The trap against new political expression (2)

So what is in the offing now, is that President Buhari, sometimes in June 2018 assented to an amendment to the Nigerian constitution (Amendment to the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Fourth Alteration, Number 9, Act 2017), with the conspiracy of the Nigerian Senate, granting INEC the authority to delicense political parties under some unclear conditions viz:

1. Breach of any of the requirements for registration
2. Failure to win at least 25% of votes cast in:
3. One state of the federation in a presidential election or
4. One local government of the state in a governorship election.
5. Failure to win at least
6. One ward in the chairmanship elections
7. One seat in the National or State House of Assembly; or
8. One seat in the councillorship election

It is unclear if these laws are to be considered together or if a single violation of any of these rules grants INEC the authority to delicense a political party. It is also unclear how many trials are to be granted a political party before these rules are applied.

Political parties supported all the electoral law amendments that were stepped down 4 times by the president. Some of the proposed amendments are about how to engender more transparency by moving towards electronic voting. Many of the new parties are run by young, forward-looking Nigerians who are more at home in an environment of electronic transparency. But the guardians of darkness stepped down the idea whose time has come.  In fact, the first amendment proposed that we have the smaller elections first, so that the power of incumbency and ‘mainstream politics’ will be reduced and young parties can snatch one or two small posts. The idea was promptly trashed.  At the fourth presentation, the president said the bill was too close to elections! He therefore prioritized himself and very much unlike the father he is meant to be, he left our new political expression in the lurch.

The issues are that if Nigeria will have to build a two party system it shouldn’t be based on APC and PDP because both parties have committed too many outrages in the past. There is a need, for the sake of Nigeria to start afresh. We must do everything to ensure that the political space, political thoughts and ideologies in Nigeria are not guillotined on the altar of neo-feudalism and some ill-gotten superiority complex. Nigeria cannot, and must never be a slave society.  Again, young parties must now be funded for a while, to cover up grounds lost when the so-called big parties were being funded. Or we take each party as an entity based on Section 4 of our Constitution which grants everyone of us the right to come together and form groups based on mutual understanding and mutual interests.

Perhaps the biggest issue with this scheme of deregistering political parties is the just concluded elections and the frauds that mar them. Also the fact that our elections are getting ever more violent. Let’s take the presidential elections alone. We saw billions of Naira and Dollars being moved by the two ‘large parties’ thereby monetizing the elections. We saw planes and bullion vans laden with such monies. We heard confessions of party officials to that extent. We then saw results that made no sense; 1.6million people disappeared from the voters’ register.  Nine hundred thousand people were accredited but never voted even though accreditation and voting are simultaneous and should be equal. We saw evidence that votes were written in parts of the country in order to achieve desired results. We saw vote suppression and vote amplification at will.  We saw underage voting. Nigeria also lost at least 100 people to violence, including youth corps members. No one is even speaking about the numbers kidnapped. These are the reasons why we must never agree to any ‘chancing’ by the ‘two big parties’ who cannot whitewash themselves of past and present sins. They cannot come to equity with unclean hands. These are the reasons why what we need in fact, is an infusion of new, fairly innocent and clean blood into our political space. If we consolidate our politics based on opacity, violence, fraud, tribalism, ethnicity, religious and other forms of bigotry, embezzlement and corruption, and a blatant refusal to reform and transform, a terrible fate awaits us all.

We have been appealed to, in the interest of peace to accept the results of extremely flawed elections. We have respected the right of seriously aggrieved parties to approach the courts as part of the legitimate electoral process. But our quest for peace and progress for our country, is obviously being taken for foolishness. Only one or two new parties will probably qualify for non-deregistration so far, and that is YPP and ZLP. I personally am not enamored of the Senator-elect sprung up by that party and his antecedents. He does not represent the resurgence of ideological politics that tends towards ethics and integrity.  I also am aware of what the former governor in Ondo State did to get his minion into office as a legislator. The remaining parties will find it tough to attain 25% of any votes anywhere. Curtains? Are we changing Nigeria’s name to violence and fraud? Is this our essence?