Delegates of the African Democratic Congress filed into Abuja's Rainbow Event Centre on Tuesday for a national convention that started with no Independent National Electoral Commission staff in sight. Party chiefs mounted the rostrum to begin proceedings while the venue itself remained half-prepared, leaving delegates standing in sections still being taped off by contractors. An Arise News reporter on the floor said chairs were still arriving at 11:30 a.m., three hours after the programme was due to open. Party officials insisted the exercise would go ahead, but could not explain when INEC monitors would appear or whether accreditation papers had been submitted. The ADC, the country's third-largest opposition party, had billed the gathering as the final step before next year's general election.
A party that hopes to challenge the big two cannot even stage a convention that meets the basic legal requirement of INEC presence. The ADC's top brass arrived to find a building site instead of a parliament, yet no one postponed the event or offered an apology to the delegates who travelled across the country.
This sloppiness is not accidental. Smaller parties have learnt that the commission rarely cancels conventions for procedural flaws, so compliance is treated as optional. Over the years INEC has registered dozens of parties, watched them hold rickety congresses, and still placed their logos on the ballot; the agency's stretched staff simply move to the next item on an overcrowded calendar.
For the ordinary delegate who spent night-bus fares and hotel money, the message is brutal: your voice inside the hall counts for little because the outcome will be ratified anyway. If the ADC fields candidates next year, they will do so under a list of officers produced in a half-empty hall with no independent witness.
The wider pattern is the steady devaluation of internal party democracy. When conventions become stage-managed pageants without referees, nomination tickets go to the highest bidder, and politics drifts further from the voters the constitution claims to serve.
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