Menace of Vote Trading in Election: Youth as Vanguards of Impactful Change in Nigeria

Abstract

This work presents an in-depth analysis of the menace of vote trading in election and youths as vanguards of impactful change. Vote trading is like a cankerworm that has eaten into the fibre of the nation’s electoral process.it has become a reoccurring decimal in contemporary discourse on the sustainability of democratic development in Nigeria. This menace of vote trading is gradually crippling electoral processes and undermining the efforts of the electoral umpire in conducting competitive, free, fair, and credible elections for the sustenance of democratic development in Nigeria. To this effect, this paper therefore, investigates the effects of vote-buying on the sustainability of democratic development and good governance in Nigeria. It argues that vote-buying compromises the well-being of the populace by entrenching bad governance and poor service delivery The study adopts reciprocal determinism theory to illustrate how the political environment and bad governance are stimuli to consolidating the commercialisation of Nigerian electoral processes The study adopts the documentary method for gathering data from secondary sources and recommends institutionalisation of a strong electoral management body to enforce a stiff penalty for commercialisation of the electoral system in Nigeria. This paper is historical; hence, it adopts a qualitative method of analysis. Useful piece of information was obtained from important relevant documents, reports and array of both primary and secondary sources.