Nigeria’s Constitution only requires that a candidate seeking elective office be sponsored by a political party. It does not specify how long such a person must have belonged to that party before emerging as its candidate.
Even if one argues that party sponsorship naturally implies party membership, the Constitution still provides no minimum membership duration before participation in primaries or candidate selection processes. In theory, an aspirant could join a political party on the very day of its primaries and still secure a ticket.
However, members of the National Assembly introduced electoral provisions that significantly narrowed that flexibility — and, in the process, limited their own political options.
One such provision requires political parties to submit their membership registers to INEC at least 21 days before the close of primaries. This means that an aspirant’s name must already appear in the party register within that timeframe before they can be considered for nomination.
By creating this rule, lawmakers effectively trapped themselves within their political parties. They weakened one of their strongest political advantages — the ability to defect to another party after losing a primary election and still contest for office.
As a result, many lawmakers became completely dependent on party leaders and governors for political survival. In parties like the APC, several legislators who failed to secure party endorsement found themselves with no realistic alternative platform to pursue re-election.
A similar situation played out ahead of the 2023 elections when lawmakers supported the removal of statutory delegates from party primaries. Ironically, that decision also worked against many of them.
With governors and party leaders controlling delegate selection, numerous legislators lost influence within their parties and were ultimately denied return tickets to the National Assembly.
The consequence today is a political landscape where many serving lawmakers no longer have viable parties under which to contest, while several registered political parties struggle to field credible candidates.
Before these restrictive provisions were introduced, politicians who lost primaries in one party could easily move to another platform and continue their political ambitions. That room for manoeuvre has now been drastically reduced by laws created by the lawmakers themselves.
Published by Chuks Nwachuku
