Political Parties And Internal Democracy

Fifteen years after the reinstatement of democracy and after years of military interregnum, it is obvious that the nation’s politics is democratic only in name. The political parties have, all these years, failed to internalise the principles of democracy in their choice of not only candidates for elective offices, but also for those of their party machinery. In the beginning, it was the issue of godfathers imposing candidates on the party they claimed to finance and own. Then it was a case of he who was paying the piper dictating the tune. Now it is consensus candidacy, a process whereby a cabal within the party meets and imposes candidates on the rest of the party, bypassing the democratic procedure of politicking, horse-trading involving give and take. The practice now is that they constrict the political space by insisting that a particular political position is not vacant. Or those interested in those offices, if they are vacant, must be anointed by the powers that be and their spouses. In some ridiculous cases, interested aspirants are denied access to nomination forms, as the party deliberately prints just one form for the preferred candidate, or fixes the cost of the form so high, that only the financially well-heeled can contemplate expressing their intention. In the end, the nation is denied the services of its best, just because they cannot play the game the dirty way by ingratiating some expired politicians who believe that the nation exists to serve their insatiable acquisitive propensity.
Worse, in our opinion, is that the party primaries that should showcase the beauty of the political system become shambolic and a disgraceful caricature of what elsewhere is a representation of what is noble and desirable. They turn out to be smokescreens, intended, ab initio, to ratify decisions previously agreed to by a set of political grandmasters. This, in our view, is a departure from international democratic best practices. Because of this lack of respect for internal democracy, the electorate is denied the opportunity of making desired choices. In the process, the much talked about deepening of the nation’s democracy becomes empty rhetoric.
But this should not be the case. What obtains elsewhere is that political parties define the guidelines for the emergence of candidates and allow them the freedom to play the game the best way they know, based on clearly set rules.
We decry this penchant by parties to set aside accepted norms and insist on imposing candidates not only on the party, but also on the electorate. It is also morally wrong to deny people who have laboured for the party opportunities to express their political aspirations, just because they don’t have the kind of money the godfathers demand, or lack the fabled connections. It is our view that the interest of democracy will definitely suffer if this trend persists.
source>Leadership Newspapers