Civil Society Organizations and Democratization in Nigeria: An Appraisal of the Role of the Nigerian Labour Congress

Abstract

Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) play a critical role in the democratization process of any country. This is because they enhance the smooth operation of democratic practice by attenuating state power and supplementing political parties as agents of interest
articulation and aggregation. Against this background, the article appraises the role the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has played in etching the contours of the democratization process in the country starting from the colonial to the post-colonial eras.
The article adopts the group theory to explain how, through group advocacy and struggles, the NLC have helped in guiding against democratic threats in the country. For its methodological thrust, the article relied on documentary evidence garnered from the literature on civil society and democracy. The finding reveals that the NLC was more adept at negotiating the welfare of workers during the colonial era and ousting the military from power than deepening the democratic experiment in the post military era. This, for the most part, is due to the penchant for corruption and personal enrichment that have pervaded the leadership of CSOs in the post-military era as well as the lack of capacity in terms of knowledge, skills and methods of advocacy to engage the state in a democratic setting. The article concludes, inter alia, that for the NLC to entrench democracy in the country, it should eschew corruption from its ranks and fine tune its methods of advocacy with the state.