Chapter Five Political Parties and Electioneering Campaigns: Patterns and Dynamics Kabiru Gambo & Abubakar Bashir Ribadu Introduction n a democratic system of government, a political party exists and engages in the struggles for power in a society. For political parties to realize their goals, they must advertise their principles and ideology, mission and vision, as well as policy framework for actualizing these goals, which can be done by convincing the electorate on how best to achieve their goals, why they want to be in power and the kind of policies to pursue in order to make changes possible once they get power. These functions are obviously discharged by political parties mostly during the conduct of electioneering campaigns. These, both in developed and developing democracies, have become the main instrument of communication between the electorate and the contestants. However, issues involved in electioneering campaigns differ from one country to another. In developed democracies, campaign activities are primarily issue-based and well-focused on what is important and desirable for the electorate. The reverse is the case in developing democracies, particularly in Africa, where poverty, ethnicity and the unequal distribution of scarce resources are some of the manifesting tendencies that occupy the front burner of campaign issues in these societies. In most of these issues, speeches and campaign rallies are bastardized, and, in most cases, the dis- articulation of campaign speeches from the mainstream concerns 93 relating to what really can promote sustainable economic, political and social developments are overlooked. With no discussion on central issues affecting the development of the society before the electorate, politicians find it easy to manipulate idiosyncratic factors, mainly religion, sectional, ethnic and other primordial sentiments as their ‘take for sale’ to the electorate. In a plural society like Nigeria, the patterns and dynamics of electioneering campaigns are indeed fundamentally different even among African countries, and more so, in developed liberal democracies. It is in this context that this chapter examines the patterns and dynamics of electioneering campaigns in Nigeria. However, the salient questions this chapter attempts to answer include the following: (a) Are the patterns of electioneering campaigns in Nigeria’s past democratic experiment the same with the prevailing situation in the country’s Fourth Republic? (b) What are the changes, if any? (c) What are the implications of electioneering campaigns on democratic consolidation? I