How are elections financed in Nigeria?
Ahead of preparations for the 2019 general elections in Nigeria, I repeat a piece I did in February 2016 highlighting one of the greatest challenges to free and fair elections in Nigeria. It is my belief that until we fix our electoral financing laws, our elections will continue to be determined by money bags and not by the people. We have little time before political campaigns kick off to act.
Elections are very expensive events. Besides the huge financial outlay required by the electoral management body and security agencies to organise and ensure smooth and secure voting, candidates contesting elections expend huge sums of money in campaigns across the length and breadth of their constituencies. In the United States of America for instance, in 2008 alone, candidates for offices, political parties, and independent groups spent a total of $5.3 billion on federal elections. For the office of the president, candidates spent a total of $2.4 billion. In the 2010 midterm election cycle, candidates for office, political parties, and independent groups spent a total of $3.6 billion on federal elections. It was estimated that the average winner of a seat in the United States House of Representatives spent about $1.4 million on his or her campaign while the average winner of a senate seat spent $9.8 million. Similar data exist for other developed societies but not Nigeria.
Generally also, monies for campaigns in the United States for federal offices come from four broad categories of sources: small individual contributors (who contribute $200 or less); large individual contributors (who contribute more than $200); political action committees (PACs); and self-financing like in the current case of Donald Trump.
Quite sensibly, federal laws in the US also restrict how much individuals and organisations may contribute to political campaigns and political parties. The law also requires candidate, committees and PACs to file periodic reports fully disclosing all monies they raise and spend. The aim of these campaign financing laws is to ensure full transparency in electoral contests and to prevent the hijack of the electoral process by money bags, which will defeat the essence of democracy.
However, Nigeria, which modelled its presidential democracy after that of the US, did not deem it necessary to copy the campaign funding laws of the United States. Although Nigeria’s electoral laws often contain campaign spending limits, neither the electoral commission nor any body in Nigeria is capable of monitoring campaign spending to know whether the candidates keep within or exceed the limits. For instance, the 2010 Electoral Act put the spending limit for candidates for presidential election at N1 billion and those for governorship positions at N200 million.
Curiously also, the electoral act did not specify how these monies are to be raised. Enter godfathers and political merchants who specialised in bankrolling candidates elections for huge profits and returns. I am sure we remember the cases of Emeka Offor and Chimwoke Mbadinuju, Jim Nwobodo and Chimaroke Nnamani, Chris Uba and Chris Ngige, Mohammed Lawal and Olusola Saraki, Rashidi Ladoja and Lamidi Adedibu, Theodore Orji and Orji Uzo Kalu and many others we may never hear or know about.
With a largely unregulated election financing environment, candidates and electoral merchants now see elections in Nigeria as simply a matter of investments and returns. This is not helped by an unhealthy culture of expectation and entitlement in Nigeria where the people expect politicians and the government to provide jobs, roads, hospitals, education, water, electricity, etc. at little or no cost. Also, many Nigerians expect and look forward to receiving money from politicians during and after campaigns. Is it any wonder then that the notion of government accountability is alien to Nigerian public officials?
Once elected into office, public officials’ main task is to recoup and make huge returns on the money spent during the elections. That is even for self-financed candidates. For those financed by godfathers, both the official and his/her godfather are locked in battle on who takes the largest share from the investment.
It should therefore come as no surprise that despite the hues and cries from Nigerians, salaries, allowances and other emoluments of elected public officials continue to be so high – and justifiably so. A Nigerian legislator once complained that he gets inundated daily with financial requests from his constituents and that if he were to attend to all of them his entire salary/allowances won’t even be enough to take care of 50% of such requests.
The decision of President Muhammadu Buhari to beam a searchlight on the PDP campaign funds came as a refreshing break from past practices where campaign funding are never probed or even allowed to be discussed publicly. And not a few Nigerians are enjoying the revelations of the Dasukigate scandal and how the then ruling party used the former National Security Adviser as conduit for the disbursement of its electoral funds. Actual source(s) of the funds are being disputed and are before the courts.
Although President Buhari is yet to disclose his and his party’s source(s) of campaign funds either – which, by the way, many believe, may not be radically different from those of the PDP – his decision to probe the PDP’s campaign funds is a first step in a long process of bringing sanity into election funding in Nigeria. For as long as campaign funding is left to political merchants and people with deep pockets, elections in Nigeria will continue to be seen strictly in the business sense of investment and returns and the dream of government accountability to the people will continue to be a mirage.
Christopher Akor