Nigeria enters 2023 without reliable options from major parties, says Nwoko

The executive is doing everything possible to completely stifle, weaken the judicial system

Uwemedimo Nwoko, Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Life Advisor, Activist and Former Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice in Akwa Ibom State, in this interview with AYOYINKA JEGEDE, reflects on the elections of 2023 and the state of the nation democracy.

Monetary policy and vote buying have become the deciders of election winners. What are your fears for 2023? Here is the problem. We need to get it right in the primaries. If political parties cannot clearly tune internal democracy to allow credible candidates to emerge, then we enter the 2023 elections from a defeated perspective. Nigerians are running in the 2023 elections without credible options to vote for because the process that produced the political party candidates is totally skewed in favor of monetary policy.

The votes of the delegates have been bought. Can we really say that Bola Tinubu would have been a good choice among the aspirants of the All Progressives Congress (APC) who presented themselves in the primary of the presidential election?

Would you also say that Atiku Abubakar was the best PDP option for the electorate at the PDP convention? Of course not! If it was on merit, the two wouldn't have won the tickets to their parties, but here we are. These are now the options that Nigerians would face. What do you expect from Nigerians? The law says they have to choose someone and on election day the electorate will have to choose from what is available.

There is no way to get it right before the 2023 election. Nigeria is not mature enough for someone to run now as an independent candidate, no matter how credible or fundamental that person is . I don't see him having a chance in Nigeria because the electorate is still crudely led by the nose. They do not have fundamental principles or standards of their own.

The Nigerian electorate is a wheelbarrow that is pushed from left to right and cannot make decisions on their own. An electorate bought off and controlled by power blocs, an electorate that does not think of itself and does not care about the future of Nigeria, then they will all be swept away in the ocean of corruption, votes will be bought, decisions will be compromised.

What are the qualities of your ideal elected leader? We know what kind of leaders we should be voting for, but we don't. When we do, they don't have the platform to stand on. We know what kind of leaders we should be voting for, but they don't have a voice because the system doesn't allow them to. The system is already skewed against them.

We are looking for people who will think about Nigeria today and tomorrow not people who will think how to get back the billions they spent to get their tickets. We are looking for people of quality and level. We are looking for people of integrity who are in good physical, mental and psychological health. It's not hard to know who we're looking for; it's just that they don't have the platform to come out for us to see them.

We are already enmeshed in the problem of vote buying. This is what we face today. Vote buying is pervasive in internal party structures and processes. In the internal party process, vote buying is there, there is no denying it.

How would you rate our democratic system? Are Nigerians better off after achieving stable democracy? We still operate a satanically guarded democratic system. Look at the conventions of all political parties, especially the two main ones - the PDP and the APC, you cannot say that the national conventions that produced their presidential candidates were democratic. They were not. None of these people who won the PDP and APC congresses did so on the basis of merit. They earned it with their purse and pocket. Nigerians will participate in the 2023 elections without even having the possibility of having a lesser evil between the two main contending parties. We are going into a situation where Nigerians will be trapped between the devil and the deep blue sea.

It's very sad, but we have to know, accept and understand the fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with our democracy.

Instead of our institutions becoming stronger, they are rather weakening. The only institution which I will say today that it manages to assert itself to some extent is the Independent National Electoral Commission (CENI). The INEC is improving little by little. Other than that, I don't think the other institutions are doing well. INEC is trying to create a system capable of producing credibility in the electoral process. The INEC tries and if the National Assembly helps enact laws and our lawyers wo...