This was as the former President of the Pharmaceutical Society of Nigeria observed that the new electoral law didn’t help to check the excesses of politicians at the just concluded national primaries of the ruling All Progressives Congress; the main opposition Peoples Democratic Party and the African Democratic Congress, among others.
Ohuabunwa stated this during an exclusive interview with The PUNCH, on Tuesday.
He said, “The experience of the last presidential primaries was a shock to us. It didn’t just create additional shock, because we know the system was already rigged in terms of the undemocratic nature of the primaries. But we felt that based on the efforts being made by the new electoral law and serious discussions on the law across the country, there was going to be a change in terms of the way we do political leadership selection or election.
“But the truth is that I was embarrassed. Nothing seems to have changed and the focus of a lot of people was on money more than anything else and that’s the shock.
“The system has always been corrupted by the influence of money and other manipulative tendencies. The fact is what has overtaken the system is the incursion of monetary influence in our leadership selection process. That’s the painful aspect of the whole issue.
“It, therefore, doesn’t allow us to be sure that whoever that is elected deserves to be elected or is the best because all we see is that those who get elected at primaries have spent more and that there is a proportionate relationship between those who get elected and those who spend money. So, it looks like that’s the overridden consideration and that’s not good for our democracy.”
He added, “What we should be looking for are the people that have the leadership qualities, that can help our country out of this current doldrum. I think that each time there is a job to be done, we should look at certain qualifications of who will fit into the job.
“In Nigeria today, it is difficult to be sure that we have taken that into consideration and that you have been a politician for life is not enough qualification to assume certain responsibilities. The question is, who is the fit person for the position? And I think that we didn’t demonstrate that at all at the primaries. I mean, in almost all the parties- the APC, the PDP, the ADC, and several other parties.
“So it’s becoming more challenging and one would have wished that if you are adopting a presidential system, we should adopt it wholesale. In the United States, where we took the presidential system of government from, primaries are done state by state and all members of the party are involved in electing the candidate. That’s the democratic way of doing it.
“In the past when we used statutory delegates, it was bad. This last one was even worse by the omission of National Assembly members. Statutory delegates were omitted. We only had elected delegates. For instance, in the PDP, there was only one for a local government. How could you ever entrust the responsibility of electing the president from a local government, to each person? In Abia, there were 17; in Ebonyi, there were 13 and just like. That increased the risk and made it a lot more undemocratic, because the smaller the number, the easier it is for them to be hijacked by money politics or other influencers.
“We know that the governors have overridden influence on the delegates, money has overridden influence on delegates. And most of these national delegates were actually appointees of the governors. So, that made the situation much more complex and made it more difficult for rationality to reign.”
