As INEC Lifts Ban On Campaigns

The journey to the 2023 general elections entered a significant phase on Wednesday, September 28, 2022 when the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, formally lifted the embargo on political campaigns. The lifting of the embargo allows political parties and their candidates to openly campaign and freely canvass for votes, using legitimate and lawful methods.
According to INEC, 18 political parties will be sponsoring candidates in the elections, which will take place in February and March, 2023.
Next year’s elections will be significant and critical in many ways. It’s a transition election which will see to the emergence of a new President of Nigeria, which to a large extent, is still the powerhouse of Africa and one of the most important countries of the world. President Muhammadu Buhari will be bowing out of office, after a second and final tenure that began on May 29, 2015. Nigeria’s Constitution does not allow executive political office holders to stay beyond two terms of four years each.
The 2023 elections will be guided by a new Electoral Act, which is leveraging on Information Technology to deliver results of elections real-time and thus eliminate hurdles that bedevilled previous pollings, that were fraught with human and manual errors. The success of this approach will change the way elections are held and accepted in Nigeria for good.
Unlike previous elections, where the race was among well established political parties and their candidates, the current electioneering has thrown up a third force, which has benefited from a digital-based mobilisation and has brought about a paradigm shift in political mobilisation. Utilising the power of the social media supporters of the Labour Party candidate, Mr. Peter Obi, have set a new tone for campaigns. The other leading candidates in the presidential election are Mr. Abubakar Atiku of the Peoples Democratic Party, Mr. Bola Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress and Mr. Musa Kwankwaso of the NNPP.
Having successively held elections for 24 years, it could be said that Nigeria has matured democratically to handle its own elections without support from outside. But has it?
The politics that dogged the processes that led up to the selection of the current candidates of the parties did not speak well in that direction. The sound bites spoke volumes about primordial considerations where the religion, ethnicity and geopolitical characters of candidates, played more significant roles than what the candidates and political parties were bringing to the table. Thus, most of the arguments were about Muslim-Muslim, Christian-Muslim, Christian-Christian, Hausa, Fulani, Yoruba, Igbo etc presidencies.
We expect that the elections will throw up a Nigerian president, a Nigerian governor etc, and not a president representing a section, religion or ethnic interest. Elected officials must see the entire country are their constituency, and not the part from which they come.
There are enough touching and troubling issues to engage the energies and time of candidates and their political parties, as they step out to campaign.
The economy has been run down with runaway inflation figures in double digits; the value of the naira against hard currencies has nosedived; the primary export product, crude oil has suffered huge drop with serious claims that it’s being stolen and sold off in the international market; and the poverty is worsening with Nigeria assuming notoriety as the poverty capital of the world.
Insecurity has ripped through the country in a way that has never been experienced in the history of the country with bandits, insurgents, kidnappers and terrorists dividing and ruling significant areas of the country. The situation has adversely affected food security and free movements across the country.
Education has suffered seriously as public universities have remained closed for most of the year because government could not meet the legitimate demands of the academic staff. The situation is equally bad at the lower rungs of the education ladder.
The Niger Delta development debacle has remained an albatross on the neck of the Nigerian state. Since the Independence Constitution when the development of the region was placed as a priority, successive governments have failed to prioritise the development of the place, which incidentally produces resources that sustain the country. The candidates and political parties must be seen to address themselves to the Niger Delta issue squarely.
Corruption, whose fight formed the plank on which the present administration rode to power has worsened and is eating dangerously and deeply into the life of the nation. It’s an issue that should attract the attention of the candidates and their political parties.
Politically, there have been genuine calls to restructure the country to free it of the energies it needs to develop both at the Federal and sub-national levels. The concentration at the centre has not only suffocated the regions, it has made politics at the centre a desperate affair, which has continued to threaten the existence of the corporate unity of the country.
As the campaign trains crisscross the country, seeking for the sacred votes of the electorate, politicians must address themselves to those key issues of development, harmonious living, economic prosperity and public decency. And the people must also demand these of the candidates and their parties.