We have noted in this column that APC has been plagued by a succession of worse National Chairmen than preceding ones. The whole idea of being a progressive party is a party with social welfare as its cardinal objective. A friend to the poor, the downtrodden, the proletariat and an obstacle to the bourgeoisie agenda of denigrating the have-nots. The bourgeoisie are the materialistic people who control the means of production in a capitalist society, while the proletariat are the members of the working class, who must sell their labour to survive. The beauty of democracy is that power belongs to the people and this imposes some humility on even the bourgeoisie who will need the support of the proletariat to assume the position of leadership in a democratic country.
In order to convince Nigerians that APC was not a party for the rich, but a party for the honest, good people, men of integrity, it nominated a proletariat, General Buhari, who worked for the country all his life with a pathological disdain for the lifestyle of the bourgeoisie. He detasted capitalist greed and corruption and never owned any means of production. He was humongously popular for his spartanic, non-corrupt personae, who had sent corrupt politicians to long terms in jail and who vowed to repeat same if elected in 2015. He was known not to be rich, despite having all the opportunity of corruptly enriching himself. He went further to nominate a pentecostal pastor, Yemi Osibanjo, to become his Vice, in the run up to the 2015 election, to complete the impression of undisputable intention of sparkling honesty, before God and man, in the handling of the country’s resoures, if elected. Nigerians got convinced and voted APC to power in 2015.
APC did not pretend that it was a progressive party when it came to the issue of nomination fees from the onset. In 2014, it had the highest nomination fee of N27.5m for Presidential aspirants. This was excused by the fact that as an opposition party, it needed to make as much money as possible, to be able to compete with a ruling party which was mercilessly sharing Nigeria money for their political campaign. The proletariat Buhari complained bitterly about the exorbitant cost of the form in 2014 and according to him had to borrow money from a bank to be able to purchase the form. The National Chairman then, John Oyegun, said the intention was to separate the men from the boys in political contestations.
APC won in 2015. The excuse of being an opposition party evaporated in 2019, but this didn’t dissuade APC from ridiculously hiking the presidential and other posts nomination fees to about N45m and so on. The greatest deceit was that in addition to a proletariat incumbent presidential candidate, a pentecostal pastor Vice President, the party went further to elect a well known proletariat, who even goes by the sobriquet, “Comrade”(the socialist aspect of the proletariat with a hatred for any public display of affluence) and who reached the highest level of the proletariat echelon to become the National Labour Congress (Association of Nigeria workers) Chairman and who predominantly wears khaki dresses to depict his public posture of an incorruptible public servant, as National Chairman. Nigerians, including myself, were so excited until the nomination fees were out. Presidential candidates were to pay about N45m and Governors about N23m. The other positions also attracted high prices. The highest in relation to other political parties.
The proletariat President screamed out loud that the fee was not only outrageous but unaffordable. He said it clearly that he could not afford it. El-Rufai, the Kaduna State Governor, lamented that he doesn’t have such an amount in his account, corroborating the fact that it was not affordable. In order to avoid the shame on the Party that its incumbent presidential candidate and Governor could not afford its exorbitant nomination fees, some party members purportedly rallied round and paid for the nomination fees for the President and the Kaduna State Governor. Women, youths, honest workers, the disabled, and some other non-incumbents were not so lucky. They lost out. By Oyegun’s description, the President and Kaduna State Governor, for being unable to afford their nomination fees, were boys in politics, not men. What a hypocrisy!
In 2022, APC decided to give up its deceit in electing or appointing the purpoted proletariat into its leadership cadre. It firstly appointed a sitting Governor Buni to chair its Party and nearly perished before two years. It hurriedly appointed, sorry elected, Senator Adamu, a bourgeoisie, to head the party. The bourgeoisie Chairman hiked the nomination fee for the President to N100m, while the Governorship was nauseously hiked to N50m. His reason was to separate the serious party members from the unserious members. In APC political dictionary, if you’re not a bourgeoisie, stupendously rich, you are a boy and an outrightly unserios person politically. Meaning that the women, youths, disabled, good and honest workers are unserious boys who are undeserving of APC’s nomination tickets. They should be used as mere tools to enthrone corrupt, conscienceless and greedy politicians to power while standing aside to take the crumbs that fall from their tables. What a shame! In this regard, the proletariat incumbent President simply kept mum. He was speechless. Summarily, in 2014, the fee was exorbitant, in 2018, the fee was unaffordable and in 2022 the fee was simply speechless.
Since the 2022 fee made the incumbent President speechless, let us assist the President with the speeches of Nigerians on the subject. Femi Falana SAN, a famous activist and human rights defender, called the fee immoral, insensitive and illegal. He postulated that the fee offended Sections 14 and 42 of the 1999 Constitution as amended. A 102-year-old presidential aspirant, Chief (Mrs) Josephine Ezeanyaeche, who is also the Founder and Chairman Emeritus of the Voice of the Senior Citizens of Nigeria, pointed out that the huge price some parties place on nomination forms is a means of eliminating good people from participating in politics, as by so doing, throwing up potential criminals with the tendency to go into offices to steal. In her words, “I have never seen a thing like this all over the world that politicians will pay such amount on the nomination form. It shows they are a group of potential criminals with the intention to go and steal because the remuneration of the office they are paying such amount for cannot recoup the money back to them in the four years without them stealing.” She called on the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission as well as the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission to arrest and prosecute any politician or group buying N100m nomination form of any political party.
The 102-year-old presidential aspirant is absolutely correct. From basic mathematics, the annual salary of a Nigerian president stands at N14.05 million. In four years, which is the maximum a president can serve, except re-elected, the cumulative salaries amount to N56.2 million, nearly half of what APC is asking presidential aspirants to pay to get the country’s presidential job. This means that the APC presidential nomination fee of 2022 is almost two times the salary of the President in four years. Many Nigerians have criticised this as deepening and emboldening systemic corruption and believe that the imposition of such exorbitant costs will become a vehicle to completely marginalise and exclude some good people from the presidential race.
What is very troubling is not the mercantile attitude of the corrupt politicians in power, but the complicity and conspiracy of the purported saints among them. The purported saints hide under the pretext that the exorbitant nomination fee was purchased for them by their supporters. This is even a worse case scenario because he who pays the piper dictates the tune. The contributors are not Father Christmas, who want to throw their money away, but want to invest it to yield dividend. When such aspirants win, those supporters will come back to be compensated with choice appointments and contracts which they will execute shoddily in order to make outrageous profits to recover their expenses. The more disturbing scenario would be with the supporters of the presidential aspirants who lost out in the game, because out of the hundreds of the aspirants contesting in all the political parties, only one person will emerge as the President, leaving the supporters of the other losers the possibility of joining the criminal gang of kidnappers, terrorists, ritualists or their sponsors to recoup their lost funds. Muhammed Yusuf, founder of Boko Haram, confessed that he was betrayed by a political associate who won election with their support and abandoned them. He hid under the guise of religion to unleash the most virulent attack on the Nigeria Federation which we are yet to recover from.
APC even wants people who are contesting for House of Assembly seat to cough out N2m for the nomination fee. This is a position that fresh graduates from universities with leadership skills ought to be targeting but will certainly be excluded from. I want to reveal to APC that eventually the opposition parties will surreptitiously obtain these forms by using their proxies in states which do not have incumbent APC Governors. It will certainly be cheaper for them to spend N2m on the surrogate aspirants who will no longer contest the general election with them than spending the humongous amount campaigning in the general election.
The only thing evil needs to persist is for the good men to remain silent. All Nigerians must reject this obnoxious nomination price hike. The “Proletariat” President and his “Saintly” Vice-President must make a statement to this effect. Any politician who does not condemn this exorbitant price, which is more than his cumulative salary for the term he is contesting for, must be presumed corrupt and be rejected at the polls come 2023. APC must revert to its nomination fees of 2019 immediately or risk being branded a corrupt party with the agenda of making the rich richer and the poor poorer. It has to immediately rename the party to the All Bourgeoisie Party of Nigeria to reflect its new status. Nigerians should no longer be satisfied with the change APC brought in 2015, which even the members can hardly recognise. There is a need for a democratically engineered disruptive change which will fundamentally wipe out these unrepentantly corrupt politicians who have nothing more to offer but suffering and misery on the people. If this warning is not heeded, be rest assured that APC will charge N200m for its 2027 presidential election, after all, the 2023 nomination fee is more than 100% increase to the 2019 nomination fee. If there intention is to exclude the good people, the good people must come together to exclude them permanently from politics in Nigeria.