Money Politics and Vote Buying, A Bane on Sustainable Development: An Assessment of the 2023 General Election

Abstract

Money politics and vote buying have become entrenched features of Nigeria's electoral landscape, with the 2023 general election offering one of the clearest empirical windows into the scale and consequences of the practice. This study assesses the relationship between money politics, vote buying, and sustainable development in Nigeria, using the 2023 general election as its reference case. Adopting a descriptive, ex post facto research design anchored in secondary data from the National Bureau of Statistics, the Independent National Electoral Commission, Chatham House, SBM Intelligence, and peer-reviewed empirical studies, the article finds that vote buying rose to 22 per cent of surveyed citizens in 2023, up from 17 per cent in 2019, with regional prevalence as high as 44 per cent in the North-West, and that 40 per cent of those offered inducements admitted the offer influenced their vote choice. The study situates this practice within Nigeria's broader culture of monetised politics, evidenced by an INEC election budget of approximately ₦305 billion and pervasive informal payments to security and electoral personnel documented in previous election cycles. The findings show that vote buying undermines sustainable development by severing the link between electoral mandate and accountability, rewarding patronage over competence in candidate selection, and entrenching poverty-driven clientelism that perpetuates the very deprivation it exploits. The study concludes that money politics functions as a structural bane on Nigeria's Sustainable Development Goals agenda, particularly Goal 16 on peace, justice, and strong institutions, and recommends stronger campaign finance enforcement, real-time transparency, targeted poverty-reduction programming, and sustained civic education as measures to curb the practice.