Daily Independent Online.
*
Thursday, July 01, 2004.
Too many political
parties in Nigeria, says Jonathan
By Bolaji Adepegba
Senior
Correspondent, Lagos
The
Deputy Governor of Bayelsa State, Mr..Goodluck Jonathan, has blamed the
weakness of opposition parties in the country to the registration of many
parties by the Independent National Electoral Commission.
“The
political actors are the same: the key actors. So when one person contested
elections in one party in the evening and lost, the following morning he is in
another party. I mean he lost primaries in an original party and later that day
he is in another party as candidate. So we had a situation where presidential
candidates emerged in virtually all the 30 political parties. Some people are
just satisfied to say always ‘I was a governorship candidate, I was a
presidential candidate’. So you see that the strong actors now spread
across the parties that are less vibrant and you now weaken the opposition.
“So
if people like Gani Fawehinmi and others now had to go to court to compel INEC
to have an open system of registering any number of parties, of course, you
will find what you now find.
Already, AD had been given a provisional registration. AD was not truly
qualified. But what we found was that INEC felt that the whole West was in
AD,” he told Daily Independent in an exclusive chat.
The
deputy governor said that the thinking of Nigerians that anything that the
government does should be challenged causes the tendency of the polity towards
a single-party system. He said that the PDP is not happy with the situation but
cannot be rejecting people, noting that the best thing for this country is to
have fewer parties to contest election without making nonsense of the political
process.
“If
we have these two, three parties, people wouldn’t have been
cross-carpeting, because by the time you are failing in the primaries of the
PDP, other viable candidates are there contesting the same position in the
other two parties. So you cannot just walk over and pick the ticket. So PDP
wanted the best for this country irrespective of our interest. If you have one
thousand parties, PDP will be happier, for you would have weakened the
opposition more and more. And that is why they are now forming an association.
How can political parties form an association? It is ridiculous,” he
said.
