Earlier in the week, the Director of BudgIT, a civic advocacy group, Seun Onigbinde, suggested a campaign to crowdfund N10 billion for former Anambra state governor Peter Obi’s presidential ambition.
In a tweet, the BudgIT CEO emphasized that a GoFundMe account would serve the purpose of funding the presidential hopeful, who recently made public his ambition to contest the 2023 presidential elections.
Although Mr Onigbinde has come out to clarify that he is not interested in raising the fund or managing it, the development has generated heated debates among Nigerians on the cost of electioneering in Africa’s biggest economy.
On Monday, Financial Times, a London-based publication, had in a viral report disclosed that it costs an estimated $2bn to prosecute a presidential campaign in Nigeria.
In other words, it costs roughly N1 trillion to campaign for the position of the president of Nigeria, where the per capita income is put at a little over $2,000 as of December 2021.
Expensive Democracy
Nigeria’s democracy is notoriously expensive and many analysts have warned about the consequences of this phenomenon on the fiscal condition of the Nigerian state itself.
On Tuesday, aside the usual online theatrics that trailed Onigbinde’s N10bn suggestion for Peter Obi’s presidential run, a key resolution among Twitter users was that the amount was ridiculously low and would not even take the presidential hopeful through the hurdles of his party’s primaries in an election said to cost about a trillion naira.
In Nigeria, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has its recommendation for election financing and spending.
By default, INEC rules officially prohibit corporate bodies from donating to election campaigns just as the commission restricts individual contributions to N1,000,000. The grand rule is that a presidential candidate must not spend beyond N1 billion on their campaign. The rules also apply as appropriate for other positions.
For gubernatorial candidates, the campaign spending must not exceed N200 million, just as a senatorial candidate must not spend beyond N40 million. In the case of a House of Representatives candidate, the amount must not exceed N30m, while the state House of Assembly candidate must also spend within the N10 million thresholds.
INEC has specific sanctions for candidates that flout these regulations and even threatened to jail presidential aspirants who disobeyed its directive in 2014.
The sanction for presidential election is N1 million or 12 months imprisonment or both and for governor, N800,000 or nine months or both.
Other Climes
Meanwhile, as in Nigeria, election financing across many parts of Africa is as expensive as it is quite opaque.
In South Africa, civic organizations have tried to force political parties by court order to publish the names of their donors, but politicians fought back with all their might. In 2019, Cyril Ramaphosa signed a law to regulate the private financing of candidates and their election campaigns.
According to the bill, donations to politicians or their parties should be disclosed starting at 100,000 rand (about €6,000). But the rule was not yet in operation before suspicion arose that Ramaphosa himself raised donations from a controversial entrepreneur.
Last year, a civic group warned that presidential elections in Ghana could cost as much as $100 million, while elections of MPs could gulp as high as 3-4 million GHS.
The 2020 election campaigns in the United States are said to have smashed all records, with presidential and congressional candidates spending a total of almost $14bn. That was more than double the price tag for 2016.
Unlike in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, however, U.S election financing is relatively traceable and a series of transparency mechanisms have been built around it to check against abuse. Aside that, the United States, with its over $20 trillion GDP, could fairly absorb such spending.
Conflicting Realities
Despite the provisions of the rules guiding election financing in Nigeria, it has been near-impossible to implement these rules over the years.
In 2019, a report found that most political parties in Nigeria breached the country’s law on financial disclosure to the electoral commission, INEC.
Section 93(4) of Nigeria’s electoral law provides that a political party sponsoring the election of a candidate shall, within three months of the announcement of the results of the election, file a report of the contributions made by individuals and entities to (Independent National Electoral) the Commission.
At the end of the 2019 elections, only four obscure parties complied, and it was widely tied to the opacity of election financing in Nigeria.
Last year, a new bill was passed by the Nigerian parliament to consider jacking up the campaign funding benchmarks. The new campaign spending ceilings in the bill passed by lawmakers was consequently jacked up from between 150 per cent to 400 per cent.
The spending limit, if signed into law, will allow presidential candidates to increase their funding from the current N1 billion to N5 billion, while governorship candidates will be able to rake in N1 billion from the current N200 million.
Senatorial candidates can now raise N100 million from the previous N40 million, while candidates to the House of Representative are set to accept N70 million from the current N30 million. The State Assembly hopefuls would be free to raise N30 million from the previous N10 million.
Now if the ideal figures have gone through changes, it’s plausible that the real election financing figures could have ballooned in the face of skyrocketed prices and inflationary pressures.
What the foregoing shows is that the N10 billion lifeline would not take Peter Obi anywhere in his presidential moves. But it also shows that Nigeria has a major problem on its hands with regard to election financing.
Engaging Ekiti’s Exquisite Election Numbers
Still talking about elections, Biodun Oyebanji won the All Progressives Congress (APC) governorship primary election in Ekiti state last week.
Oyebanji, a former secretary to the state government (SSG), polled 101,703 votes, while his challengers, Ojo Kayode, Opeyemi Bamidele, and Dayo Adeyeye polled 767, 760, and 691 votes, respectively.
A breakdown of the figure, as shared by spokesperson to former governor Ayo Fayose, claimed Mr Oyebanji polled 49,380 votes in Ado LG alone. Interestingly, in the 2014 governorship election, the APC polled 13,927 votes in Ado while it polled 28,111 in 2018.
In other words, Oyebanji polled more numbers in a primary election than the party polled in a general election!
It’s these sort of miracles that are the defining features of Nigerian politics that party supporters who vote overwhelmingly for their candidates during primaries suddenly disappear during general elections.
Last year in Anambra State, APC’s Andy Uba scored 230, 201 out of 348, 490 votes cast in the primary elections. However, in the general elections, which had other Anambra voters outside of Uba’s APC members as participants, the APC candidate polled a miserable 43,285 votes.
Such electoral miracles are only possible in Nigeria.
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