Still on election financing in Nigeria

Another election season is upon us in Nigeria and political parties and candidates will begin campaigns to win the hearts and minds of voters before the 2019 elections. We have written severally on the imperative to legislate workable election financing laws in Nigeria like that of the United States, but the political class have been reluctant if not unwilling to do anything about how elections are financed in Nigeria.

We still consider it pertinent to talk about how elections are financed in Nigeria because it is key to the institution of an accountable governance system in any country.

The world over, 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 and parties 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. 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.

It is clear that Nigerians’ clamour for accountability in governance cannot be achieved without a thorough review of election financing laws. We call on the federal government, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), the National Assembly and all concerned stakeholders to initiate moves to sanitise the laws governing elections financing in Nigeria to rescue elections from electoral merchants and god-fathers who see elections as an investment opportunity where they stand to make huge profit from.