Cedar Seeds Foundation on Tuesday 10th September, 2019 organized a media chat with political parties titled Inclusive Governance in Nigeria of Political Parties. This project by Cedar Seeds ably sponsored by Mac Arthur Foundation is geared towards encouraging political participation of persons with disabilities in Nigeria. The project intends to engage the stakeholders in the view raising awareness on the need to create an enabling environment for the persons with disabilities to compete favourably with other persons in the political space.
The Founder of Cedar Seeds Foundation Lois Auta in her remarks pointed areas where political parties need to improve in order to ensure inclusion of persons with disabilities in politics. She urged the political parties to solve the problem of physical access to party secretariats, address the issue of high nomination fees because most people with disabilities can hardly afford daily expenses to let alone buying exorbitant party nomination fees, create disability desk officers, involve the persons with disabilities in the formation of their executives, introduce more friendly ways of communication to enable persons with disabilities access information coming from their parties because lack of information affect the participation of persons with disabilities in politics, include the interest of PWDs in their manifestoes, create deliberate plan to nominate and sponsor PWDs in their parties.
She lamented that not much has been done by the political parties to encourage the participation of PWDs in the affairs of their parties. Most of the party’s secretariats are not accessible, few political parties mentioned PWDs in their manifesto and the procedure for nomination totally excluded PWDs. She reminded that the rights to vote and be voted for is enshrined in our constitution and every Nigerian up to the age of 18 posses these rights and should not be denied.
The IPAC chairman Chief Peter Ameh speaking on behalf of the political parties acknowledged that democracy will not be say to be democracy when you did not involve the participation of all the people. He assured that the political parties would do more to encourage the participation of PWDs in Politics and that should start from engaging all the political parties to create a disability desk office because you can deal with people better when you understand them better and having a desk officer will provide that opportunity for political parties to properly include PWDs in all their activities. He promised that IPAC will continue to engage with Cedar Seeds Foundation to ensure that this is done and their door is always open for more collaborations to ensure full participation of PWDs in political process in Nigeria.
The event witnessed the participation of chairmen and representatives of five political parties, IPAC chairman and some of his executives, members of the media and Persons with disabilities.
The event was interactive, people with disabilities and members of media seek clarifications from the Panelists which is the IPAC chairman and representatives of the political parties through questions. They all made commitments to include persons with disabilities in their party activities.
At the end, IPAC Chairman, Chief Peter Ameh proclaimed that IPAC under his leadership will be engaging the services of sign language interpreters in all their events to carry along all PWDs.
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