In Niger, 41 candidates for the presidential election in December next year have been handed over to the Interior Ministry. This is the first time there are such a large number of potential candidates for the election on 27 December. In the last election, they were 16. President Issoufou hopes at the end of his term to achieve the first alternation in Niger: a civilian sending the torch to another.
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as reported from Niamey, Moussa Kaka
All the big names in Nigerian politics are among the forty applications submitted to the Ministry of Interior.
They include former president Mahamane Ousmane, Seyni Oumarou, Bazoum Mohamed, General Salou Djibo, Hama Amadou, Albadé Abouba and ducheikh Boureima Daouda, the imam of the Grand Mosque at the University of Niamey.
The second phase is the moral survey for all candidates. In Article 134 of the Electoral Code, we read: “No one is entitled to the presidency of the Republic unless he enjoys a good state of physical and mental health, as well as of good moral character. Certified by competent offices”.
After all these formalities, the administrative authority transfers the forty documents to the Constitutional Court. The country’s highest court then has two weeks to validate applications, ie no later than 1 December 2020.
The special thing about these elections is that almost three quarters of the candidates are young people, new faces arrive on the political scene according to a political scientist.
Each candidate pays a deposit of 25 million CFA francs, their participation in election costs.
At the Ceni level, approximately 7 million 400,000 voters are registered in the biometric electoral roll. The election campaign for the law and presidential election in the first round opens on 5 December and ends on 25 December 2020.
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