Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka has blamed what he called a ”dictatorship of first comers” for looming uncertainty in the country’s emerging democracy, newspapers reported on Sunday.
A political ”cabal”, he said, has foisted on Nigeria a ”dictatorship of the first comers, by the first comers and for the first comers,” the Guardian newspaper reported.
The 1986 Nobel literature prize winner was quoted by the Sunday Vanguard as saying: ”Their definition of democracy is so much more personal than it is for most of us. Democracy has arrived for them from the moment that it became possible, as their first act of self-accreditation was to look after priority number one -? their own very self.”
He was speaking at a function in Port Harcourt, capital of southern Rivers State, marking the sixth anniversary of the death in a plane crash of prominent social scientist Claude Ake.
Soyinka accused the electoral agency of violating the constitutional rights of unregistered political associations by prescribing over-strict conditions.
His remarks coincided with a supreme court ruling on Friday in Abuja throwing out a decision by the electoral agency to bar five small parties from key elections next year. The unanimous ruling was hailed by the minority political groups, which had seen their bid to break into the Nigerian political mainstream thwarted by the stringent registration guidelines.
Four supreme court judges headed by Chief Justice Muhammadu Uwais declared that party regulations set by the Independent National Election Commission (INEC) were null and void.
The five parties came together in July to launch a challenge to the INEC rules, which they claimed had been deliberately framed to keep dissident voices out of the running for the first elections since the country’s 1999 return to civilian rule.
Nigeria is expected to hold local government, legislative, state gubernatorial and presidential elections by May 29 next year, in what could be the first handover of power from one civilian regime to another in 42 years of independence.
INEC will now be forced to reopen the party registration process under less stringent rules, allowing smaller parties to take part. – Sapa-AFP