ABSTRACT:

In Nigeria, political parties often struggle to win election contests. This is evident considering various strategies each party adopts to actualize their primary interest which is to control state power. In the process, they are faced with the challenge of choosing legitimate and acceptable means to achieve this result. Regrettably, electioneering campaigns in Nigeria have often been characterized by defamatory, derogatory and insulting attacks on rival parties or individual personalities thereby making political atmosphere intense. Consequently, this study is aimed at examining inter alia, the nature of campaigns carried out by People Democratic Party (PDP) and All Progressives Congress (APC) in the 2015 presidential election. The methodology adopted was that of descriptive thereby deriving heavily from the secondary sources for data collection with our theoretical framework anchoring on ‘capture theory of politics’. The paper finds out that in the 2015 presidential election, political parties’ campaigns were not issue based, as APC and PDP resorted to verbal attacks of the personality of the opposition members, thereby, posing a colossal threat to Nigeria’s democratic political process. Therefore, the Nigerian Electoral Act should be strengthened in order to strictly regulate the conducts of political parties and their members, and by this, punish electoral offenders. A viable institutional framework should be instituted to strictly superintend the activities of the media in order to prevent hate/inciting speeches and adverts from being made public.