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The whopping sum of N 22.5 million charged by the All Progressives Congress (APC) for its nomination forms has edged out over 50 aspirants who hitherto indicated interest to contest the party’s governorship ticket in Kogi and Bayelsa States ahead of the November 16 poll.
At the close of the sales and submission of nomination forms by APC on 21st August, only 16 and 7 out of the over 50 aspirants who earlier declared for the contest had obtained the party’s nomination forms.
In Kogi alone, two groups of governorship aspirants-the Coalition of APC Governorship Aspirants had 37 members and APC Governorship Aspirants Forum had 20 members- while there were many other individual aspirants who belonged to neither of groups, but in all, only 16 purchased the forms.
Investigations revealed that the inability of majority of the aspirants from both Kogi and Bayelsa to obtain the party’s nomination forms was not unconnected with the outrageous cost.
APC had pegged the price of expression of interest form at N2.5 million and N20 million for nomination form, making a total of N22.5 million charged each aspirant seeking its governorship ticket for Bayelsa and Kogi for the off-season gubernatorial election in the two states.
The cut-throat prices for expression of interest and nomination forms are at variance with Section 87 of the Electoral Act Amendment Bill, which contains the prohibition of such arbitrary fees by political parties. But it will take signing into law of the bill to get party leadership desist from the imposition of such a huge sum of money.
Section 87 of Electoral Act Amendment Bill states that, “the new provisions prohibits political party from imposing arbitrary fees on political aspirants and prescribes limits for each elective office as follows: N5,000,000 for a governorship aspirant.”
Reacting to the development, Samson Itodo, convener of the NotTooYoungRun Movement which initiated the Bill that culminated in the #NotTooYoungToRun Law, said the high price of nomination forms by the ruling party was against the law as it practically shuts out competent youths in the leadership recruitment process in Nigeria.
Itodo told BDSUNDAY that the cost of APC and PDP forms did not only impede the participation of both women and young people, but was against the principles of participatory democracy and queried why a political party would peg high cost of expression of interest and nomination for a process that ought to be open for everyone to participate.
According to him, “What this tells you is that, we have a political class that is not interested in electoral reforms because the parties themselves are adopting an exclusionary approach towards electoral politics and that is unacceptable”.
“Where do you expect an aspirant to get N22.5 million to purchase forms? and the party has the effrontery to say that it does so simply because it is a strategy to weed out unserious aspirants but that argument holds no water,” he said.
According to him, “If they understand the fact that electoral politics ought to be open but what you are doing now you are commercialising the process whereby only people who have economic power can afford it, and that is bane of our leadership crisis because our criteria for political leadership isn’t about capacity, isn’t about competence or about character. It is about how you are able to amass wealth or able to get financial resources to be able to purchase forms.”
“So, it is unacceptable and this template cannot work. That is why citizens are losing faith in political parties because it makes no sense that an individual is asked to pay N22.5 million just to purchase a form. So, when that person gets into office his first preoccupation is how do I recoup all these monies I have spent? It just makes a mockery of our entire democratic system. You have a leadership recruitment that is already commercialized. So, we shouldn’t expect people who have character, competence and capacity to be presented by the political parties,” Itodo lamented.
Meanwhile, APC has raked in the total sum of N483.8 million from the sale of expression of interest and nomination forms to aspirants contesting for its ticket in the November 16, governorship election in Bayelsa and Kogi States.
At the end of the sales and submission of the forms, a total of 23 aspirants, comprising 20 males and 3 females obtained and submitted their forms.
While the 20 male aspirants bought the forms at the cost of N22.5 each, the 3 female aspirants paid N11, 250, 000 each in line with the party directives that female and physically challenged aspirants should pay 50percent of the prescribed fees.
Also, out of the 23 aspirants, 7 are from Bayelsa with 6 males and 1 female, while Kogi has 16 aspirants consisting of 14 males and 2 females.
James Kwen, Abuja
