POLITICS-NIGERIA: Election Guidelines Announced

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Remi Oyo and Toye Olori

LAGOS, Jan 26 1999 (IPS) - Nigeria’s Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) has announced the guidelines for the country’s legislative and presidential elections which would be held on Feb 20 and Feb 27 respectively.

The guidelines, issued by INEC chairman, Justice Ephraim Akpata over the weekend, set the age limit for parliamentary aspirants to at least 35 years and presidential to not less than 40.

Each presidential aspirant must possess at least a high school diploma and pay a non-refundable fee of 100,000 Naira (about 1,200 US Dollars) to enable him or her to contest.

Similar education requirement applies to parliamentary aspirants who will pay a non-refundable fee of 20,000 Naira (about 250 US Dollars).

Nigeria’s three main political parties — the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), the Alliance for Democracy (AD) and the All People’s Party (APP) — have till Jan 30 to present their candidates for the legislative elections, but no date has been fixed for the Presidential aspirants yet.

Unhappy with some of the guidelines, the AD and APP say they will meet this week to challenge a ban by INEC on the proposed merger between the two parties.

INEC Secretary, Adamu Mu’azu, wrote to both parties at the weekend that Nigeria’s “electoral law does not envisage a situation where a candidate at an election is backed by two separate logos belonging to two separate parties.”

Mu’azu described the proposed alliance between the AD and APP — both arch rivals of Nigeria’s largest political party, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) — as violating the decree governing the elections.

Confirming the meeting between the alliance and the INEC, Chukwumeka Ezeife, a top AD official, said they will re-apply to formalise the alliance.

Adding its voice to the debate, the Lagos-based human rights watchdog, the Constitutional Rights Project (CRP), urged electorates to reject INEC’s decision. “Let us resolve to begin the process of democratization by casting our votes,” said CRP in a statement over the weekend. “After the elections, let us resolve to defend the integrity of our votes, by challenging any attempt to violate the decision of the electorate.”

Meanwhile, the Joint Action Committee of Nigeria (JACON), a coalition of more than 50 pro-democracy and human rights groups, has threatened to call mass action by February if government continues to defy its demands for reforms.

JACON, which fought the government of the late dictator Sani Abacha (1993-1998) over its human rights abuses, gave the government of Gen Abdulsalaam Abubakar 30 days to accede to its demand or face mass action.

Sceptical about the transition to civilian rule, JACON chairman, Gani Fawehinmi, said “if, indeed, the military means to hand over power on May 29, why did the head of state (Abubakar) find it necessary to draw up a budget for a whole year?”

JACON described the duration of the budget as a “further indication that termination of military dictatorship in May 1999 is still in the realm of speculation”.

Fredrick Fasehun, President of a Pan-African group, Oodua Progressive Congress (OPC) whose militant members have been battling the police in Lagos, said the regime had put a lot of obstacles on the way to a smooth transition.

“The government is looking for excuses to disorganise their own transition. Nobody forced them to announce a new minimum wage. They announced it and the market women seized the opportunity to hike prices then government chickened out on the wage increase,” he told IPS this week.

“The government also has increased the price of fuel, the tuition fees in universities and has taken on the Ijaws in the Niger Delta and on the Yorubas (in Southwestern Nigeria),” he said.

“All these are meant to provoke protests and disrupt the transition to civil rule programme, which they have told the world, would terminate on May 29, with the swearing-in of a democratically elected president,” said Fasehun.

What worries JACON most, says Fawehinmi, is the disparity in the allocations of budget between the north and south. “The south, from where 67.92 percent of the total budgetted revenue comes from, is allocated only 20 percent of the total allocation. This for an area that produces the greater percentage of the country’s wealth is unfair,” the group said.

Ninety percent of Nigeria’s export revenue comes from oil which is produced in the Niger Delta region in the south.

JACON is also unhappy about Nigeria’s involvement in Sierra Leone where 15,000 Nigerian-led West African peace-keeping force, ECOMOG, is trying to flush out the rebels of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) from the capital, Freetown.

The West African peace-keeping force in Sierra Leone, which was beefed up after the rebels infiltrated Freetown on Jan 6, has been drawn from Nigeria, Guinea and Ghana.

Nigeria spends about one million US Dollars a day in Sierra Leone, according to a senior official of the Sierra Leonean government.

Nigeria’s Army Chief of Logistics, Maj-Gen Chris Garuba, said Nigeria cannot afford to shy away from supporting its neighbours.

“If our neighbours are allowed to disintegrate, the backlog of refugees would ultimately be a burden to Nigeria,” he said.