Fundamentally therefore, to describe governance as a good one and to determine whether it is a bad one requires the understanding of the essence of the state which are not only embedded in the constitution but also a function of the religious ideals and the nature of current problems confronting the state. The question about the essence of the state formed the major preoccupation of the earlier philosophers like Aristotle, Plato, Rousseau and others. The essence of the state to these early thinkers is to promote the common good as acknowledged in section 16(2 ‘b’) of the Nigerian constitution. Thus, public authorities have the common good of the state as their prime responsibilities. The common good stands in opposition to the good of rulers or of a ruling group. It implies that every individual, no matter how high or low, has a duty to share in promoting the welfare of the community as well as a right to benefit from that welfare (Eboh, 2003). Common implies that the “good” is all inclusive. In essence, the common good cannot exclude or exempt any section of the population. If any section of the population is in fact excluded from participating in the life of the community, even at a minimal level, then that is a contradiction to the concept of the common good (Eboh, 2003). Then what is
governance? Governance can be defined as the process that is employed to achieve the noble end of the state. Thus, governance simply implies the art of governing a people within a given territory or a state. It consists of two essential elements of the state, namely the structure of the state and the procedures of the legislative, judicial and those of the executive and administrative bodies at all the tiers of government. In one word, governance remains a state in action. Hirst and Thompson (1996) define governance as “the control of an activity by some means such that a range of desired outcomes is attained”. Thus, governance in a political sense is a more complex activity. Secondly, political governance is service oriented. Governance is better conceived from Lasswel traditional definition of politics as who gets what,
when and how and perhaps how much. Thus, governance has a lot to do with the allocation of values in the society, which to a large extent is political in nature. Although governance is related to politics, it is conceptually different.