By Rotimi Fasan

IN a few weeks’ time candidates of the different political parties lined up for next year’s general election would be known.

But what would probably have been forgotten by the time these candidates are announced is the flawed process that led to their emergence.

This started with how the leading parties selected members of their executive and working committees.

The All Progressives Congress, APC, chose the option of consensus which on the surface looked like a tidy way to handle what has been turned into a rancorous process of electing party leaders.

But consensus, as practised by the APC, was a tool of disenfranchisement, a subtle way to manipulate the electoral process for favoured candidates of the godfathers in the person of President Muhammadu Buhari and other party leaders opposed to an open contest that could throw up independent-minded candidates.

Consensus prevailed and has remained. The sad thing about it, however, is the manner this option has been taken up by rival parties like the Peoples Democratic Party, and PDP, where four aspirants to the office of a president decided to work together for the emergence of one of them as the party’s candidate.

That effort, midwife by practised conspirators and marked by skulduggery, did not last a month before it blew in the face of its promoters.

They are now pulling each other in different directions, hurling accusations and counter-accusations as each gives his own interpretation of what transpired and the outcome of their seeming gentleman’s agreement that produced not one but two consensus candidates.

Still determined to weed out as many ambitious Nigerians as possible, the APC and PDP have gone ahead to place high price tags on the purchase of their nomination/expression of interest forms. As is now its custom in blazing dangerous and unpopular trails, the APC set the ball rolling by releasing a price list, each worth a king’s ransom, for Nigerians aspiring to public office on its platform.

This is at a time most Nigerians are lamenting the high cost of living and many graduates are jobless and labour unions are on prolonged strikes on account of the government’s failure to meet its obligations or provide basic demands of modern governance. At the top of the nomination forms, the cost is N100 million for presidential aspirants, N50 million for governorship aspirants, N20 million for senatorial aspirants and N10 million for aspirants to the House of Representatives.

This is a clear indication that the APC will commit twice the very sins of corruption that have left Nigerians disenchanted with the PDP which put the cost of purchasing its presidential nomination forms at N40 million and N21 million for governorship aspirants. Not ready to take responsibility for their monetisation of the electoral process, members of both parties aspiring for these offices that have been priced out of the reach of most Nigerians pretend to be too poor to pay for their own nomination forms as if they were not privy to the criminal imposition.

Their way around the high price is to obtain their forms through faceless individuals and so-called support groups that pay for the forms as proxies of their preferred aspirants.

While the number of office aspirants across the leading parties is increasing in spite of the high cost of nomination forms, not one of those who have purchased these forms (with the singular exception of Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the APC) has owned up to buying the form in their own name.

From Yemi Osinbajo, Yahaya Bello, Babagana Zulum to Dapo Abiodun of the APC, everyone has relied on supporters for their forms. Not even Chukwuemeka Nwajiuba and Chris Ngige who have serially flunked every test as competent representatives of government at talks to find a solution to the lingering strike of the Academic Staff Union of Universities, ASUU, have been left out of the jamboree.

Former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Aminu Tambuwal, Bala Muhammed, Nyesom Wike, Pius Anyim, among other presidential aspirants of the PDP, have also enjoyed the help of their support groups with the purchase of nomination forms as has Peter Obi. There has not been any serious complaint about or opposition to the high cost of forms from the aspirants. Everyone, including the usual advocates of financial prudence, has been happy to pay for them through proxies called support groups.

The important thing to note here, however, one which a national newspaper reported last week, is that this trail of buying nomination forms via proxies was blazed by the APC when in 2018 a faceless group that went by the name Nigeria Consolidation Ambassadors Network purchased the N45 million presidential nomination form for President Muhammadu Buhari. The goal was to sustain the illusion that President Buhari, the man of integrity, was too poor to purchase his nomination form.

From N45 million in 2018 the cost of a nomination form for a presidential aspirant of the APC has risen to N100 million in 2022 and the floodgate has since been open for everyone to buy their nomination forms through surrogates, no thanks to the APC and President Buhari.

The intent of the Electoral Act that President Buhari was never keen to append his signature to until he was all but suborned and blackmailed into doing so by the vociferous demands of Nigerians, some of the objectives of our electoral system that this Act was meant to achieve, are being subverted and rendered ineffective by this sharp practice of funding political parties and their candidates through the imposition of highly-priced nomination forms.

In the words of Auwal Rafsanjani of the Civil Society Legislative Advocacy Centre, the Nigerian chapter of Transparency International: “What we are seeing is the preamble to vote-buying. It is shadow financing and the whole process is being stage-managed. These are illicit financial flows.

Public funds are being funnelled through these so-called groups to buy forms for aspirants”. In addition to narrowing the space for democratic options what the purchase of nomination forms with high price tags portends is the high probability of unprepared people, lacking experience and motivation, emerging as officeholders.

We’ve had more than our fair share of political misfits holding high office in Nigeria. We can do with some competence for once. But how can we stem the tide of incompetence and corruption in public appointments if shadowy groups and individuals could randomly buy nomination forms on behalf of others as some are planning to do for a former Chief of Army Staff, Tukur Buratai? Buratai’s present ambassadorial posting is one injury that owed much to President Buhari’s determination to make him an ambassador in spite of the national outrage then. Why should anyone add the insult of buying him a presidential nomination form?

Vanguard News Nigeria