Abuse of state administrative resources and money Recent trends in the polity relating to the (mis)management of state administrative resources demand the urgent attention of the authorities if Nigeria is to record free, fair and credible elections in February 2015. By way of definition, SARs are public resources placed at the disposal of public officers for the day to day administration and running of government. They are entrusted to the occupants of positions of authority for the public good. They include media, legislative, regulatory, coercive and institutional resources. The (mis)application and misuse of these resources could have far-reaching effects on the outcome of the polls and may lead candidates and parties to believe that they have been unduly shortchanged by the system. It is therefore in the overall national interest that these resources be deployed in a non-discriminatory manner across the board to all candidates and political parties. There is a recent report that the Nigeria Communications Commission has shut down the Short Messaging Service Platform 35350, unveiled by the Buhari/Osibanjo All Progressives Congress team to raise funds for their campaign activities. The NCC was reported to have directed telecoms operators not to carry political messages and advised all service providers to avoid running political advertisements that will portray them as being partisan. The NCC also threatened to sanction any service provider that flouts this directive. The directive of the NCC raises a specific poser; if newspapers, radio and television houses are allowed to carry partisan advertisements, what is so special about using SMS messages to raise money? Is the use of the SMS platform an advertisement on its own? Considering that you must first of all desire to donate money to the campaign and what the platform offers is an easy means of doing so, instead of going to the banks or other non SMS platforms, this does not qualify as advertisement. An advertisement implies some form of solicitation, persuasion and convincing of the public to act or refrain from doing certain things. It will be recalled that way back in 2010, the same NCC approved the use of social media platforms and issued regulatory guidelines for the use of Short Coded Numbers for political campaigns in Nigeria, as part of its support for innovation and development in products and services in the telecommunications industry. What has changed between 2010 and now? Governor Babatunde Fashola who chairs the APC fundraising team accused the NCC of double standards, saying that the commission had in a letter dated October 21, 2010, with reference no: NCC/TSMI /short Code/ Vol.9/044/ 2010 granted approval to the Goodluck/Sambo presidential campaign to use the same platform. If Fashola’s position is true, then this amounts to discrimination against the APC campaign team which is outlawed by Section 42 of the constitution. Furthermore, it amounts to the abuse of state regulatory resources and should be reversed in the spirit of fair play. However, the SMS platform must be configured in such a way that it meets the demands of the Independent National Electoral Commission’s Guidelines and Regulations for Political Parties, 2013. In Section 13, the Guidelines state that every candidate shall maintain a record of all contributions as well as any other sources of funds and the records shall include the names, addresses, occupation of the donors and the amount donated. Another major challenge is the crisis building up in relation to the application of the Peoples Democratic Party to use the Adokie Amasiemeka Stadium in Port Harcourt, Rivers State. The APC-led Rivers State Government had turned down the application stating that the stadium was undergoing repairs and the rally would cause unnecessary disruption to the ongoing repairs. However, the APC had used the stadium twice for its campaigns in recent times. In response, the Federal Government has deployed soldiers to barricade the stadium ahead of the rally date. Two wrongs are involved here. The state government has no right to prevent the PDP from using the stadium for its event. The state government can only ask for the appropriate user fees which should not be more than what the organisers of the APC rallies paid for use of the venue. On the other hand, the PDP-led Federal Government cannot by the sheer force of arms take over and forcefully use a stadium that does not belong to it. The parties need to sheathe their swords and come to a reasonable middle ground.
Posted on: Mon, 26 Jan 2015 06:44:32 +0000
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