It’s remarkable to realise that the country has so many parties when most of them appear to be unnecessary. On Thursday, December 14, 2017, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) approved the registration of 21 new political parties.This brings the total number of parties in the country to 67, with INEC also disclosing that 80 new groups are seeking the commission’s approval to be registered as political parties ahead of the 2019 general elections.Earlier in November, a record number of 37 political parties had contested the Anambra gubernatorial election.To illustrate how wholesomely useless a good portion of those parties turned out to be, 20 of the contestants got less than 100 (yes, one hundred) votes out of a total of 422,314 valid votes.A further seven parties got less than 500 votes, while only four candidates got more than 3000 people to vote for them. How effective are Nigerian parties?During a quarterly consultative meeting with national leaders of political parties in October, INEC chairman, Prof.
