Leaders of the deregistered Youth Party led by Francis King Akinlotan, member of the Board of Trustees (BoT); Ifeanyi Nwoye, national financial secretary and Toni Aladekomo, last week paid a courtesy visit to BusinessDay during which they interacted with some members of the editorial staff. The leaders spoke on the party‘s recent deregistration by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), why their case is different and the vision behind the formation of the party, among other issues. INIOBONG IWOK captured the interaction. Excerpts:
The Youth Party has just been deregistered by INEC, what is the position of the party?
The journey started in 2014, some people came together on how to do things better for our country and a group of people wanted to sponsor candidates but the process was not free and fair. We regrouped, and in 2016, we applied for registration as a party, INEC refused to register us; saying that our party was restrictive and we said no, that the membership is open to all Nigerians upon attaining 18 years. But they refused to register us; we went to Court and the Court gave judgment in our favour. Eventually, they registered us in August 2018, about a year after, which was about two months to the commencement of the primaries. It was difficult for us to compete in the 2019 election, because most of the people who wanted to contest under the party went to another party mainly because of the timing. But we managed to field eleven candidates in Bauchi, Osun and Ogun states. What INEC did to the Youth Party was like tying a man’s hands backwards and pushed him into the ring to fight. We were incapacitated. Then recently, INEC has been saying that there is a provision in the Electoral Act which says that parties should win at least 25 percent of elective positions across the country. We decided to go to court. But INEC suddenly went ahead and deregistered our party, saying that we did not meet the demands of the law. The rule is that you either win the presidential election, House of Representatives election or governorship elections. What we have competed in has been just the general election. We did not participate in the governorship election in Osun State, and we have not been allowed to participate in the upcoming governorship election in Ondo and Edo States. The initial concept is that since most of the founders of the party are youths, the name of the party should be youth party. We believe we would grow old one day and we believe in the concept of national change, and in training future leaders. We believe in a party that gives education, food, unemployment, free health to the people. When INEC refused to register us, we went to court and we proved to them that we merited being registered as a political party and the court ordered that we should be registered, which was never appealed by INEC. But they delayed the registration again for another one year; so, this is not only about us meeting 25 percent, it is just negative perception of our party by INEC. They took it to the extreme and it manifested in them deregistering our party.
Is the party not affected by the recent court judgment won by some parties?
No, our party is not part of the recent court order; we were not part of that suit. If you noticed, there were 33 parties in that suit; the name of our party was not even available when they filed that suit. One of the reasons they gave is similar to our party’s complaints and it is good for the system. It is a good development. There is a precedent in court that INEC should not deregister parties having failed to meet certain things they themselves should have done; it is premature.
You talked about leveraging on ICT to conduct internal elections; how do you intend achieving that?
Yes, for online voting, when you want to take up a big project you have to do some test-run to check the suitability and capability of the system. This is not the first time electronic voting is being used. There are lots of factors that come into it. There are several countries in the world that use electronic voting, we have two systems that suit our members. We have the online voting and the mobile system; what we are trying to do is to show the entire country that this can be done and that INEC can do it on a large scale.
But your party has been silent; if voted into power what would the Youth Party do differently?
Our party for instance, has policies sub-committees for the different sectors of the economy. We have in agriculture, health, education and others. We offer our opinion constructively, we don’t believe in unnecessary criticism; that is why we don’t believe in personal attacks or pointing fingers at people. We have committees that meet periodically and take their positions on national issues. Our policy is on our website. We held a policy roundtable recently where we brought people and politicians from different backgrounds, political parties, including the two leading parties, and people from various parts of the country, We believe that there is something that should be called irreducible minimum in what the government should be talking about and which people in other political parties should be making their government to focus on. We agreed that everybody should give more attention to education; when you educate a man the government would have fewer problems. Issues of unemployment and insecurity would be taken care of. We are having the second edition in March 21th on national revenue; you could see that today some people say that this government is over-taxing some businesses; the assumption is that the government wants to break the neck of some people to fund that system. We have a system where the daughter of the President is using the presidential jet to go and take photography in another state and you want people to pay their N50, 000 and N1, 000 to fund that. So, there is the political aspect of taxation and revenue generation.
In July we are going to have a round table discussion on employment and education so that we can focus on issues. We would bring people from different backgrounds to talk and offer solutions on the way forward. We would present our agenda as a political party; let people also bring their opinions and then let us agree on some things that are achievable. For example, in our party, we believe in one Nigeria; we don’t entertain comments that are divisive; we want people to focus on issues. We have a heavy presence on Twitter being a youth party. What we want to achieve is not talking, the objective is to have people to think about what we have said and make behavioural changes.
What is the source of funding for the party?
We are doing crowd-funding. We live on pledges, the projection is if we get 1,000 people to become members, we get donations and that takes care of salaries of our staff in the 36 states. That takes care of the money we need to organise our events and other things that we do. We don’t have a godfather or moneybags dropping huge amount of money and detecting what we do. That’s why we have adopted the principle of crowd-funding. When Obama started, he did not have big donors, it was when he won his primaries that people started to give him money. Because nobody knew him; he was a junior in the Senate. So, they took to the principle of crowdfunding; that example is what we have adopted. People are donating N10, 000, N2, 000 to us, whatever amount of money that they can afford depending on their ability, that is how we have survived so far and built our profile. The issue of the late registration was a distraction; the late registration of our party affected us; what we are doing now are the plans we had for 2016; our membership drive was hampered based on the focus at that time. I have been to most of the states; even when the Boko Haram insurgency was high, I was in Bauchi State during the LG election and I travelled by road not by air; what people would ask me was if we had been registered. It is the people who are really convinced by your written document that would want to join you except they have a leader who have joined and they want to go with their leader. Then the focus was to get the registration to go through and then we went to court and got a judgment. After the 2019 elections, we set up a committee to review what went wrong and sampled opinions; we did an investigation and they came back with results in the entire places that we contested election. We want to focus on the policy side of our party, the strategy and policy committee is the biggest organogram in our party. So, they would often be on ground and as opposition, offer solutions to national issues such as security, employment generation etc.
We deliberately did not have a presidential candidate in the 2019 election because we knew it was unrealistic; we knew some of the parties that had presidential candidates had no reason having one because a lot of them could not even win a local government election. So, we did not have a governorship and presidential candidate and we did not adopt anybody because we don’t believe in that.
Would the party consider the option of merger?
We cannot just say we would merge with another party, such is like marriage; you have to be sure your ideologies are in accord; you don’t just want to merge for the sake of it.
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