CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.0 Background to the Study
The history of Nigeria has been characterized by a variety of political violence and social economic development in Nigeria, this could be attribute to the coercive imposition and tradition brought together by colonial era (Udokang, 2006). However, apart from these scholars have identified leadership problem, ethnic crisis as well as living standard of the people as the cause of political violence and social economic development in Nigeria.
          Consequently, violence is usually accompanied with wanton loss of lives, property, instability, infrastructural destruction among others, while social economic development contributed to the advancement and improvement in the standard of living increase in the life of people. Perhaps, no nation can survive a test of time when it’s drowned in the menace of violence and moreover no nation can actually develop under the prevalence of crisis violence and upheavals.
          Therefore, in order for a nation to have a bit of development it should do away with all violent like attitudes. However, political violence is a form of violent relations and incompatibility of interest goals and ambitions between individuals’ groups and political structures in the process of attaining power and keeping it. To put it differently, political violence emanates during when elections are conducted and economic development after election is concluded in the state. This action is usually accompanied with various act of violence in Nigeria which is not usually the same in other countries of the world.
          Before the attainment of independent in 1960 Nigeria had recorded myriads of violence chiefly among which is political. This problem however could be traced to 1922 when the first election was conducted and this has continued unabated till this present-dispensation, violence has done no nation any good has earlier observed rather it’s mark remains inextripable.
          In the precolonial times, many of the traditional village democracy that was practiced in some geo-political environment has the needed popular support of the electorate and the citizens at large. Consequently, the history of modern democracy in Nigeria is chequered with one from of violence and another, this according to Nweke (2006), the emergence of political violence in sourced through the nature of party formation which was ethnoregionally based.
          This was followed by the regionalization of Nigeria as created by Richard Constitution of 1946 Anu and Uwanaju (2011) wrote that at independence, political conflicts over the centre stage of nation building in Nigeria and its multiplier effect gave birth to the factor that led to Nigeria civil war of 1967 – 1970.