Peacebuilding and Nigeria’s 2023 General Election: An analysis of cases from Benue and Plateau State

Abstract

INEC staff work ethics; voter intimidation and inducement; security agents’ use of firearms, and peacekeeping at polling units. These topics are common election issues that arose in the 2023 Nigerian general election. This article is necessary to address the gap in the scholarly literature on Nigerian elections and its consequent lack of impact on election policy. We use cases from Benue and Plateau states based on participatory observation and descriptive presentation; and were view data from the internet, books, and articles. We theorise, Human Needs, the cases and find that the Police used pep-talk, threats, and firearms during the 2023 general elections in Benue state, but pep-talk is paternalism, an inhibiting satisfier; threats are pseudo-satisfiers and firearms are destructive satisfiers. Moreover, party agents and supporters used abuses and “religious shaming,” inhibiting satisfiers against each other and INEC officers in Plateau. Similarly, the agents and party supporters used cooked food and drinks, salt, Maggi cubes, and bags of rice even on voting day to induce voters. However, INEC staff succeeded in their work, and the elders in keeping peace because they used a synergic satisfier, that is, INEC used self-managed hard work and the elders used wisdom to prevail on agents and supporters not to share induced material at the polling unit. Therefore, we recommend the followings, that is, community elders and youth be trained and paid to maintain peace at polling units; voters be given a meal on election days to reduce voter inducement; some of the prescribed 1999 Nigerian constitutional synergic satisfiers be made rights of Nigerian as a problem-solving for empowering women, youth, the Police, and community elders in minimizing voter intimidation and inducement to conduct credible, free, and fair elections without violence in Nigeria.