Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) will on Thursday give its verdict on the request by leading opposition parties to coalesce and be registered as the All Progressives Congress (APC).
The Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP) had teamed up to form the coalition on whose platform they would challenge the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the 2015 elections.
The parties had on June 12 submitted an interim application to INEC for the registration of APC which was accompanied by a list of nine interim executive members of the party contrary to the guidelines that all the 35 executive positions must be filled.
Following the commission’s insistence that the application should be accompanied by the full list of the leadership of the budding political party, the opposition parties, having resolved the crisis over the constitution of an interim executive council for the APC, redressed the situation by submitting another application on July 1, which was accompanied by the list of the 35 executive members, headed by ACN National Chairman, Chief Bisi Akande.
Going by the Electoral Act 2010, as amended, a group seeking registration as a political party is assumed to have been registered if after 30 days of the submission of the application, there was no response from INEC objecting to its registration.
But in the last few weeks, the opposition parties have expressed concern about alleged moves to frustrate the registration of APC.
APC officials last week had argued that if INEC did not make a pronouncement on the group’s application for registration by today, it would have been deemed to have been registered in line with the provision of the Electoral Act.
A source told THISDAY Monday that although the merging political parties have met all the guidelines to enable APC become a registered party, the controversy over its abbreviation, which has pitted the opposition coalition against the African Peoples Congress (APC), which shares the same APC abbreviation with it, has put the commission in a dilemma on how to resolve it.
The rival APC, having been denied registration by INEC, has gone to court to challenge the commission’s decision.
Besides, it is seeking a court injunction restraining INEC from registering any party with the APC abbreviation pending the determination of the suit.
But an INEC National Commissioner told THISDAY Monday that in a bid to resolve the controversy over the APC abbreviation, the commission was consulting legal experts to know whether any party could lay sole proprietary claim to it.
He said the commission wanted to determine whether either of the contending group to the APC identity has a copyright to the name.
According to the top INEC official, “This is the question the commission wants to unravel. We want to know whether the APC is a copyright to any of the group. We are seeking legal opinion on this and the position of the commission would be made known soon.”
It was further gathered that the commission will come out with its decision whether to register the APC as a political party by Thursday.
But another source said what the Electoral Act frowned on in registering a political party was similarity of names and not abbreviations.
It was however learnt that if the commission keeps silent on the status of APC until Thursday, when the source said INEC would write to convey its decision of the merger bid to the promoters, it might have created a lacuna that the opposition parties could employ to justify APC registration.
According to a party source, technically, APC could be considered to have been registered by tomorrow in line with the 30-day provision in the Electoral Act, if INEC did not convey its decision to the opposition parties by today.
“It is on record that the three parties, Action Congress of Nigeria, Congress for Progressive Change and All Nigeria People’s Party, made initial case for a merger on June12 and by July 12, the merger have been concretised through resolutions at the party conventions.
“The date of our final submission of registration materials for APC was July 1st and going by that, the 30 days will expire on July 31,” a top official of the party had said.
Although the official said the issue of a 30-day deadline had not been raised at any of their discussions with INEC, he alluded to the possibility that the coalition may rely on the deadline if the commission decides to prolong the matter.
“What they (INEC) are saying is that there is a matter in court which we did not agree to. The issue of date will not be in contention until Tuesday (today) when we would have claimed automatic registration as a political party,” he added.
Also opposing the alleged moves to deny APC registration based on clash of abbreviation, a member of the CPC merger committee, Mr. Osita Okechukwu, had said there was no way INEC could depend on the posturing of another group to refuse to register the new platform being championed by the three major parties.
He said the only way for the commission was to grant the application of the merger group since there were no restraining orders by the court.
“INEC cannot depend on phony characters to deny us registration and they do not have any basis since there are no subsisting court orders restraining INEC. The spirits of the constitution is that phony characters and mischief makers should not be taken seriously and registered as a political party. They should register us and then allow us to meet them in court,” he said.
However, the source said as much as possible, the opposition parties were avoiding confronting INEC on the issue, unless it is inevitable. Only at the weekend, the ACN and ANPP had urged INEC to be fair and unbiased in handling the registration of APC.
They had said since the promoters of APC had met all the requirements to consummate their merger, INEC had no reason not to approve their bid.
Source: Thisday
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