By Emmanuel Suji, Abuja.
Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, on Sunday blamed the governors of the Peoples Democratic Party(PDP) for President Goodluck Jonathan’s defeat during the Presidential election.
Ndoma-Egba, told newsmen that the road to PDP defeats on the March 28 and April 11 actually started from the December 2014 primaries when the governors deliberately shut out ‘unwanted candidates’ and imposed their own, on the party.
“The resultant effect, was exodus from the PDP without any corresponding influx,” he argued.
The leader of the senate, had on Friday, delivered a paper titled, “Majority and minority parties in the Legislature: Party defection (cross carpeting in the legislature)” at the induction course for legislators-elect of the 8th National Assembly in Abuja.
He said that aggrieved PDP members defected to the opposition parties because their former party squeezed them out.
According to him, “In the case of the PDP recently, politicians left because they felt that they did not fit within the governors’ calculations.”
He said, “In my view, since every politics is local, each case should be treated on its merit.Unbridled defection has the capacity of not only overheating the polity and upsetting the entire political configuration but destabilizing the polity.
“While the law has clearly settled the circumstances under which a person elected on the platform of a political party can switch parties, nothing restricts those who are not in the legislature from switching parties.
“The phenomenon will endure for as long as ownership of political parties is not with its members but with, as in the case of the PDP, the governors.
“Governors (especially of the PDP) have become so over bearing that it is only their wishes that rule. The party (at the national level) suborns its constitution, guidelines and even court orders to please the whims and fancies of governors who appropriate the will of members and impose theirs in its stead.
Ndoma-Egba advised that the best antidote against the PDP defeat in 2019 was to stem further defections by ensuring “internal party democracy” as a party can only give the nation what it has.
He added,”A party that does not have internal Party democracy can only falsely promise the nation democracy.”
