INEC can amend guidelines on political parties — Prof Egwu

Samuel Egwu, a professor of Political Science, with specialty in Political Economy and Development Studies, said INEC can amend its existing guidelines or evolve new policies to determine how political parties can be on the ballot papers to contest elections. He also spoke on how to reduce the number of registered political parties.

Some Nigerians are of the view that the country has more than enough political parties. Do you share this view?

My position is that we are a country that has built our democracy on the foundation of multi-party system. What this means is that there can be no limit to the number of political parties you can register.

But there are two things that normally happen. The first one is that ordinarily, the election management body should define the criteria for political parties to access ballots. It shouldn’t be automatic that once you are registered today you would contest presidential election.

In democracies like India, parties graduate from local to state levels before you can run for national offices. In that sense, parties are given room to mature before they access ballots. But here in Nigeria, when you register 90 or more parties, all of them are producing presidential candidates. You must clearly use the rule of regulation of INEC to define access to ballots. In which case, not all of them will file for elections at national level. They can, in fact, have the first five years opportunity to contest the election only at the local government level and so on. Number two is to define the threshold of what you need to win, even as a party, to survive. When you now qualify to contest the election at the national level, you create a threshold. And that threshold is often more scientific for parties that have representation in either local government councils, state or the National Assembly. That is what we have done. We have been able to register some parties on the basis of electoral performance.

Otherwise, you leave the whole thing to our electoral system, which is based on first-past-the-post. And what that does is that if parties realise that they don’t have strength, they always form alliances and dissolve into other parties. If you allow the first-past-the-post system to survive for over a 50-year period, the likelihood is that even if you started with 90 political parties, they will eventually reduce into few – two, three etc – as a result of electoral dynamics, in which case it is not a sitting president deliberately poaching people from the opposition and promising them automatic tickets.

So, you allow the dynamics of the first-past-the-post to restructure the party system. And I think that is why today, the US has two large national political parties. That’s why in Britain you have two big parties. It is their nature of first-past-the-post politics that is doing that.

We have seen tendencies like that in this country. In the First Republic, it was the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) versus the Grand National Alliance, and in the Second Republic, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) versus other parties as progressives. That is natural progression dictated by first-past-the-post.

Do you think INEC should register more parties?

My understanding is that democracy is better when you allow different political expressions in terms of establishing political parties, except you have a constitutional limitation that prescribes a two-party or five-party system. If you don’t do that, I think it is democratic to register those who applied.

And you create a kind of regulatory regime to guide them so that you would avoid unnecessary criticisms.

 But we have less than two years to the next election…

Maybe that is a different story. That is why the power of regulation is important. You can register a party and provide guidelines. It is a very tricky issue. That is the problem of democracy.