Addressing The Questions In APC’s N100m Nomination Fees

The recent announcement of expression of interest and nomination fees for the 2023 elections by the All Progressives Congress, APC, has elicited an avalanche of mostly unfavorable criticisms. The amounts are quite substantial and would be expected to raise more than a few eyebrows amongst Nigerians, especially against the background of present economic realities.

It has been said that those who think education is expensive should try ignorance, instead. Unfortunately or, indeed, fortunately, democracy, just like education, is also expensive, and we cannot remain a jurisdiction insistent on being democratic without the willingness to pay for that democracy.

Indeed, as far as global best democratic practices go, it is the electorate, itself, that ends up directly funding electioneering and political parties by financial subscription to aspirants, nominees or candidates and the platforms they choose to be affiliated with.

This ethos serves to place the average politically active individual and, by extension, the average citizen, at the center of the democratic process, thus insulating the polity from the danger of wholesale hijack by moneybags, kingmakers and other categories of power brokers. Unless we are, in fact, adamantly against what would favour us, we cannot continue to decry godfatherism and yet not be willing to assert ourselves as a financially participating citizenry in the politics of our country.

APC Nomination Fees Should Inspire Grassroots Mobilisation

If someone, confident in his or herself enough to aspire to become the next President of Nigeria, a country of over 200 million individuals, is nevertheless unable to command the confidence of at least 1 million of those fellow citizens he aspires to lead to the extent that they are willing to part with as little as 100 naira each, for the purpose of subscribing to his ambition, such person is really just another joker who woefully lacks the political credibility requisite to such towering ambition.

Yet beyond the matter of subscribing to the candidates of our preferences, it is truly pathetic how political parties and electioneering activities are financed in this country. The parties are basically left to their leaders to fund. Such funding is not just restricted to the financing of political activities but even includes the rendering of financial assistance and provision of other forms of material support – including for very personal issues – to the rank and file of party members who ought to be the ones financing the party through payment of dues, in the first place!

It therefore appears to be rather hypocritical to have the leaders picking up the bills and yet be harangued for seeking to pick the candidates for various positions at primaries. Indeed, it is quite disingenuous to pretend that the party leaders are just a parasitic bunch that ought to be excluded from determining the candidates for their parties and that such task should be left to the generality of party members the leaders might had been financing for years or even decades, for that matter!

Nevertheless, anyone tempted to write off the mass of party members and supporters on this account, would only thereby be exposing their infantile grasp of politics. Ultimately, all politics is local, and it is still these non-due paying party members that the political parties and their candidates rely on in every election, not only to vote but, indeed, to bring out their family members, relations, friends, neighbours, associates and acquaintances to vote on election day, quite apart from being those saddled with the responsibility of protecting the votes and securing victory for candidate and party.

Yet, there can be no refuting the notion that such party members, themselves, and, indeed, our entire democracy and nation, would be far more benefited if candidates and party leaders had no choice but to accord them the additional respect that should arise from not only being card-carrying but also due-paying members of their party, as well.

The Fees Stipulated By APC For The Nomination Forms Should Inspire Nation Building

Party politics is actually pretty similar to nation building. Short of winning the Nobel Prize for your country, dying on the battlefield in defense of one’s fatherland or bagging an Olympic medal in honour of the motherland, the easiest and most readily available means of being a patriot is to pay tax.

In fact, paying one’s taxes is so critical to citizen responsibility that not even national heroes are exempt from paying up their fair share. In short, the payment of tax is a veritable and ubiquitously available avenue by which the common man and average citizen asserts his stakeholder status within the polity. Similarly, payment of party dues is critical to a healthy paradigm of popular participation in party politics and citizen engagement in the democratic process.

Unless for those determined to delude themselves, there is no viable means of becoming a President of Nigeria without an outlay amounting to billions of naira. If you cannot raise a hundred million to surmount the very first hurdle of nomination, you clearly lack the stamina to withstand the heat of the cutthroat kitchen of Nigerian politics, and should just quit wasting other people’s time.

The APC Nomination Fees Changes The Narrative On Participatory Democracy

Rome was not built in a day but each day, something new was added to its ancient skyline. Our democracy is work in progress and it is a most bewildering, complex and high octane process that desperately needs citizen stakeholders to be at the center of it all for the ultimate good of us all.

Anyone who desires to become our next President should take it as a test of his popularity and viability that one kobo of his private money does not enter into the purse that pays for his nomination fees. If he or she succeeds, they are, indeed, politically credible as opposed to being mere moneybags, tingods, oppressors and prospective milkers of those they purpose to lead.

This is a country whose citizens excitedly subscribe billions to a meaningless television show like Big Brother, a program of absolutely no relevance, whatsoever to their day-to-day existence but will not fund the political parties whose candidates will govern them from local government to federal level for a cycle of years.

Rather than the unhelpful and quite irrelevant posture of condemning a decision seasoned politicians would have made in accordance with complex calculations they deemed to be most favourable to the fortunes of their political party, these fees should be apprehended as a blessing in disguise and considered to be veritable devices affording average citizens the opportunity to fund the democracy they belong to and finance the candidates they would rather prefer to preside over their affairs.

While Felix Morka, the party’s National Publicity Secretary, has been at pains to account for the rationale behind the fees, I must differ with critics of the party, as I really see no problem with the various amounts involved.

Indeed, I would encourage the party to stick to its guns on this one for I believe the party’s newly minted Chairman, Senator Abdullahi Adamu, and his National Working Committee, have actually ended up presenting Nigerians with a feasible opportunity of owning their politicians rather than the other way round. To own your democracy, you must also be the one funding it. It is really that simple.

Onokpasa, a lawyer and media consultant, writes from Warri.

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