at its birth in 1960 as democracy's best hope in Africa, Nigeria succumbed to yet another military takeover on December 31, 1983. Of particular anguish is the fact that the coup reverses the celebrated constitution of 1979, when Nigeria redeemed democracy from the ashes of violent political breakdown, military intervention, assassination, and civil war. Now events are bound to confirm the all too general impression that in Africa authoritarian rule is inevitable.

The focus of any discussion of Nigeria at this time in its history is the outlook for success of its recently reconstituted democratic political system. Equally in question should be the validity of external assessments of the Nigerian political situation, some of which in the past have tended, I believe, to rest on misunderstandings of Nigerian politics.

With several notable and recent exceptions, the current literature on "modernization" in "developing countries" implicitly or explicitly assumes an inherent irreconcilability between "modern" and "traditional" values, institutions, and behavior patterns. Related to this assumption is the expectation that whenever important elements off these two social systems collide, the natural result is social convulsion.It is typical of this literature to qualify these assumptions with the caveat, commonly employed in conjunction with the use of "ideal j types," that differences between these two apparent classes of society are only relative, or that "pure" cases of either type are never manifested.