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Tar, Usman A. and Shettima, Abba Gana (2010) Hegemony and subordination: governing class, power politics and electoral democracy in Nigeria. Information, society and justice journal, 3 (2). pp. 135-149. ISSN 1756-1078
As African countries continue in their march towards neo-liberal democracy, elite power politics has assumed new but macabre heights. The continent’s governing class is demonstrating dramatic behaviour in achieving and sustaining power by all means possible. In this article, recent experience in Nigerian 2007 general elections and the upcoming 2011 elections are recalled to argue that rival elements of the governing class are engaged in a vicious circle of subordinating one another, albeit with no threat to their hegemony. The paper appropriates Michael Foucault’s concepts of ‘new economy of power relations’ and ‘legitimation’ as well as Antonio Gramsci’s terminology of ‘subordination and hegemony’ to demonstrate that, by both design and default, dominant form and structures of power are reproduced and sustained by the governing class. The paper shows that dominant elites (incumbents and their allies) use state structures and an emerging single-party machinery to get an upper hand over opposition elites.
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