Political parties should not be muscled – Dr Garuba

Dr Dauda Garuba, a seasoned democratic governance expert and currently, the director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), also told Weekend Trust that political parties should be permitted to operate freely to raise their credibility.

More associations are seeking registration as political parties, what is your take?

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For me, maybe as somebody in the area of political science and is attuned to what multi-party democracy is all about, you may want to say that people are free to register their parties.

On several occasions, I also argued on why we are regimental about political party registration. As far as I am concerned, in a true democracy, people can decide to establish political parties based on the common problems they face. For instance, in the Niger Delta, if you realise that you want to build a political party around ecological issues that affect you, or you are safe in the far North, where environmental issues are about winds and all those things, you are free to do that. But the general efforts by the government to regiment the formation of political parties have been largely responsible for the kind of mad rush you see each time we are about conducting elections. We have also seen what that has constituted for us in respect to the nature of the albatross, where election is happening and people are complaining that their parties were from the ballots; yet they are registered.

We can run a multi-party democracy with people freely registering their political parties and people don’t necessarily have to struggle to be in the ballot for either gubernatorial or presidential election.

A party can decide to limit itself to an area of operation within a local government based on the common challenges they have in that environment. I don’t see that as a huge crisis. What I see as a problem is the government or the electoral body, by virtue of the guidelines it operates, trying to insist that every party has to be national. It is when you do that that you are going to force some fake or non-widely spread political parties to masquerade as widely spread.

Some of these parties don’t even have offices. They operate as tenants at some business centres in Abuja because they want to present themselves as having national coverage. But if you allow parties to run independently the way they want to do it, we won’t have some of the issues we have seen with political parties.

Some people are saying that majority of the existing parties are not viable and should be de-registered…

I do not support the effort to muzzle out people who are seeking freedom to register their political parties. Let the people look out for themselves what they want to do.

Parties exist without necessarily seeking for elections. In the United States, people talk about Democrats and Republicans, but they are not the only parties there. Why is it that it is only in presidential or gubernatorial elections that you hear them?

So we can as well have that nature of arrangement where you have many parties but you only hear few of them when it is coming to elections. Let us democratise this process. It will also help in aggregating views and cultivating ideologies that will eventually centralise some of these parties if we so want.

Some people also argue that registering more parties puts more financial and operational burden on INEC, especially considering the ethno-religious nature of the country. What is your take on this?

Well, that used to be a factor when INEC paid for party organisation, but it is no longer so. So you don’t even need to ask political parties to register with you. People who want to contest elections indicate the political platform on which they would run. So, in the first instance, INEC should not be the one registering political parties. We are unnecessarily adding to the job of the commission by asking it to register political parties.

Would that not cause INEC to spend more money on elections?

No. The fact is that if you allow these parties to run independently, they will not even be as many as we are speculating.

You will find out that some people will be comfortable remaining at that local government level while some will be at the state level. It is because of this forceful effort to regulate or regiment them that some of them keep doing what they are doing – pretending to be national in nature.

The question is: Has ethno-religious influence exited our politics? It is still there. So, what is it? It is the same thing people say when they talk about the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) scheme today. We wanted to deal with the issue of ethnicity and those stuffs, but we have not. And we have moved on with the NYSC for many years. Which means that there is much more than other intervening variables that are responsible for some of these things.

So, why don’t we look out for the proper solution to some of those things? Ethno-religious issues are also in the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). That is why you have the issue of where the president should come from and which religion he should represent.  Are they actually addressing the fears we have long been stressing? These are the questions.