In March 2010, I had one of my most unforgettable experiences with Tirso de Molina. We had brought our University of Massachusetts’ production of Marta la piadosa [Marta the Divine] to the Siglo Festival at El Paso’s Chamizal National Memorial. I was the show’s translator and adapter, and my perspective on the play had always been from the audience’s side of the proscenium, whether during rehearsals and performances from the previous November’s run at UMass or brush-ups for our Chamizal remount. We were able to bring only a skeleton crew to El Paso; all hands were needed literally “on deck” to crew the performance. Where was the need greatest? Costumes, of course! Along with costume designer Felicia Malachite and dramaturg Sarah Grunnah, I got swept up in the frenzy of the backstage costume-change pattern. In the dimly lit wing space off-left, we helped harried actors get in and out of breastplates, shawls, head-dresses, hoop skirts, belts, booties, stockings, and accessories—all in near darkness and sometimes with just a few seconds to spare before an actor was called upon to exit our murky world and enter the audience’s brilliantly illuminated one. It was one of the most exhilarating and also one of the most exhausting nights I have ever spent in a theater, and it gave me new appreciation for Tirso: for the technical complexity involved in engineering the spectacle taking place on stage, and for the virtuosity required of his performers—especially actresses—who are called on to juggle multiple intricate tasks for the entire run time of a show, on stage and off.

From my perspective as a theater practitioner, Tirso’s dramaturgy, at least in his comedies, is rooted in the potentialities of costume, in ways that distinguish him from his early modern Spanish playwriting peers. My observations come from a close knowledge of his texts from a series of productions that I have been associated with over the last thirty years.

Numa Visits Crotona

{W}hile the land of Rome was without a king, they sought a worthy man, wise and loyal, who would know how to govern the land well and be able to succeed such a valiant king in holding such a great kingdom. They chose a worthy man of great renown, wise and valiant, named Numa, to be king by election. The king devoted his attention not only to learning and discovering the rights and laws of the land, its customs and usages – in these things the king was sufficiently wise – but he also wanted to work at and strive towards learning greater knowledge. Hence he put his study and care into learning the art of nature and the powers, natures, and strengths of created things. [1–20]

To focus more diligently on study and learning, he left the land and country where he was born and to which he was native, and the people of his homeland, and came to the city of Crotona, located on the borders of Lombardy, to study philosophy. A Greek had founded and established it there in the Greek style, and Numa asked how it had been instituted differently from other cities located in that country, and by whom. An elder of the kingdom, who was very sensible of heart and knew the customs and usages of olden times, told him: [21–39]

“Long ago Hercules came here from Spain, with rich booty that the hero had won there. He stopped by this shore and made landfall and let his livestock graze on the grass. While the cattle were grazing, Hercules, because of the exertion that weighed on him, came to the home of a worthy man who was generous and courtly. The people of those olden times named him Croton. He was courtly, as I understand it, and those who sought his hospitality found that hospitality courteously provided. Croton lodged Hercules well and handsomely. When Hercules left there, he said to his host: ‘A time will come when this house will become a city of great authority.’ He said it, and it was true: it is very evident that the promise was sound. [39–60]

“Now you’ll hear how and in what way the city was later founded here.

What Is the Ovide Moralisé?

Visitors to the Villa Borghese in Rome are charmed every year by Bernini’s statue of Apollo and Daphne. For good cause: the statue is beautiful. The characters spring to life, almost escaping from the marble – the god pursuing the nymph; the nymph beginning her transformation into a laurel tree. Few modern visitors glance at the Latin inscription on the base, but for those who do, their experience of the statue is transformed, for the transcription places the myth within a moral framework: “Those who love to pursue fleeting forms of pleasure, in the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands.” This was a feature of the Western tradition of reading Ovid for over a thousand years, and nowhere do we see it more clearly than in the Ovide moralisé.

The Ovide moralisé (Moralized Ovid, or OM for short) is a fourteenthcentury French retelling of the Metamorphoses, a collection of Greco-Roman myths by the Latin poet Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43bc–17ad). Ovid’s poem was about “forms changed into new bodies” (1.1–2). Some of these are famous even now: Echo, the nymph who became a mere voice after pining away for Narcissus, a beautiful young man who fell in love with his own reflection and dwindled into a flower; Arachne, the proud weaver who became a spider; Pygmalion, whose statue of a woman came to life. The OM metamorphosized the Metamorphoses, turning about 12,000 lines of Latin – all fifteen books of Ovid’s poem – into some 72,000 lines of French.

Unlike Ovid’s poem, the OM is an explicitly Christian work, and Ovid’s stories are understood to be communicating Christian truth. The way the OM goes about demonstrating this makes it a fascinating case study in medieval thinking. It opens a unique window onto the culture, religion, politics, and intellectual climate of France, and, by extension, Western Europe, c.1320. The broad issue that it exemplifies, in terms of the history of ideas, is how premodern Europe dealt with the legacy of ancient Greece and Rome.

Christianity, as a monotheistic religion founded on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, might have been inclined to jettison or condemn everything that came before it. This issue was debated from the formative period of the early church. For example:

This essay draws on masculinity studies in literary criticism to arrive at a more historically situated understanding of the Don Juan figure in the Tirso de Molina-attributed play El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra [The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest]. Over the centuries, this famous play has led to countless iterations in varied artistic forms produced by a wide variety of creative geniuses, including Molière, Mozart, Zorrilla, and Byron while continuing to generate abundant artistic and literary activity today. Interestingly, the character of Don Juan has escaped the confines of the works of these artists and their historical, social, and cultural milieux and has come to represent the apotheosis of masculine debauchery, emerging as a generic term for a seducer and womanizer in the popular imagination and parlance. And, yet, this young serial sexual offender is not a timeless literary creation. Although the exact date of composition and authorship of El burlador de Sevilla has long been the subject of vigorous debate, with Tirso de Molina as the leading contender (Parr 2004: 138–163) and Andrés de Claramonte vying strongly for the title (Rodríguez López Vázquez 2020), this influential play is the product of Counter-Reformation Spain, a particular cultural moment and place that played a major role in the formation of normative masculine conduct. Constantly juxtaposed against the older characters who seek to thwart his sexual transgressions or look the other way, the figure of Don Juan in El burlador de Sevilla engages not only with some of the most pressing issues regarding early modern masculinity, such as the Counter-Reformation regulation of masculine sexuality, but also with the under-examined intersection of masculinity and age on the seventeenth-century Spanish stage and in wider early modern society.

Remarkably, for a play that gave rise to the term donjuanismo (Don Juanism) as a synonym for a womanizing masculinity of sorts, and that inspired many later artistic treatments of this toxic masculine trait, the construction of masculinity (or masculinities) in El burlador de Sevilla has received scant critical attention to date. In recent years, critical masculinity studies has emerged as an exceptionally vibrant interdisciplinary academic field that looks at masculinity as a dynamic and evolving category and as a discrete topic of scholarly inquiry.

Perseus Fights Phineus (I)

{A}s the valiant hero, the son of Danaë, was telling this story in the midst of the folk of this kingdom, chaos broke out in the hall. There was a great tumult, but it was not the sound of joy or celebration: joy had turned into its opposite. There was a loud call to arms, and there you would have seen the crowd rushing for their weapons in great haste. Suddenly Phineus, the king’s brother, full of folly and rashness, stormed through the palace, ready to do battle. He brandished his ash-wood spear. Seeing Perseus, he berated him and lashed out at him in anger: “Vassal, soon you will find out what reward you will earn for stealing my beloved. There is nothing that could rescue or preserve you from death. Soon, I shall make you repent for the foolish thing that you have done – stealing my wife from me!” So saying, he drew back his arm to launch the spear, when King Cepheus shouted: [1–28]

“Brother, what madness, arrogance, or frenzy is making you want to instigate this outrage and this strife? Is this how you intend to pay back and reward him for the pains he endured to save your beloved’s life and return her safely after Jupiter had sent her to be devoured by the sea monster? For it is not he who took her away from you but Jupiter, who condemned her to the beast, and if he hadn’t been there, the beast would have already killed and eaten her. You lost her as soon as she was condemned to death. It is indeed true that you were meant to marry her: I myself promised her to you in front of my people and my friends. But the agreement was broken when Jupiter, in his anger, rendered her up to death. This man promised to free her on the understanding that if he did, she would be his wife. We assured him of this: oaths were sworn to that effect. You were there: you saw it, and you didn’t raise a single objection. Now that he’s saved her by his might, you want to be master of both the beauty and the kingdom? There is no reason, as it seems to me, why we shouldn’t hold up our end of the deal.

If there is common ground that the authors in this book share, it is their genuine willingness to examine and rediscover Gabriel Téllez (1583–1648), known as Tirso de Molina, according to the interests and sensibilities of twenty-first-century readers and audiences and, among them, undergraduate and graduate students, literary scholars, and practitioners of global theater. To this end, the authors of this volume have collaborated to frame Tirso’s production and his persona within an interdisciplinary, multicultural, and transhistorical scope to demonstrate his contemporaneity and future projections, especially in relation to his dramatic works. The greater transcultural visibility of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca in Spanish early modern theater has tended to outshine Tirso unjustly, partly because of his intermediary position between the two. Yet, it could be argued that this bridge position in the history of Spanish theater is what made Tirso an outstanding figure unique in his own right. Tirso’s deeply religious knowledge obtained from his time as a friar—and later chronicler—in the Mercedarian order to which he belonged made him particularly adroit in adapting the doctrine for the stage and articulating the sacred and the profane with masterly alacrity. His plays range from theological and biblical content to perceptive situations based on a deep reflection on the human condition and the society in which he found himself enmeshed.

Rather than approaching Tirso from historicist or philological perspectives, our volume relies on completing the foundational studies to date (e.g., biographies, critical editions, and literary analyses) mostly written in Spanish with new voices from cultural, material, and performance approaches to create multivariant frames for the Mercedarian friar’s life and works that further enrich his legacy with multidisciplinary interpretations attuned to the interests of the twenty-first-century reader. The intellectual approaches that we use to reinvigorate Tirso’s dramatic legacy take into consideration the ways in which the religious and secular contexts that surrounded our author left a distinctive imprint on his works and his characters as he adeptly created an organic, critical dialogue between the real and the fictional. Within this framework, we have prioritized the themes that we consider key within the playwright’s oeuvre to open up Tirso studies to the discipline of global theater as well as to a broader English-speaking audience.

Andrew Marvell stands at the junction of literature and history, a consummate poet who latterly became a prose writer of stunning virtuosity and forthrightness. His polemics touched upon every political and ecclesiastical crux of the Restoration era. A member of parliament for Hull and a client of aristocrats who were at odds with Anglican Royalism, he encapsulates sensibilities that were at once Puritan and proto-Whig. His Rehearsal Transpros’d (1672–3) brilliantly skewered the persecutory Samuel Parker; his Mr Smirke; or, the Divine in Mode (1676) burlesqued the rising clergyman Fancis Turner, while its appendix, A Short Historical Essay on General Councils, exemplified the partisan weaponizing of the history of the early church. His Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government (1677) was a clarion call of the emerging Whig movement, famed for its opening assertion that ‘there has now for divers years, a design been carried on, to change the lawful government of England into an absolute tyranny’; while his (now obscure) Remarks upon a Late Disingenuous Discourse (1678) delved into the crisis of Protestant soteriology and the dilemmas of Calvinism. Marvell's career throws a bridge between the Revolutions of 1648 and 1688. During the Interregnum he served alongside John Milton in the task of vindicating the Commonwealth; in his last years (he died in 1678), his confidant was his nephew, William Popple, who would become an intimate of John Locke and translator into English of Locke's Epistola de tolerantia. To examine Marvell's adversaries, and his responses to them, is to exhume not only the substance of civil and religious contention during the 1670s but also their manner and form, their rhetorical and performative character. We may capture the latter aspect by reference to a single trope. Marvell took from the second duke of Buckingham's play The Rehearsal (1672) the character of ‘Draw-can-Sir’, a brawling buffoon, and applied it to Parker, thereby popularizing the figure of the swaggering, bullying authorial swordsman. The phrase caught on. One of the critics of the supreme Tory pamphleteer Roger L’Estrange called him a ‘Draw-can-Sir’. By 1698 a versifier could casually refer to a ‘Draw-can-Sir’ as a ‘fighting coward and a Tory’. Locke surely had such allusions in mind when, in the Second Treatise of Government, he called the defenders of absolute monarchy ‘arrant Draw-can-Sirs’.

John Rhys and Thomas Jones suggested many emendations in order to regularise syllable counts. Some of their emendations may be excessive, since variation may have been tolerated, as in the saga englynion analysed by Jenny Rowland, which have many stylistic similarities to Englynion y Beddau. That said, it is clear that the scribes sometimes disregarded metrics and tinkered with the texts in order to clarify their prose sense (e.g. I.35c and III.2c).

Nearly all the englynion in Englynion y Beddau are milwr or penfyr, the two three-line types already found in the Juvencus manuscript in the early tenth century. These were not used by the court poets of the twelfth century onwards – or, rather, not in the official poetry attributed to them by name. There are also some examples of four-line englynion, either the englyn gwastad (first attested in manuscript at Llanbadarn in the late eleventh century) or the englyn cyrch, which chiefly occurred in popular verse in the later Middle Ages. Four-line englynion of the more elaborate types used in the court poetry of the twelfth century onwards are absent, and the syllable counting and ornamentation is less strict than in that corpus.

Without ruling out a much earlier date, it seems reasonable to suppose that some parts of Englynion y Beddau were composed at least as early as the first half of the twelfth century. Once their format was established, however, one can imagine later poets adding further englynion in the same metres, as has been suggested in the case of the englynion referring to Norman kings in prophetic englynion such as the Cyfoesi. Metrics are therefore an unreliable dating guide. III.17, an englyn penfyr, is unlikely to be earlier than the fourteenth century (see commentary), but it does not stand out metrically.

Englynion milwr

Rowland shows that 7-7-8 and 8-7-7 were probably acceptable in englynion milwr as well as the canonical 7-7-7. In the Beddau there is one example (37) of 7-7-8, and although its 8 in line c could be reduced to 7 by deleting the optional adjective plural ending -ion, that is probably not mandatory.

A Durable Republic?

On Monday, 20 December 2021, President Muhammadu Buhari formally declined assent to the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2021 which had been passed by both chambers of the National Assembly a few weeks earlier. The Bill sought to amend Section 87 of the Electoral Act, 2010. In the period between the passage of the Bill by the National Assembly and the President's decision, there was a debate in the country about what the President's refusal would signal about the fate of electoral democracy in Nigeria. When they threatened to override the President's veto, if he exercised it, the leadership of both legislative institutions were lauded by leading critical voices in the political and civil societies (Baiyewu, et al. 2021). Therefore, when the President eventually declined assent to the Bill, apart from the state governors who strongly urged the President not to sign it, most interest groups condemned his decision.

The main point of contention in the Bill was the provision that political parties must select their candidates through direct primaries. For most of the Fourth Republic, political parties have used either indirect primaries or consensus (which is often a metaphor for the imposition of candidates by party leaders) in choosing candidates. Indirect primaries are highly susceptible to manipulation and corruption. They have become the most potent way for some party leaders to impose their candidates, even if such flagbearers are not popular among the generality of the party members. Therefore, mandating direct primaries, as the Bill did, was a way of not only ensuring that the most popular candidates won the party tickets, it was also crucial to broadening the direct engagement of party members in the internal democratic process.

In rejecting this provision – while requesting the National Assembly to drop it from the new electoral bill – President Buhari claimed that ‘the nomination of party candidates solely via direct primaries as envisaged by the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2021 has serious adverse legal, financial, economic and security consequences which cannot be accommodated at the moment considering our Nation's peculiarities’. He added: ‘It also has implications on [sic.] the rights of citizens to participate in the government as constitutionally ensured’ (Premium Times 2021). The other reasons provided by Buhari, were judged by the media to be specious.

Pulling up the roots of sedition

In 1661 the Speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Turnor, likened republican England after the execution of Charles I to the five-day anarchy permitted among the ancient Persians so that they might appreciate kingly rule. ‘The forms and species of government are various’, he explained, ‘monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical: but the first is certainly the best, as being the nearest to divinity itself.’ As this remark suggests, civil war and regicide made a generation of gentlemen more, not less, willing to endorse the doctrines that sovereignty lay in the crown, that rebellion was never justified, and that monarchy had something of divinity. It now seemed incontrovertible that the crown's supremacy was the guarantor of the gentry's own authority. ‘There can be nothing’, wrote Thomas Hobbes, ‘more instructive towards loyalty and justice than will be the memory, while it lasts, of that war’.

During the Civil War the Long Parliament's defenders had deployed, with increasing self-confidence, the arsenal of anti-absolutist arguments developed by Scottish Calvinist and French Huguenot radicals in the late sixteenth century. They asserted that the source of political authority lay in the community, and that the king was an officer of the commonwealth, answerable to the people. The community, incorporated in parliament, might legitimately coerce a tyrannical ruler in defence of its rights. The premise was populist, the conclusion revolutionary. In 1649 the Rump Parliament declared that ‘the people are, under God, the original of all just power’ and ‘the Commons of England, in parliament assembled … have the supreme power in this nation’.

The legislation of the early 1660s, as Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, put it, ‘pulled up all those principles of sedition and rebellion by the roots’. Several statutes provided explicit affirmations of political doctrine, among them the Regicide, Militia, Treason, Corporation, and Triennial Acts. They declared that the period of the ‘late usurped governments’ had seen ‘many evil and rebellious principles … distilled into the minds of the people’, which must now be ‘prevented’. Parliament's war was not a legitimate resistance but a ‘barbarous rebellion’ bred by ‘fanatic rage’. The attempt to enforce regular parliaments had been a ‘derogation of his majesty's just rights and prerogative inherent to the imperial crown’.

The chapters in this volume tell a sobering tale of a major emerging-market country (by far Africa's most populous) still searching for a viable political order six decades after its independence. Among the largest states that emerged from colonial rule after the Second World War (countries like India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Philippines), none faces such persistent and deep questions as does Nigeria about its future existence as one nation. And in recent years, secessionist calls and pressures have multiplied. Even within Africa, only a few large countries (such as Ethiopia and the Congo) confront anything like these existential challenges to their corporate existence. The tenacity of this most basic question of political order – who and what constitutes the nation – may seem odd for a country that has enjoyed decades of bountiful oil revenue to fund the central state and distribute resources to diverse parts of the country. But, as in many other low-income countries that have become largely dependent on this stream of income, oil has been very much part of the problem.

Anyone taking the long view of Nigeria's political development cannot but be struck by the continuity in the country's essential dilemmas. The core questions of Nigeria's existence – whether it should be one country or several, and if one, how it should be structured as a federation – have been at the centre of constitutional debate since the very inception of Nigerian politics. In fact, this debate dates back not to independence in 1960 (or the 1959 federal elections that paved the way for that), but rather to the birth of competitive party politics in the early 1950s (Diamond 1988). To this overarching and deeply unsettled conundrum can be added numerous others that have endured virtually unabated since the traumatic early post-independence years and that feature prominently in the withering analyses of this volume:

• • the predominance of ethnicity in political calculations, alliances, and electoral mobilization;

• • the complex layering of identity politics along ethnic, sub-ethnic, regional, and religious lines, with the potential for any of these to become a fault line that threatens political stability;

• • the recurrent eruption of these identity cleavages into various forms and levels of deadly violence;

• • the prominence of fraud (and often as well, violence) in elections at all levels;

• • the dominance of distributional questions in political life – which groups are and/or are not getting their ‘fair share of the national cake’;

Introduction

Of all of the things we think we know about Nigeria's particular form of democracy, one of the most persistent and widely shared is that it is closely related to a political economy dependent on sharing the revenues from oil exploitation. In materialist terms, everything from the intitutional forms and structures through which political action and public spending are filtered, to the identities and social linkages which come to the fore in political sociology, have been arranged around and invigorated by the flows of hydrocarbon revenues out of the mangrove swamps, into a central pot and outwards through the capillaries of formal and informal government spending. In both scholarship and popular discourse, there is a remarkable pervasive accepted ‘fact’ that oil and gas revenues account for 85% of Nigeria's revenues, which has acquired axiomatic status over the years simply by its frequent citing. This figure persists despite a growing realization that Nigeria may be approaching a ‘post-oil’ economic transition. Recent variations include the claim that oil is 80% of Federal Government revenues (Omoregie 2018, citing unspecified national statistic source), that it constitutes 77% of total government revenues, according to the governmental body Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (NEITI 2016)2 or that it is 65% of all revenues to government (EITI 2019, 2020). Very few such claims are presented with supporting data. Related to that assumption is that, correspondingly, the state collects comparatively little revenue from other sources such as income or transaction taxes. However, data on exactly what this might be are frustratingly hard to reconcile.

This study began as an attempt to determine more precisely what the exact proportion of Nigeria's gross domestic product (GDP) collected as oil versus non-oil revenues might be, in order to map this change. However in doing so we also uncovered a more significant issue in the data: when looking at aggregated revenue across both state and Federal governments, we find that, rather than being on the road to a post-oil transition, Nigeria already passed this point in 2015, the first year since 1971 when real-terms non-oil revenue outstripped oil revenue. This potentially has far-reaching consequences and should help to update our understanding of how Nigeria's political economy – and especially the link between economic activity and government revenue – actually should be interpreted at the start of the third decade of the twenty-first century.

The anonymous Englynion y Beddau name and describe the burial places of early medieval heroes, providing a key to a narrative literature which is largely lost. In this they resemble Trioedd Ynys Prydain (‘The Triads of the Island of Britain’). While the Triads’ mnemonic function is accomplished by grouping information in threes, Englynion y Beddau are suitable for memorisation because they are metrical and use poetic formulae.

Two series of Englynion y Beddau survive, Series I in the Black Book of Carmarthen (NLW Peniarth 1), c. 1250, and derivatives of it, and Series III in various derivatives of a lost copy, with partially modernised orthography, in a manuscript belonging to William Salesbury (c. 1510–c. 1580). The so-called ‘Series II’ and ‘Series IV’ are not true ‘series’ (see below, p. 18). A reference such as I.10 or III.10 refers to the number of the stanza (usually in englyn metre) within the relevant series, and a reference such as I.10c refers to the line (here the third) within the stanza.

On 32r of the Black Book a late medieval scribe added the title Englynnionn y Beddev. This is the first attestation of the now customary title, translated as ‘The Stanzas of the Graves’ by Thomas Jones in his 1967 edition. He also included the alternative title Beddau Milwyr Ynys Prydain, ‘The Graves of the Warriors of the Island of Britain’. Although not attested before the early seventeenth century, this title is quite apt. All stanzas, except one (I.70) which was added to the Black Book of Carmarthen by a second thirteenth-century scribe, refer to men rather than women; even Branwen, whose grave is described in the Second Branch of the Mabinogi, is missing. With the exception of Beli ab Benlli Gawr – another addition (I.73) – the warriors seem to be humans rather than giants, although that distinction was fluid and could change over time. Typically the men are heroes praised for their ferocity in battle. They come from the whole of Britain, including Mercia and present-day Scotland. Warriors from the ‘Old North’ include Cynon ap Clydno Eidyn (I.8–11), Owain ab Urien, and Rhydderch Hael (I.13–14), Einion ap Cunedda (I.72), Llofan (III.5–8), and Elidir Mwynfawr (III.15). From Wales come Cynddylan of Powys (I.15), Aergol of Dyfed, and Maelgwn Gwynedd’s son, wife, and bard (I.70–71), among many others. From Mercia comes Panna ap Pyd (III.9/I.10).

Introduction

Nigeria's democratic governance has been weighed and found wanting with the values, principles, ethos, objectives, and goals of different models of liberal democracy. The consensus among analysts and other stakeholders is that democratic politics in Nigeria's Fourth Republic has failed to deliver good governance and other democratic dividends (Adeosun 2014; Omilusi 2015; Usman and Avidime 2016; Ashindorbe 2019). Disrespect for human rights by security agents (especially the infamous Special Anti-Robbery Squad, SARS) leading to the ‘EndSARS’ nation-wide protests in 2020, and executive lawlessness are still rampant. This is why some analysts and stakeholders have characterized Nigeria's democracy as civil rather than democratic rule. For instance, the distinguished public commentator and Catholic priest, Matthew Kukah (2019) noted that Nigeria's political system has become even more unruly with irresponsible behaviour of men and women of unquestionable character that it has thrusted into power. Sklar, et al. (2006) similarly wrote that the personalization of political power and the overbearing influence of powerful politicians have undermined the principles and values of democratic practice in Nigeria. Furthermore, Falode (2013) and Suleiman (2016) similarly observed that democratic progress and good governance have been stifled by the leadership styles characterized by Machiavellian tactics of the four executive presidents that the country has had in the Fourth Republic.

Political institutions – national parliaments, judiciary, political parties, elected local governments, etc. – that distinguish today's representative governments from the popular governments of the Greek and the Roman without which no democracy in large and complex polities can meet the expectations of popular will are also present in Nigeria (Dahl 1998). But collectively derived decisions from the participation of all citizens through these political institutions are possible when a modern state organization lives up to the two basic principles of democracy highlighted by Pericles’ funeral oration for fallen Greek soldiers – political participation and political equality. A participant political culture that these principles foster contributes to the development of strong political institutions and ensures that those entrusted with political power act within constitutional safeguards for rule of law, respect for civil and political rights, accountability and, in a presidential system, separation of powers between the arms of government against usurpation by one person or political institution to prevail. This is what remains to be seen in Nigeria.

For some, strong institutions are sufficient for securing and guaranteeing good governance.