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Henceforth,
associations seeking registration as political parties are expected to
establish and maintain functional and verifiable offices in at least
two-thirds of the 774 local government areas in the country in order to
qualify for registration.

They will also have at least 10,000 registered members in at least two-thirds of the 36 states.

These are some of
the conditions adopted by the House of Representatives yesterday to
streamline the numbers of political parties in the country.

The adoption was
based on the report of the House eight-member ad-hoc committee it set
up on June 1, which made the recommendations.

Others
recommendations by the committee, chaired by the minority leader,
Mohammed Ali Ndume, and which were adopted by the House at the
resumption of the review of the amendment of the Electoral Act, are
that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) shall have
powers to deregister any party which breached any of those requirements
for registration; or which fails to win a seat in the National or State
Assembly election; and that the commission shall verify the claims of
the associations seeking registration, and publish same in at least
three national newspapers before registration.

However, following
a suggestion by the Speaker, Dimeji Bankole, the House rejected a
proposal by the panel that INEC should forward report on the parties
registered to the National Assembly, not necessarily for approval, but
for the records.

Following the
adoption of the recommendations, a new subsection will be inserted
under Section 80 of the substantive Electoral Act, while Section 83
will be amended to read “Power of the Commission to register and
de-register political parties.”

The committee was
set up to synthesise the views of members on the issue of political
parties registration in a Bill for an Act to establish the Independent
National Electoral Commission and make appropriate recommendations to
the House. However, the amendment will scale through if the Senate
concurs.

The members of the
committee are Mohammed Ali Ndume, Ita Enang, Cyril Maduabum, Abdullahi
Shuiabu Hashiru, Ibrahim Mustapha, Lanre Agoro, S.Y. Ahmed, and Hannatu
Jankara (Assistant Clerk of the House), who is the secretary.

Mr. Ndume said,
during its assignment, the committee consulted widely with members of
the House and that at its meeting, all the options were considered.
“The members of the committee, after exhaustive deliberations, came up
with recommendations which they felt would go a long way in creating
broad-based national political parties.”

He also explained
that the committee did not request the parties to have two-thirds
registered members in all the local government areas and the states at
the same time, to avoid ambiguity.

He said the
intention of the panel was not to give powers to the National Assembly
to approve the parties that applied to be registered by the commission,
but just to have such information in its record.

Heated debate

The issue of the
number of parties to participate in the 2011 general elections had
generated a heated debate in the House when it began the amendment of
the Electoral Act with some members, particularly those in the
opposition, calling for a two-party system while others demanded a
multi-party system that will only have five parties.

Yet, others
insisted that the multi-party system, as presently obtained in the
country, should be left intact in the Act. Most of the members of the
ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which has about 280 members in
the lower legislative chamber, canvassed the registration of five
parties. Some of the lawmakers had argued that since the return of
democracy in the country, the number of the political parties has risen
from three to 57 because of the grant given to the parties, and which
is usually pocketed by their leaderships without fielding candidates
during elections.

They noted that
some of the leaders of the parties, which they described as “portfolio
parties”, only become active politically when it is time to receive the
grants. On two occasions, the lawmakers could not vote on the amendment
to Section 80 of the Electoral Act 2006 to include a clause regulating
the number of parties in the country.

However, on May 20,
amid protests and rowdiness, which spanned over an hour, the House, by
a vote of 172 to 48, dumped the proposal for a two-party system. But
members of the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Action Congress (AC),
and a handful of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the House, who
wanted a two-party system, kicked against the result and staged a walk
out in protest.

The minority parties were led by the same Mr. Ndume during the walk out.