ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the effort to institutionalize democracy in Nigeria by political forces in state and civil society. In colonial era, it was marked by the setting of a limited agenda by the petty bourgeois politicians for procedural democratic changes. This agenda was for the accommodation of local politicians and ultimate transfer of power to them. Procedural issues related to transfer of power was the preoccupation in the pre-independence constitutional dialogues of 1953, 1954, 1957, 1958 and 1960. Similarly, the post-colonial era was characterized by the defining of the agenda of political dialogues with attention, mostly to elite-oriented issues of procedural democracy. The dialogues end up reproducing the dominant form of power and political actors without embedding the substance of democracy. Thus the institutions produced in each case fail to represent popular aspirations for institutionalizing democracy. Thus, in terms of outcomes the balance has yet to tilt in favour of democratic forces in both the state and civil society.
