Nigeria’s election commission on Saturday registered three new parties out of a total of 24 that applied to compete in next year’s national elections.
The decision immediately reignited a furious row over the commission’s strict rules, which many of the would-be parties regard as a cynical and unconstitutional ploy to exclude them.
Gani Fawehinmi, whose hopes of standing in April’s presidential election were dashed when his National Conscience Party was not registered, said that former generals were stifling democracy.
”There is no basis for what they have done. No legal basis, no constitutional basis and no moral basis,” he said.
Next year’s elections will be the first to be held since Nigeria’s return to civilian rule at the 1999 election.
The three existing political parties were set up under military rule, and many observers regard them as little more than loose coalitions of powerful men with no ideological stance and little to bind them togther beyond a taste for power.
Fawehinmi alleged that the Independent National Election Commission (INEC) was ”following a script” written by incumbent President Olusegun Obasanjo.
”The parties that were registered are the parties belonging to the generals,” he said. ”The NCP was formed in 1994 to fight the military. We were jailed, arrested, intimidated.
”Why can’t we break free from the dictatorship of our past? I don’t see how there can be any hope for the sustenance of democracy in Nigeria if they go the way they are going,” he said.
The leaders of the newly-registered parties disagreed and hailed the INEC ruling.
”It is a triumph for the political class and all Nigeria,” said Alhaji Habu Fari, chairman of the National Democratic Party (NDP).
”It justifies the new parties’ stance that the political space should be opened up.”
The NDP is mainly made up of defectors from Obasanjo’s ruling PDP and is widely rumoured to be close to the former military dictator Ibrahim Babangida.
Obasanjo is also a former dictator, as is his main rival for next year’s presidential poll, Muhammadu Buhari of the opposition All Peoples’ Party (APP).
The prospect of a democratic changeover between one Nigerian civilian regime to another persuaded some 37 political groupings to seek registration, although 13 later dropped out.
INEC set tight rules for political associations wishing to become registered parties, and many groups balked, for example, at the requirement that they must have offices in all 36 Nigeria states and in the federal capital Abuja.
The INEC rules were challenged in court by 33 of the would-be parties, but their claim was thrown out.
Commission chairman Abel Guobadia told reporters in Abuja that certificates of registration will be handed on Monday to the All Progressive Grand Alliance (AGPA), The National Democratic Party (NDP) and the United Nigeria Peoples Party (UNPP).
The previously approved parties are Obasanjo’s ruling PDP, the Buhari’s APP and the Alliance for Democracy (AD). – Sapa-AFP