There are three frontline political parties in Nigeria today. Labour Party (LP), All Progressives Congress (APC), and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Political parties are the breeding ground for the building of the government of a nation, especially in a nation like Nigeria that does not have a provision for independent candidacy. The best way to ensure good governance is to democratically elect persons by the people of Nigeria. However, if all the political parties do not provide qualified persons for the offices of government of the federation, there’s nothing the general election can do, because the people can only choose from the available candidates presented to them. This situation has become so dire that the incumbents and some corrupt rich candidates, intentionally back the lesser qualified candidates in the primaries of the opposition parties to defeat the more qualified candidates, so that they can easily win the candidates of the opposition parties in the general elections.
The leadership of political parties determine substantially the outcome of the primary elections which produce candidates for the general elections. Where the leadership of the political parties are incompetent and corrupt, they sell the candidacy of the political offices to the highest bidders. The candidates will in turn buy the officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to be declared winners. And the ignoble circus of bribery and corruption continues to go round. Have you noticed that whoever is elected a national chairman of any political party wants to sit on that seat for ever? When the first tenure elapses, he contests for another term. When the second tenure ends, he asks for extension of time. When the extension of time ends, he embarks on indefinite suspension of the date to organise elections into the principal organs of the party. They want to die on the seat because of the illicit money they extort from the people.
Another trend in the management of political parties is the total usurpation of the powers of the political parties by any political incumbent in power. Once a political party produces the President of Nigeria, the President becomes the leader of the political party and neutralises the powers of the party. Usually, the President always have little respect for the members of the executives of the political party because he knew that he bought all of them to become President or the executives of the party fought against him to stop him from becoming President because they collected more money from someone else. President Obasanjo changed the leadership of the PDP five times within eight years before the end of his second tenure.
After PDP lost power at the centre, till date, it has never been able to organise a convention to pick its party officials, without controversy, till date. The present national chairman is on acting capacity and whom more than 60 members of the National Assembly from PDP have asked that he should organise a national convention in which executives of the party should be elected which will terminate his tenure. So far, he has rejected such entreaties. Some unscrupulous politicians need him to remain there to ensure their ownership of the party to be used for elections in 2027. And more sinisterly to be used to elect the presidential candidate of another party in 2027. Meanwhile, the last Chairman of the PDP is in court to regain his seat as he believed that he was illegally removed. The situation is so bad that five governors of PDP, who refused to work for their presidential candidate in 2023, of whom four of them are now former Governors, have pledged to support Tinubu of the APC, in 2027, not even minding who will be alive then and at a time when most people that voted for Tinubu are openly regretting their votes.
All in all, the political parties are governed by the rule of individuals not the rule of law. Presently, the Chairman and Secretary of APC were chosen single handedly by Tinubu, after the former Chairman of APC, Senator Adamu, was disgraced out of the position for daring to declare Senator Lawan as the concensus candidate for the presidential primary election in 2022. Adamu boasted that the Villa was in support of his consensus candidate. The villa denied him and his claim. With the emergence of Tinubu as President, he was sidelined in everything and was told to throw in the towel. He did. In replace of him, Tinubu chose Ganduje, former Governor of Kano State, to head APC, through the National Executive Council (NEC) of the party.
Same scenario is playing out in the LP where the National Chairman, Julius Abure, bulldozed his way from Assistant Secretary of the Party to the National Chairman, without the votes of all members of the party, or their delegates, and without a National Convention. The former National Chairman died, and he successfully wangled his way to the Chairmanship position through the corridor of the National Executive Council (NEC). His tenure as Chairman has elapsed, but he refused to go and refused to conduct a national convention to allow the members of the party to elect their principal officers. The stakeholders sensing that Abure is sitting tight, and with the approach of 2023 general election, even went into a political settlement with Abure on the 27th of June, 2022, to grant him extension of one year to end on 27th June 2023, within which Abure will organise the Ward, Local Government, State and National Convention of the Labour Party and these terms of settlement was made pursuant to the judgement of Justice Kolawole in 2018 and brokered by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Abure was the first to sign, followed by his secretary, Umar. The Nigeria Labour Congress President and his Secretary signed on behalf of the Nigeria Labour Congress.
Unfortunately, Abure disrespected the court judgement, disrespected the terms of agreement, disrespected all the stakeholders and decided not to hold ward, local government, state and national convention until his tenure ended by every known law available for him. Fearing a shadow of himself, because every criminal allegation of forgery and embezzlement have been flying against him, right, left, and center, he surreptitiously and clandestinely organised a purported social media convention where every stakeholder, from the ward, to the local government, to the state, in Labour Party was excluded except himself and his appointees, and some low rated elected members of Labour Party whom he hoodwinked to the illegal and unconstitutional backyard utopic convention that was dead from the beginning.
The three parties now have converged in incompetence and corruption by the compromised leadership of the three parties. The difference may lie in the reaction of the members to this congregation of evil leaders. While the APC has been completely neutralised under the jackboot of their maximum leader, the members of the opposition parties are battling for the souls of their parties. Let us be clear, any party that has no internal democracy has no basis to ask Nigerians to vote for it, because they cannot entrench democracy in Nigeria, since nobody can give what the person doesn’t have. If you are surprised why Nigeria leaders do not respect the rule of law, it’s because they didn’t respect the rules of their parties and emerged in manners accentuated by bribery and corruption.
For the avoidance of doubt, the Constitution is very clear that no tenure of any principal officer of the party shall exceed four years. (See Section 223(1)(a)(2)(a) of the Constitution). This means that any of such elongations of tenure by the political parties, is void. Recall that John Oyegun’s tenure as APC National Chairman, was purportedly elongated by one year, after he served his first tenure, as a compromise position that will make him to voluntarily step down after the one year and not seek a second term. President Buhari was informed of the legal consequences of such unconstitutional elongation of tenure which may affect the validity of his own candidacy. He quickly recanted and ordered for a national convention, which was held in 2018, and which brought Adams Oshiomhole to power as Chairman.
All these experiments that PDP and LP are doing in tenure elongation is unconstitutional and as opposition parties, they must be seen as obeying the laws. Also the process of organising national convention has also been settled by the Constitution and the Electoral Act. Section 228(a)(b) compels political parties to ensure internal democracy and commands INEC to ensure that the parties ensure fairness and transparency in the conduct of their convention to choose their officers. To ensure such transparency, Section 82(1)(5) of the Electoral Act mandates political parties to give INEC 21 days notice of any convention they need to conduct and if this notice is not given, the convention is void. The election of the principal officers must be by every member of the party or through their elected delegates. See Section 82(3) of the EA. Any party that purports to conduct a national convention without commencing from the ward to elect the delegates to the national convention is making a mockery of the rule of law, just as the recently purported social media convention of Abure has done.
The people must rise and become more interested in what is happening in the internal affairs of the political parties, because without internal democracy in the parties, there cannot be democracy in the polity. INEC must sit up to reject any leadership of the party that didn’t proceed from internal democracy. Above all Nigerians must vote out any party that cannot get its act together because the only thing such parties will foist on the country is incompetence and corruption