Pruning Down Parties in a Multi-party Democracy
The recent deregistration of 74 out of the 92 hitherto existing political parties in the country, sparing only 18 by the Independent National Electoral Commission, has raised concerns about the nation’s multi-party democracy, writes Chuks Okocha
Ordinarily, a multi-party democracy ensures what could be described as a proportional representation at all levels of governance. It is ideal in nature, because it prevents the domination of a single party in any system. Multi-party system is a direct opposite to a monopoly or one party system. If the government includes an elected Congress or Parliament, then parties might share power according to proportional representation.
Political scientists describe a multi-party system as democracy at its best. In a democratic country like Nigeria, any person or a group has the freedom to form their political party. This practice encourages electoral transparency.
Apart from this, any government in a multi-party system is seen as responsive and accountable to the needs of the people. This is what the practice of a multi-party system represents. This is what separates it from a military oligarchy. But this has come to represent a direct opposite of the actuals in Nigeria.
In the words of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) National Commissioner in charge of Voter Education and Publicity, Festus Okoye of INEC, the preponderance of too many political parties in Nigeria has negative effect in Nigeria’s democratic growth.
This, he reckoned, has necessitated the proliferation of political parties that made the operators to turn them into vessels of commercial ventures.
The registered political parties, therefore, have become veritable tools in the hands of political moneybags and the affluent to further extend their selfish interest, rather than fulfilling the traditional roles of political parties in a democratic setting.
The registration of political parties has thus become a business venture as politicians register as many political parties as possible that the exercise has come to negate the very essence of multi-party democracy.
In Nigeria, during the 2019 general election, there were 92 political parties. This constitutes a threat to the democratic practice itself in the preparation of elections itself.
According to political scientists, if there was any lesson to be learnt from the recently concluded general election in the country, it was the fact that Nigeria did not need as much as 92 political parties.
During the election itself, apart from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), many of the other parties were on the ballot just to make up the number.
In several instances, many of these parties had no candidate for elections while their presidential candidates withdrew few days to the election to adopt another presidential candidate.
In the last presidential election that had a total of 73 candidates, Muhammadu Buhari, candidate of the APC, won 15,191,847 of the total votes cast while his closest opponent, Atiku Abubakar, scored 11,262,978 votes, an astonishing victory margin of 3,928,869 votes.
Felix Nicholas of the Peoples Coalition Party (PCP) came a distant third with a total of 110,196 votes. Others barely scored up to twenty thousand votes or collected money to step down for others in the eleventh hour.
Those who did not withdraw ended up scoring ridiculous number of votes. The display of the last presidential election result could attest to them.
At the end, the question that arose was why billions of public funds were wasted just to accommodate those, who merely exploited the weakness of the law to ‘entertain’ themselves.
In the run up to the 2019 general election, when the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, defended the budget of the commission for elections before the National Assembly, he said the cost of conducting elections in the country had risen considerably, because 92 political parties would be on the ballot, a figure he added could rise as the commission still had 140 pending applications for party registration.
At inception of this political dispensation in 1999, Nigeria had just three major parties: Alliance for Democracy (AD), PDP and All People’s Party (APP). This small number of political parties then made it easy for the electorate to vote without being confused as we witnessed in the present political dispensation.
With 92 political parties out of which 73 actively participated at the elections, many of the voters were confused on the choice to make.
The question being asked is how did Nigeria come to this? Simple! It was the the Supreme Court judgment in a case filed by the late legal icon and human rights activist, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, SAN to the effect that, “INEC had no power to make guidelines on how an association can become a political party insofar as the Constitution has covered the field in section 222”, adding that “to restrict the formation of political parties weakens the democratic culture”. This judgment therefore fueled the implosion of mushroom political parties in Nigeria and made a mockery of the multi-party democracy in Nigeria.
Worried by the mockery of multi-party democracy in the country through the unprincipled proliferation of political parties, the National Assembly amended the Electoral Act 2010 to empower INEC to de-register political parties that failed to win any election.
Since political parties were registered pursuant to section 222 of the Constitution, the suits filed by the affected political parties succeeded as the Federal High Court declared the amendment unconstitutional and set it aside
Among the grounds are that a party can be de-registered if it breaches any of the requirements for registration and fails to win at least twenty-five per cent of votes cast in one state of the Federation in a presidential election or one Local Government of the state in a governorship election.
The National Assembly thus took advantage of the 2017 constitutional review to reduce the number of registered political parties in the country. The Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1999 (Fourth Alteration, No 9) Act, 2017 enacted on May 4, 2017, has amended section 225 of the 1999 Constitution to empower the Independent National Electoral Commission to de-register political parties.
Sadly, most of the political parties are bereft of ideas, ideology and the very vital ingredients of political parties with regards to philosophy, organisation, structure, motive, spread and capacity to fulfill the role of political parties in Nigeria. This was why INEC made the bold move to deregister 74 political parties, leaving just 18 out of the existing 92 parties.
Curiously, most the parties that were deregistered don’t have national spread or political structure that could win a single seat, most practically have no manifestoes and even where they exist, end up being a duplication and repetition of another party.
This, no doubt, should be a disturbing development in Nigeria’s political history, because these political vampires were merely exploiting section 222 of the 1999 constitution (as amended) to register parties.
The implications in actual fact should be minimal as there are eighteen functional political parties that Nigerians can use to ventilate actualize their dreams today.