CSOs, political parties partner to strengthen internal democracy

Chairman, Partner for Electoral Reform (PER), a Civil Society Organisation (CSO), Mr Ezenwa Nwagwu on Monday said that CSOs would enhance collaboration with political parties to strengthen internal democracy.

Nwagwu made this known in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja.

According to him, CSOs have observed that the internal workings of political parties have over time been left for political parties alone without external support and supervision.

This, he said had created gaps in the parties and weakened internal democracy, adding that CSOs and parties were presently meeting to develop and sustain a collaborative measure to strengthen parties and enhance transparency in their activities.

“We have been having such Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) since 2014 to observe the activities of political parties from their election processes, especially their primaries to their congresses.

“That MoU, however, have been lying in the shelves without implementation. So recently, a meeting was held to begin to put life into them to see how we can oversight their functions.

“This is even more crucial as we approach the 2019 elections, but more importantly is the need to also do some confidence building with the political parties, so as to allow them to feel confident enough to open their spaces to us.

“This is important because if we must understand the political parties and collaborate with them, then we need to build some bridges that will help us to work together.’’

Nwagwu said CSOs had been working with the management of the electoral body by putting a lot of search light on them, but not so much had been done with politicians and their parties.

“We have had incremental progress and reforms in INEC due to pressure and resilience in consistent advocacy around improving electoral issues.

“We think that we should also put that kind of effort to the issues around political parties’ organisation, administration, funding, campaign finance and internal party issues.

“We may be able to at least nudge them up a bit to begin to respect their own laws.’’ he said.

Mr Joseph Ndirang, the Chairmen FCT Inter Party Advisory Council (IPAC) assured that political parties were ready to work with CSOs to encourage internal democracy.

Ndirang said that political parties were also planning on using the whistle blowing policy to discredit irregularities in elections.

He said that the Federal Capital Territory had set up a committee to ensure that there was no foul play during the Continuous Voters Registration.

Ndirang said the committee was saddled with the responsibility of mobilising qualified people for the exercise and to ensure that no under-aged person was registered.

“No political party should go and mobilise under-aged people to come and register simply because they want to get votes,” he said.