THE STATE, GOVERNANCE AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN NIGERIA

Abstract

 When a State has visionary and forthright governance in place, healthy and progressive change becomes a common place in society. However, and as this study points out, social change should be as situations required. However, where a government fail in its duty to initiate needed change, the public will have no option than to initiate one, either peacefully or violently. The focus of this article is, to stress that it is the duty of the State to bring about needed political, economic, social, and other changes for the good of society. It is part of State’s duties not to allow a situation where the people will have to take laws into their hands to initiate change. Furthermore, social change is taken in this study to refer to every change, and improvements that takes place in society as against changes that take place in just the social sector of society alone. Thus, the political electoral process is a means of bringing about change in political leadership of a country. For instance, the clamour for general restructuring of the nigerian State which has been on for some time now, is a desire for a general overhaul that would bring about change in virtually all sectors of society. Data for this study was collected through secondary sources, namely: books, newspapers/magazines, journal articles, and internet sources, and were analysed using content analysis. The specific objectives of the study are to: examine the Nigerian state with its multi-divinity; assess the level of response of government to people’s quest for needed change; investigate the constraints and challenges to good governance and social change, and identify the consequences of non-response of government to public demand for social change in the Nigeria society. The study findings revealed that, good governance has not been attained in the Nigerian state mainly due to leaders’ attitude of greed, selfishness, and ignorance, such that changes only attend to areas of their personal interest alone, while the interests of the public are not usually considered with passion. The paper concluded that government that makes peaceful change impossible, obviously and inadvertently makes violent change inevitable.