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From Fred Itua and Adesuwa Tsan, Abuja
Governorship aspirants of the Nigeria Democratic Congress (ADC) have expressed fury over a N5 billion bank account benchmark imposed by the party’s Senator Sam Egwu-led Screening Committee as a mandatory requirement for any aspirant to scale through the screening exercise, describing the financial threshold as arbitrary, unconstitutional and fundamentally at odds with the spirit of an opposition party positioning itself as a democratic alternative to the ruling All Progressives Congress.
The Screening Committee, inaugurated on Monday, commenced its exercise almost immediately, screening the party’s sole presidential aspirant, Peter Obi, on Tuesday without incident.
However, governorship aspirants were confronted with a far more daunting obstacle when the committee insisted on documentary proof of N5 billion in a bank account as a condition for clearing any aspirant to proceed.
The development has since triggered widespread outrage among aspirants who argue that the threshold finds no basis in either the Electoral Act as amended or the NDC’s own constitution.
Reacting, Deputy Publicity Secretary of the NDC, Abdulmumuni Abdulsalam, dismissed the claim as strange.
“The issue of N5 billion is very strange to me. I have not heard of it from the party or anyone in the hierarchy. But I will make further enquiries about it,” he said in a telephone chat with the Sun, Abdulsalam said,
He, however, added that it may be an advice not a requirement as “we prefer that the candidates are financially endowed so that the party does not suffer defeat on account of lack of funds. But to the best of my knowledge and information available you, there is nothing like a N5 billion requirement from governorship aspirants,” he stated.
But a governorship aspirant from the South South region, who spoke to our correspondent in Abuja on Wednesday, insisted and described the committee’s position as high-handedness of the most counterproductive kind, warning that such a requirement risk transforming a party that was supposed to represent a departure from the transactional politics of the establishment into a mirror image of the very system it was formed to challenge.
The aspirant further argued that the imposition of such a benchmark was particularly incongruous given the NDC’s status as a newly registered party attempting to establish its democratic credentials for the first time.
He noted that while it was reasonable to expect governorship aspirants to demonstrate financial capacity for electioneering, the demand for proof of N5 billion in a bank account went far beyond any precedent set even by the ruling APC, which has never contemplated such a threshold as part of its own screening requirements.
“Even the APC, which is the ruling party, never contemplated such a huge benchmark as a requirement to contest governorship,” he said pointedly. “We are in NDC because of the injustice and arrogance of the APC. NDC should be home to all of us and liberal in how it handles aspirants. It should not make the contest favour only the highest bidder.”
The aspirant also raised a procedural concern of considerable urgency, noting that political parties had already submitted their membership registers to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) ahead of the May deadline 10, effectively closing the window for defection and cross-carpeting.
That development, he argued, placed aspirants who had committed to the NDC platform in a particularly vulnerable position, as they could neither clear the committee’s financial threshold nor migrate to another platform in time for the 2027 general elections.
“The screening is scheduled for Thursday and we are preparing and trying to beat the INEC timeline,” he said. “The screening committee should de-emphasise financial clout and instead elevate acceptability and electability. It is common knowledge that anyone running for governorship should make provision for funding, but this benchmark is of an entirely different order.”
The anger within aspirant ranks, it was gathered, reflects a broader concern that the NDC’s internal processes risk being shaped by the same culture of financial gatekeeping that has long been criticised as one of the most corrosive features of Nigerian party politics.
For a party whose principal selling point is that it offers a credible and principled alternative to the APC’s dominance, the optics of a N5 billion screening benchmark are, at the very least, deeply problematic.
