Nigeria is at a crossroads – Atiku

Atiku Abubakar, former vice president of Nigeria and presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2023 general election, gave this speech on the state of political parties and opposition at a national conference in Abuja on ‘strengthening democracy in Nigeria, recently: INIOBONG IWOK brings the excerpts:

My part in political party formation

Firstly, the issue currently with political parties started in the last 80s, then the main objective was to drive away the military. I spent most of my political career in forming political parties. The objective firstly was to send away the military and return the country to democracy and the second phase is what we are discussing today, which is the role of political parties in governance.

I can tell you that when the establishment of political parties started to send away the military, I was in the fore-front together with the late Yar’Adua.

We wanted to send the military out

Basically, the main objective was to send the military out of governance, of course we formed political parties and they dissolved them. Eventually, we ended up with two parties set up by the military themselves; Social Democratic Party and National Republican Coalition.

Our own political wing, which was the people’s brand of Nigeria, formed an alliance with SDP. These were the two political parties that fought the military out of power and power was handed over to the civilians for the supposedly democratic parties.

Role of political parties

Since getting into power the roles of the political parties have evolved; in some cases, changes, in some cases for the good of the country and some for the bad of the country and I think we have come to the peak of the crisis, as far as the role of political parties is concerned today.

I hope the deliberation in this conference would lead to real examination of the roles of political parties in providing good governance. We have listened to a number of challenges facing the political parties currently and how to go about getting them solved.

Some of these challenges have moved from political parties to governance, now governance dictates political parties, it should have been the reverse; it should have been political parties directing governance on what should be done because that is their role.

They interact with ordinary people, they go into campaigns, our main challenge in this conference is to see how the National Assembly through various laws and legislation can play a role in making this objective realised.

Read also: Atiku: The heartbeat of the opposition

Electoral Act

Sometime last year, I sat down with my advisers and lawyers and we crafted amendment to the Electoral Act, that is currently in operation and I signed it and sent it to the National Assembly committee for the amendment of the Electoral Act, but I know for sure that they are not going to make use of the recommendations that I made.

I made them in good faith to strengthen the political parties and the electoral process but with the current National Assembly, I don’t see them adopting some of the recommendations that I made.

National Assembly must act

So, what do we do? Like someone said here, we have a National Assembly that is a rubber-stamp of the executive, but I refuse to agree. It depends on us.

Effective institutions

For example, in last year’s Turkey presidential election, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been in office for twenty years, and in the presidential election because of the credibility of the electoral process, Erdogan scored 49.5 votes, the constitution requires him to score 50 percent.

The second candidate scored four percent, and the third candidate with less than two percent and the electoral commission refused to declare Erdogan the winner. When we were in primary or secondary school, we were told that when someone scores 49 percent, you would round it up to 50 percent.

But the electoral commission of Turkey refused to round it up and declare Erdogan the winner, they insisted on a run-off. When they had run-off the candidate who had four percent supported Erdogan and when the second result came up, Erdogan won with that four percent that the man supported him with. That is the credibility of the electoral process. Do we have the same thing here?

Like somebody said; it is because some people declare the winner and not the people.

We are at a crossroads

We are really at a cross-roads on our democratic experiment. We either decide we want to be democratic or we decide to abandon it. The conference is very important and historic; we can’t leave here without a marshalling plan to get an Electoral Act amendment and not the court determining who the people have elected.