What party system for Nigeria?

[bamalli]

 

Nigeria has registered nearly 60 political parties. But on the national level, only a few of them are known to have structures, functional offices with staff and party officials. Fewer still have made any appreciable showing at any election by way of the number of seats won both at local and national levels. The rest exist only in name and documents of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which by law is empowered to register political parties. To qualify to play on the national political scene, the constitution requires that political parties have neither ethnic nor religious colouration; that they have offices in a minimum number of states as proof of their spread and acceptability. Once they fulfil this criterion, they are registered by INEC and qualify for a  grant of N6 million from government.

This procedure makes the formation of political parties a fairly lucrative business for some enterprising politicians and appears to exacerbate the current debate over the number of political parties that should be allowed to play in the national arena. Both arms of the National Assembly have held extensive and often raucous debates on this issue. Some school of thought are agitating for inactive political parties to be delisted while others want Nigeria to peg the number of political parties that can operate in the country. As expected, each side of the debate has its own reasons and arguments to back its position.

Debates on critical national issues such as this enhance the democratic culture. However, we do not see any need for now to delist political parties that are currently on INEC register. Already, there is a serious argument over whether it is necessary or democratic in the first instance for the government to register political parties in the way and manner that are currently the practice. Parties, by their very nature should own their legitimacy to the people and not be subject to the usual rigours required of companies and other associations that operative purely to make profit. The second argument is on the propriety of giving grants to people who have decided on their own volition to associate as guaranteed by the constitution. This procedure is a tacit endorsement of pluralism; anything to the contrary tantamounts to stifling the culture of democratic growth.


In that culture, funding political parties could be a common ground to argue that clubs and non-governmental organizations registered with the Corporate Affairs Corporation (CAC) should receive subvention from government. This would be a recipe to financial recklessness with no element of accountability. The current practice making grants from the public purse to political parties should be discontinued. Those who are serious enough to form associations should be enterprising enough to legally and transparently fund them without recourse to government subventions. We must not encourage a culture where people know that there is free money to be hustled for at the beginning of every electoral campaign season.

We recommend that the current free democratic space where so many political parties operate should be allowed to continue so that in the not so distant future the weak ones disappear and the ones which best aggregates the aspirations of the electorates continue to flourish.  Those who fail to clinch seats should see the handwriting on the wall and either close shop or seek mergers. The government, in consultation with all political stakeholders, should enact new laws on campaign funding to free the taxpayer from the responsibility of underwriting the expenses of every office seeker. The truth is that the nation's economy cannot continue to provide free lunch vouchers to adventurous political excursionists.


FRM:The Nation