The announcement of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on February 6, that it had deregistered 74 political parties received mixed reactions. While INEC was criticised and its power to deregister parties questioned, the Commission was lauded on the other hand for taking a measure that some Nigerians and groups have called for severally, as a way to enhance the electoral process. The fourth alteration to the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria empowers INEC to deregister political parties that fail to meet stipulated criteria as contained in section 255A. Section 78 (7a) of the Electoral Act also gives INEC the power to register political parties.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There were 91 registered political parties in\nNigeria during 2019 general elections, with 74 of these parties fielding\ncandidates for the Presidential election. The plethora of political parties\nposed a challenge to election management, as the size of ballot papers had to\nbe adjusted to accommodate all the parties who fielded candidates for the\nvarious elections, and voters educated on how to cast their votes to avoid the\nincidence of void votes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Reacting to the deregistration of political\nparties, the Inter-Party Advisory Council (IPAC) has asked INEC to rescind the\ndecision, as 33 political parties have instituted a legal action against the\nCommission. INEC Chief Press Secretary, Rotimi Oyekanmi in an interview with\njournalists underscored that the constitutional provision that empowered the\nCommission to deregister political parties did not prevent it from registering\nnew ones but stressed that any parties to be registered must meet the requirements\nof section 255A. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The announcement of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) on February 6, that it had deregistered 74 political parties received mixed reactions. While INEC was criticised and its power to deregister parties questioned, the Commission was lauded on the other hand for taking a measure that some Nigerians and groups have called for severally, as […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1321,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[35],"class_list":["post-1307","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-inecs-deregistration-of-political-parties-stirs-reactions"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1307"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1326,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1307\/revisions\/1326"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1321"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1307"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1307"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/placng.org\/Legist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1307"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}