This is a collection of essays on a remarkable and turbulent period in the political history of Nigeria. Although written between 1999 and 2003, the focus of these essays reached far behind that period to the crises of the annulment of the June 12 1993 Presidential elections and its aftermath. The annulment marked a defining moment whose impact still haunts Nigeria's democratic experiment to date. The essays seek to offer both the general reader and professional an insight onto the issues, currents and trends that defined this watershed decade and its sequel, of which the current political dispensation is a part.

The authors examine the rise and fall of democratic transition and structural adjustment in Nigeria during the eight-year regime of General Ibrahim Babangida (1985-1993), chronicling the country's descent from the promise of reform and renewal to an unprecedented political and economic depression.

In 2015, Nigeria's voters cast out the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP). Here, A. Carl LeVan traces the political vulnerability of Africa's largest party in the face of elite bargains that facilitated a democratic transition in 1999. These 'pacts' enabled electoral competition but ultimately undermined the party's coherence. LeVan also crucially examines the four critical barriers to Nigeria's democratic consolidation: the terrorism of Boko Haram in the northeast, threats of Igbo secession in the southeast, lingering ethnic resentments and rebellions in the Niger Delta, and farmer-pastoralist conflicts. While the PDP unsuccessfully stoked fears about the opposition's ability to stop Boko Haram's terrorism, the opposition built a winning electoral coalition on economic growth, anti-corruption, and electoral integrity. Drawing on extensive interviews with a number of politicians and generals and civilians and voters, he argues that electoral accountability is essential but insufficient for resolving the representational, distributional, and cultural components of these challenges.

A panoramic view of military transition in Nigeria since 1970 by a collection of intellectuals, mainly professors at the University of Lagos, who in one way or another participated in or observed this period of Nigerian politics. Their clear objective is to say never again to military rule, and to anticipate and deflect any possible defence of this kind of regime. The essays contend that what the military call transition to civil rule was rather a phase in which transition programmes were permanently recycled; a dimension of power struggle; and that the military consistently desisted deferring political power to civilians. Additionally they show how military stranglehold has divided a country it claimed to unite, and mindlessly wrecked an economy through expropriation, collusion and pillage. They further demonstrate that the nation was in a more disintegrated and divided state in 1999 than 1996, the federal structure having been deformed in the aftermath of transitions, and the citizens having lost any residual confidence in their country as a nation.