On APC’s N100m Fee for Presidential Form

By Waziri Adio

The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) indiscreetly raised the bar midweek when it set N100 million as the price tag for the chance to compete in its presidential primaries. While there may be a few good reasons for such a high fee, that decision is, all things considered, a very bad idea. It is a tactless move that has done a grave damage not only to the party’s name and pedigree but also to the finer norms that undergird democracy and good governance. It should be seriously reconsidered. 

The N100m that APC is asking from its presidential aspirants is quite some hike over what the party charged for the same position in two previous election cycles. The new fee is 122.2% higher than the N45 million that the party asked for in 2018 and 270.3% higher than the N27 million price it sold the same form in 2014. Also, it is a major leap over the amount demanded by other high-charging parties for the same position: almost three times the N35 million charged by the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and two and a half times the N40 million demanded by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). 

To be sure, inflation has been soaring but it is a major lapse in mindfulness for the party that has superintended over a period of double-digit inflation to be imposing price hikes in multiples of official inflation figures. And while APC may want to use the high price to project its might, a more sensitive approach to differentiation would have been desirable. This format screams of pure hubris and tone deafness. 
Some people, including those not officially designated to do so, have rushed to defend the N100 million fee. Some of their arguments are valid, but most are not. I will quickly go over a few of the points that I have come across and some that I can think of. 

One, political parties need money to run effectively; and the bigger the parties, the bigger the money needed. Since we don’t have a culture of party members dutiful paying dues to fund their parties, sale of forms for elective offices becomes a golden opportunity to raise money for party operations and electoral campaigns. It is also a better way of funding parties than through patronage or mainly by godfathers. 

Two, it costs a lot of money to organise primaries, especially presidential ones. According to a recent story in Daily Trust, APC has 7,800 delegates. Organising indirect or consensus primaries for such a high number of delegates will definitely cost a tidy sum, and much more with direct primaries in the 36 states and FCT. This argument and the previous one seem reasonable but they do not justify asking for more than a leg and an arm just for the chance to compete to be the presidential flagbearer of the party. 

Three, setting a high fee can help the party to weed out unserious aspirants and can make the process of selecting the party’s candidate less clumsy. As the argument goes, a crowded field of aspirants has logistics and bandwidth implications. The high fee thus prevents every Tom, Dick and Harry from wasting the party’s time and resources. Though Section 84 (3) of the Electoral Act 2022 stipulates that political parties cannot impose additional conditions for qualifying or disqualifying aspirants outside the ones contained in the relevant sections of the 1999 Constitution, political parties are free to set fees for selling forms for various positions. Fees are thus not used for screening aspirants, but as a pruning mechanism. 

Four, and related to the above, it can be argued that the ability to raise N100 million provides a way of gauging if the aspirants can raise the huge amount needed to run a successful presidential campaign. Section 88 (2) of the Electoral Act 2022 sets the maximum a candidate can spend on a presidential campaign at N5 billion. If we use this limit as a default, it can be argued that those who cannot raise 2% of the amount needed for presidential campaign from their savings and their friends and associates probably have no business competing in that category. 
The fifth argument is that there are positions with significantly much lower price tags and there are concessions already for the historically disadvantaged groups like women, youths and people living with disabilities. For example, the form for state Houses of Assembly is N2m, and discounts still apply to the relevant groups. And six, APC is not the only party that aspirants can run on. In truth, there are 17 other political parties, including those charging aspirants no fees at all.  

There may be some other arguments. Most likely they will fall somewhere between the reasonable and the ridiculous. Apart from the fact that they are contestable, the valid arguments on this outrageous fee are vitiated by what APC and some of its chieftains should represent on one hand and the additional harm being inflicted on a political culture already damaged by a predatory, patronage and prebendal proclivity on the other. 

It is worth restating that APC has the word Progressives in the middle of its name and that it came to office in 2015 as the party of “Change”. There is nothing progressive about a party asking aspirants to pay N100 million just to contest to be its candidate. And if there is anything counter-change, this status-quo entrenching move is. Rather than diligently pursue a different way of politicking, the party has chosen to solidify and elevate politics as usual. Lacking both in self-awareness and in a sense of its history, the party has undermined its own true believers who kept insisting that progressive and change meant more than mere vote-catching buzzwords. 

In any currency and even with Naira’s battered state, N100 million is a hefty amount. It is clearly beyond what many, including the fabulously wealthy, can easily stake just to have a chance of competing to fly the flag of a party and,  ultimately, to serve their country. APC has thus effectively shut out many from the basic democratic right to just aspire. It is a sad restatement of the pervasive tendency to denominate everything in money. Following Davido, the musician, APC is contemptuously telling its less endowed and less connected members that:  “if no get money, hide your face.”

Even when it is clear that the equality promise of democracy is undercut by unequal material endowments, a party sworn to progressive ideals should always strive to reduce barriers and disparities, not to promote and glorify them. Telling people to run for positions that suit their material status or to go to parties for their like is a really unfortunately cocky thing to say in a party that flaunts a progressive identity, even if only in name. 
Yes, the party needs to raise money and needs to have a manageable number of aspirants. But if a ruling party waits till the primaries before trying to raise money, it betrays a resource mobilisation deficit. As inconveniencing and costly as it may be, giving as many people as possible an equal opportunity to aspire is much better than erecting sky-high barrier to entry. The party should feel flattered that many still find it a viable platform and it should trust the delegates to be sensible enough to do the weeding. 

A truly progressive party would not use money as the first gauge of seriousness of aspirants. In fact, the party should actively be recruiting and grooming and incentivising credible, competent, honest and innovative people to fly its flag at different levels. Of course, having money or being able to raise money is not necessarily at odds with these attributes but APC seems to have prioritised money ahead of all else, irrespective of the provenance of such money, which in itself is another unfortunate development. 

A big party can afford to stand on ideals and should be leveraging its spread to raise resources to support its eventual candidate. It should be more concerned about the marketability of its candidates across the board than the depth of their pockets or goodwill. It should be focussing more on the capacity of its candidates to deliver good governance and use that to cement its place among the voters and to further project its ideals. 
I chose to focus on APC not because the other leading parties are markedly different but because I believe that a ruling party can afford to take some positive risks and should be setting the tone for the others.  

With this outrageous fee, APC has however set the wrong tone. It has, wittingly or unwittingly, deepened the entrenched belief that public offices are prebends, sought at great expense for the benefit of office holders and those proximate to them. Asking aspirants to pay N100 million just to compete to be its candidate for a position where the eventual office holder will earn N14.06 million per annum in cash commodifies the most exalted office in the land, raises the cost of running for offices, and eliminates any pretence to transparency, accountability and good governance. It hurts more than the party involved. It is retrogressive and reprehensible, and should be reversed.