Examining the Influence of Ethnicity and Religion on the Voting pattern of the Nigerian Electorate- ICA 2016 – BRICS Media Pre-conference – Aoyama Gakuin University, Tokyo – Session 4 – 2.00 – 3.15 (Informal concurrent roundtables and audience interaction); Slot 4: BRICS Media – Challenges and relevance in Africa and Russia, Godwin Ehiarekhian Oboh, Associate Professor, Department of Mass Communication, Benson Idahosa University, Nigeria.
Abstract:
This study examines the influence of ethnicity and religion on the voting pattern of the Nigerian electorate, justifying the central objective of the paper, and used the Pluralist Theory to argue why the media should be involved in the Nigerian politics. The paper employed the content analysis approach to review the 2015 presidential election and found that the Igbo community had the least representation in the office of the president of Nigeria. Since democracy is a game of numbers, it might be relatively difficult ever having a Nigerian President of an Igbo origin without the support of the other ethnic nationalities in Nigeria.
Therefore, to create the platform for both the members of the major and the minority ethnic nationalities in the country to occupy the office of the president of Nigeria, the paper recommends among other things that the Nigerian presidency be rotated among the six geo-political zones in the country as recommended earlier by Chief Anthony Enaharo, architect of the phenomenon of the six-geo zone structure in the Nigerian politics.