Paying Huge Amounts For Nomination Forms Will Hurt Our Democracy – Itodo

Political parties asking aspirants to pay exorbitant amounts for presidential and gubernatorial nomination and expression of interest forms will only hurt Nigeria’s democracy.

This view was expressed by the Executive Director of YIAGA, Samson Itodo, who was a guest on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Thursday.

It will be recalled that the APC National Publicity Secretary, Felix Morka, had announced on Wednesday that members willing to participate in the presidential primary election of the All Progressives Congress (APC) were to pay N100 million for the nomination and expression of interest forms

While those seeking the party’s ticket to contest the governorship election in their respective states would part ways with N50 million.

Itodo bemoaned the high cost of the forms which, he believes, will erode the foundations of democracy.

He added that it would create the wrong impression for the nation’s elections.

“Please don’t ask people to pay this huge amount of money because what you do is stamp this narrative that public leadership is the exclusive preserve of those who have economic strength and this shouldn’t be the case as it does not help Nigeria in any way,” Itodo stated.

“The moment you make the entry into political context defined by your economic war-chest, you have undermined the qualities and qualifications that should define our leadership selection process.

“When people spend this amount of money just to procure forms, we are not talking about campaigns, so at the end of the day when people spend this amount of money to get into office, their first preoccupation when they get into the office is how to recoup their resources.

The development practitioner was also critical of the means by which political parties were being funded.

“But to ask people to pay I don’t think it is good practice, I think we should have other ways of parties generating their income. I am not one who supports state funding of political parties but I think parties can actually recruit members, members pay their dues and you also have people donate to the parties,” he said.

“Political parties can devise means of selecting their leaders. Encourage people if they want to seek public office let them apply and you can consider those applications.”

“And parties in this clime and other climes I must say that parties sponsor candidates but here in Nigeria it is candidates that sponsor political parties, until we change this anomaly we are going to have a situation where this whole concept of internal democracy within parties cannot be achieved because party structures are hijacked by individuals who have the resources to fund the parties and not necessarily by the parties who ideally who first are a conglomeration of different interest and individuals who are able to build consensus internally.”

He equally added that these monies spent on politicking could lead to election violence as aggrieved aspirants could feel shortchanged

“People see that ‘I have spent this amount of money, so I must win this election’. So this do or die nature of our politics is reinforced by this cost.

“This also has implications for violence because when people spend this amount of money, they don’t want to be shortchanged, they make it a duty to circumvent the election just because they won’t be losers at the end.”