Ayodele Adewale, a chieftain of the ruling All Progressive Congress (APC) in Lagos State, has said that the on-going moves to amend the 2010 Electoral Act must lead to the deregistration of several of the existing political parties in the country, saying that the high number of parties was a set back to the nation’s electoral system.
More than 90 political parties are registered in Nigeria and participated in the 2019 general election; however, due to their poor performance in last year’s elections, there have been agitations in recent months from stakeholders for the number to be reduced.
Stakeholders say the large number of parties has only succeeded in adding to the logjam in the electoral system.
Speaking in an interview with BusinessDay, Thursday, Adewale said the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) should set target and boundary for political parties to meet before they can contest national elections.
He supported the agitation for the scrapping of some non-performing political parties by the National Assembly, stressing that the number of parties was unreasonable and was part of the problem bedevilling the electoral system.
According to him, “Yes, I support the amendment; 80 percent of the political parties have not even won a councillor seat, so if you cannot win a councillor why are you there? They are just clogging the system. We would get to a stage where we would have a million parties; can we put that in the voting paper? It would be crazy.
“We need to set the limit and set boundary; that is we are not saying you should not form a party, but if you form a party you need to be in a class, if you win the certain number of seat you move to the next class. We should create independent candidacy because if we do that we would not have this number of political parties.
Speaking further, the former council boss, urged smaller parties to form an alliance with the major ones to compete favourably, while seeking the introduction of electronic voting into the electoral Act for the 2023 general elections.
“We should also encourage parties to form an alliance with a dominant party. But what I think the focus should be more on electronic voting so that people can vote from the comfort of their rooms. Not where polling units where someone would come and snatch the ballot box away.
“E-voting is what is done in Canada, Britain and other advanced societies; it would discourage all these problems and make people have confidence in the system when they know their votes would count.
“Even in LASU, electronic voting has been adopted and is being used in the conduct of SUG elections, within few minutes the result is out; we even do money transfer from our phones why not electronic voting?” he adds.
