Democratic Process and Social Justice: a Key to Sustainable Peace and Conflict Prevention in Nigeria

Abstract

Democracy is a principle of governance that ensures equity, supremacy of the law and welfare of all citizens of a state using social justice as an apparatus through which it realizes these tenets.  In a plural society like Nigeria, democratic governance cum social justice is the obiter dictum of peace and conflicts prevention. Our general aim in this paper is to unravel the paramount of democratic process and social justice to sustainable peace and conflicts prevention in Nigeria.  The paper made use of secondary data source for data collection, made use of social identity theory as the model of analysis and historical descriptive approach to analyse the phenomenon understudy. One of the most worrisome challenges of Nigeria’s peace and conflicts prevention is embedded in the country’s democratic experiments and lack of social justice in the polity. Based on our findings, it was realized that leadership character of the person in government goes a long way to determine the place of democracy and social justice which determines whether or not, sustainable peace and conflicts prevention can be realized in Nigeria. Therefore, among other policy implications, the need for Nigerians to vote a person with a profile of law-abiding attitude and, the need for the judiciary to ensure that social justice is guaranteed by ensuring that all irrespective of social class so involved in a court process are treated in the spirit of equity and fairness hence, sustainable peace and conflicts prevention in Nigeria.