The Electoral Act amendment bill that the National Assembly recently re-forwarded to President Muhammadu Buhari for assent contains a provision that political appointees would no longer be allowed to vote as delegates or as aspirants for party positions during conventions or party congresses or seek party nominations for elective positions until they resign.
In this category are ministers, commissioners, special advisers, special assistants and the like. If the bill is signed into law by President Buhari, it would mean that some ministers currently serving in this administration and who are reported to be nursing ambitions to contest for political positions would have to relinquish their present positions. There are speculations however that the president is not happy with this provision.
This newly introduced provision may have several merits, but it has two visible drawbacks as well. For one, it seeks to depart from the practise in the past which allows such political appointees to influence the outcome of major political developments using their vantage positions in government.
This practise was often used as a tool by past Presidents and Governors to impose their will on the political process, to the detriment of the principle of free choice in the political parties. All a President or Governor needs to do is to fill up the political space with his appointees, the numbers of which are determined by him, and they sit as delegates at party conventions and congresses. This hardly encourages political inclusion.
It is incongruous to leave the decision making process of a political party to unelected officials to the exclusion of the vast majority of the rank and file members and cadres of the party. The practice also encourages and confers undue advantage on favoured political appointees to usurp and by pass the laid down party political process to pursue their political ambitions. Members of the National Assembly must have observed these untoward developments as members of political parties, and sought to tackle it in this way.
There are two problems, however. One is that it is responsible for slowing the signing into law of the amended Electoral Act. The National Assembly had earlier passed a full version of the bill. President Buhari refused to sign it and raised objection to only one thing, namely the provision that made it mandatory for parties to hold direct primaries. National Assembly bowed to his wishes last month and removed that provision. However, it then used the opportunity of the returned bill to include new, previously unheard of provisions before it re-forwarded the bill to the president for assent. This is indecorous.
Forcing appointed political office holders to resign from office before they contest in party primaries was first tried in the Second Republic, but not through the Electoral Act. In 1983, the ruling NPN’s National Executive Committee adopted this same policy, which forced several ministers and many state commissioners to resign before they could seek nomination.
It is better to do it that way, just like we supported allowing political parties to adopt their own method of primaries, instead of enshrining a mandatory provision in the Electoral Act.
