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Nigeria 2011 party primaries in retrospect
By Jide Ojo
Newsdiaryonline
Wed , February 9, 2011
Finally, the wheat has been separated from the chaff, the men
from the boys, the contenders from the pretenders. It was battle
royale, a nerve wracking game of intrigues, eventually by fair
or foul means the 63 registered political parties have nominated
their flag-bearers and by close of business on Monday, January
31, 2011, only 44 or thereabout of the lot were able to beat the
deadline for submission of the names of their candidates for the
April 2011 General Elections.
It is yet unknown if the 19 political parties who did not submit
list of their candidates to the Independent National Electoral
Commission (INEC) as at when due decided of their own volition
not to field candidates for the April polls or they were
negligent with time, thinking that it will be business as usual
when INEC’s time-table could be treated with disdain.
An evaluation of the party congresses, conventions and primaries
held between INEC stipulated time of November 26, 2010 and
January 15, 2011 shows that Nigeria’s political class have
refused to learn any positive lessons from the past. The
candidates nomination process in many of the parties were at
variance with letters and spirit of Nigeria’s legal framework
for elections, be it the 1999 Constitution as amended, the 2010
Electoral Act as amended, Constitutions of the various political
parties themselves, and INEC as well as respective political
parties’ electoral guidelines. Some of the party primaries were
not only very rancorous; they were undemocratic, prejudiced and
unscrupulous. Any wonder the dust stirred by controversies
surrounding some of the party nomination exercises is yet to
settle several weeks after the conclusion of the party
primaries? That is to be expected as all manner of tricks were
used by the party executive to deliver the party tickets to
their favoured aspirants. This has led to arson, assassinations,
mass decampments and litigations.
As it happened in the lead up to 2007 elections, there is
hullabaloo about some candidates who won the party primaries
being substituted in the final list of nominees submitted to
INEC. In its trademark policy, Peoples Democratic Party decided
to annul primaries conducted into the gubernatorial positions in
Kogi and Kano states as well as 10 senatorial seats. The party
thereafter ordered a re-run into those seats well after the
timeline set by INEC which was January 15. Confusion has trailed
the ordered re-run as INEC officially communicated PDP of the
breach its action will constitute on the electoral timetable if
it goes ahead with the re-run. PDP dared INEC by conducting
fresh primaries in some of the constituencies, leaving out the
others. INEC on its part has said it will not accept the names
of the candidates that emerged after the deadline. Some of the
candidates whose victories were annulled have either approached
the court to restore their mandate or resort to lobbying the
members of the National Working Committee of PDP whose
responsibility it was to compile the names of the party
candidates.
Still on PDP, in states like Ogun, Enugu, Delta, Anambra there
were reported cases of conduct of parallel primaries for some of
the elective offices. This has put the party leadership at the
national level as well as the electoral commission in a
quandary. This is because injunctions were being dished out to
some of the aggrieved people by the court. On daily basis there
are ‘ex-parte applications’ ‘interlocutory injunctions’ and
‘restraining orders’ from a State or Federal High Courts
compelling INEC to accept one set of nominations against
another. This is the scenario with the PDP in Oyo, Ogun, Yobe,
Bayelsa, Enugu and Kogi states. This ugly phenomenon has raised
fear about the negative impact the litany of litigations will
likely have on the preparation and conduct of the April polls
which is barely two months away.
PDP is not the only political party that has acted in breach of
legal provisions backing the 2011 elections. Another major
culprit is the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) who has added
another word to the political lexicon of Nigeria. The new word
is ‘baba-sope’ politics. Baba-sope literally means ‘Father has
declared’. Contextually speaking, however, it can be taken as
euphemism for anointed candidacy. It is the process of imposing
the choice of party elders, willy- nilly, on party members. It
is so unfortunate that a party that funded the establishment of
Coalition of Democrats on Electoral Reform (CODER) and organised
several ‘one-man: one-vote’ crusades will shamelessly be saying
that it chose consensus arrangement over and above having
elected delegates vote for candidates of their choice.
Chief Bisi Akande in a recent press interview had this to say on
why ACN opted for consensus arrangement instead of conducting
party primaries: “If election within our party is what you are
trying to describe as internal democracy, then we reject such
idea. Can we impose when we are contesting against PDP? But we
can do something within our party if the leadership of the party
feels that that is the best thing. This is because it is the
leadership of the party that understands the manifestoes of the
party and knows what the people really want. This is not a
matter of individual but the party. Nobody should accuse ACN of
imposition because that is our style. Anyone that is not
comfortable with that should go and contest in another political
party.” It is in ACN that aspirants are made to fill out and
sign withdrawal form ahead of purported party primaries. This is
quite unfortunate. When ACN knows that it was going to handpick
its candidates, why did the party sell nomination forms to the
aspirants?
What the former Osun State governor does not know or chose to
ignore is that the candidate nomination process arrangement of
his party is against the prescriptions of the Electoral Act 2010
as amended, which had stipulated in section 87 subsections 1 –
10 the procedures for conduct of the nomination process.
According to the section of the Act, parties are supposed to
conduct primaries where elected delegates will vote for the
candidates of their choice. The example of UK, Canada and India
candidates’ nomination process cited by ACN Chairman is
untenable as those countries operate parliamentary system of
government while Nigeria operates presidential system modelled
after that of the United States of America.
As controversies continue to trail the nominations of some
candidates for the April general elections, my unsolicited
advice to INEC is to refrain from using candidates’ name and
pictures for the ballot in April. The Commission should just
feature the names and logos of all the registered political
parties on the ballot papers and allow the electorate to vote
for the party of their choice. If INEC heeds this advice, it
will save itself a lot of stress and resources that may be
incurred if the court ruled late into the preparation for the
polls that it is not the candidate whose picture and name appear
on the ballot that is the rightful flag-bearer.
Jide Ojo is an Abuja based Public Affairs Analyst
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