July 06, (THEWILL) — On Thursday, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, gave an update on the number of associations seeking registration as political parties with it. It said the number had increased from the earlier figure of 110 to 122. That was within a week. At this rate, that is before the end of the legal window of 30 months expiration date for application and registration before an election, the number might increase.
While the Commission disclosed that the list of the new applications by names of associations, their acronyms, addresses, and interim chairmen and secretaries has been uploaded to its website and other platforms for public information, it added that response to the applicants will be in line with the Electoral Act and Regulations and Guidelines for Political Parties 2022.
Interestingly, INEC noted that one association has already changed its interim secretary as a result of defection to another association. This attitude is typical of many Nigerian politicians: Always in a hurry to jump ship at the slightest change, all in search of where the grass is greening, never on the basis of principle or vision.
We however wish to draw the Commission’s attention to the need to be as practical and legal in the execution of its mandate on registration of political parties. This is like history repeating itself.
As of February 2019, Nigeria had 90 political parties, many with no known office address, web site and administrative office until the Commission wielded the big stick in 2022 and pruned the number down to 18 . Even so, the parties are just numbers during every election, general or off-cycle.
In fact, if the Commission had been diligent in its assignment with regard to monitoring of administrative, election and financial standing of political parties, the country would have been left with probably five political parties.
According to Section 225A of the Constitution (with the First, Second, Third and Fourth Alterations as amended in 2017), INECis empowered to deregister political parties for various reasons.
Section 225A states, “The Independent National Electoral Commission shall have power to de-register a political party for breach of any of the requirements for registration;
“Failure to win at least 25 percent of votes cast in one state of the Federation in a Presidential election or one Local Government of the State in a Governorship election;
“Failure to win at least one ward in the Chairmanship election, one seat in the National or State House of Assembly election or one seat in the Councillorship election.”
Similarly, Section 222 of the Constitution states that political parties that fail serially to render accounts of their detailed annual statement and analysis of their sources of funds and other assets with similar statements of expenditure, may also be deregistered.
If these constitutional provisions are applied, political parties may not be more than seven in Nigeria, namely, the governing All Progressives Congress, APC, the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, Labour Party, LP, the All Progressives Grand Alliance, APGA and the Young Progressives Party, YPP, the New Nigeria Peoples Party and the Social Democratic Party, SDP.
What we have seen with the other fringe parties, truth be told, is that they are usually for sale to the highest bidder during elections. Many of the money bags who pay to use these parties to pursue their inordinate ambitions have nothing substantial to offer by way of vision, manifesto and followership. Apart from stretching the logistics and manpower of INEC during elections, they also give a false impression that democracy is being served by their inclusion, when in fact they have neither followership nor presence in the public space to speak of.
If these rules had been applied, we would not be faced with this present glut that is threatening to stretch the Commission to distraction. Even the major parties would begin to shape up and conform to their designation as political parties in the true sense of the word, devoid of the current crisis of leadership plaguing virtually all of them.
Indeed, many of the names on the list published by the Commission look like duplicates. Our preliminary investigation shows that some of these associations were duplicated in the belief that “one of them must be registered,” according to a leader of one of the associations which bear similar but twisted names to achieve the same purpose.
Like the interim secretary of an association whose name had to be substituted because he had defected to a new party, many others duplicating names are ignorant of the relevant laws governing registration of political parties and we think the Commission should spare Nigerians the agony by weeding them out.
This is exactly what a section on the INEC’s Registration and Deregistration of Political Parties speaks to when its states that “Where at any stage of the registration process.
it is discovered that the same set of persons submitted more than one application, or that any aspect of the submission is false, such an application shall be invalidated.”
The point in all of this is that INEC should begin to apply the rule with no reasons whatsoever for waiver. After 26 years of unbroken democratic practice, Nigeria should have political parties that are true to their names as agents of political mobilisation and socialisation.
