Chaos Was The Name of The Game
According to the guidelines of the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC], the country’s registered political parties have up until today, Sunday to conclude their primary elections for various offices in readiness for submitting the names of their candidates for the 2019 elections. Even though they had several weeks to conduct these primaries and have enough […]
According to the guidelines of the Independent National Electoral Commission [INEC], the country’s registered political parties have up until today, Sunday to conclude their primary elections for various offices in readiness for submitting the names of their candidates for the 2019 elections. Even though they had several weeks to conduct these primaries and have enough time to resolve the inevitable contentious issues that will arise from them, the two major parties, APC and PDP both left things until the last minute for reasons of political jockeying.
As it is, APC held a convention in Abuja yesterday and ratified President Muhammadu Buhari as its presidential candidate while PDP started its convention in Port Harcourt last night and its presidential candidate will only become known later today. However, some primary elections for governors and members of National and State assemblies, which were supposed to be concluded earlier, were still pending at the weekend. There was no way some of them could be resolved by today, so the party working committees may have to resort to undemocratic measures in order to pick some candidates.
No one expected party primaries to lack excitement and passion. Ideally however, it is aspirants’ campaigns that should be exciting and passionate while the voting process, either direct by all party members or indirect through convention delegates, should be a peaceful and orderly process. However, the party primaries here were characterized in various cases by violence [such as the Gombe PDP congress], manipulation of delegate lists by officials, general disorder and even chaos at polling units, open vote buying, repeated shifting of election dates [e.g. Lagos PDP guber primary and all elections in Zamfara], candidate imposition in the name of consensus, parallel congresses in some states, confusion generated by fake announcement of winners by party factions, cancelling of some elections after they had taken place [e.g. APC guber primary in Lagos, which was later reversed] etc.
Probably the worst case is the APC primaries in Zamfara. In a state already bedeviled by rural banditry, Governor Abdulaziz Yari and his party opponents have fought a do-or-die battle, with the party national working committee playing a dubious role characterized by open disagreement between the National Chairman and the Deputy National Chairman, North. In Imo State too, APC governorship primaries were holding yesterday due to the do-or-do battle between Governor Rochas Okorocha and his party rivals.
A curious dimension to the APC primaries was the back hand “automatic tickets” given to some senators. This was not achieved through consensus or even consultation but by disqualifying all their opponents, even after those opponents were cleared by the screening committee. That deed pitched APC national chairman Adams Oshiomhole against many APC state governors and even President Muhammadu Buhari’s intervention could not solve the problem. All these happenings have put the whole country on edge. Together, they are a very sad commentary on the mission, cohesion, internal democracy and fair leadership in the major political parties. Not that things were any better in the minor parties.
If this is what politicians do to themselves within their own parties, then it is doubly important for Nigerian citizens to rise up and protect the sanctity of the electoral process next year. Those who think nothing about visiting impunity and violence on their own party men and women will not think twice before they visit it on other parties during the general election.