APC, PDP’s Campaign Spending Limit Has Been Exceeded – NNPC

The All Progressives Congress and the Peoples Democratic Party are among the parties that are yet to submit their audit reports from the last general election, NNPC has said.

The corporation recently had its say via a press statement, and Nigerians have been reacting.

According to him, the two major parties also ran afoul of campaign expenditures as they both exceeded the N1bn ceiling set by the Electoral Act which is currently being investigated for more clarity.

NNPC added that it has prepared forms that would make the process easier to track expenditures, while training auditors from the registered political parties.

It read, “In the 2019 general election, we tracked election expenses and we have a report of that. In 2023, we will go through this process.”

“The commission tracks expenditure for general elections. In the last report we did, we had some figures from the presidential election of the two major parties. We remember that then, the maximum limit was N1bn and what we had based on our tracking across the country was N4.6bn and N3.3bn. What we tracked were about four items namely billboards, print media advertisements, electronic media advertisements and coverage/programmes.”

“In the 2019 election based on requirements for auditing reporting, 91 political parties participated and about 34 submitted reports of expenditure.”

“But even among the 34, there were issues of compliance with the reports. Out of the 34, only nine fully complied with submitting a report with an affidavit. The commission is already auditing the accounts of political parties over the last five years; 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021.”

“In the list of the 34 political parties that submitted audit reports for the 2019 election, the major parties were not among.”