[SENATE AND POLITICS OF DEFECTION] ------------------------------------------ Senate has never been held in the grip of a gale of defections, as it is presently. Hints of defection of some Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senators to the All Progressives Congress (APC) started last September 2013, after seven serving PDP governors stormed out of the special convention of the party a month earlier, formed the New PDP and quickly unveiled 79 members in the National Assembly. The grouse of the nPDP, as they were then known, was that the old PDP was hounding them in their respective state chapters while some had the control of those chapters crudely taken away from their grip, others were simply shunned and a parallel executive installed. That movement to Shehu Musa Yar’Adua Centre to announce the formation of a New PDP, with Alhaji Kawu Baraje as chairman and aggrieved former Osun State governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola as secretary respectively signalled the beginning of crisis in the PDP, which would later snowball in the affected states. Besides, as is the norm in Nigeria, any out-going governor would love to participate actively in choosing his successor; something which was never going to happen during the chairmanship of Alhaji Bamanga Tukur. The last straw that broke the camel’s back, according to some National Assembly sources, was the December meeting between Tukur’s NWC and the Senate PDP caucus; the first and last of its kind before he resigned from office last month. Sources told Daily Sun that the promise of automatic tickets to senators was the last straw for some governors who quickly banded together to put pressure on President Goodluck Jonathan that Tukur must go. The governors simply played safe as 15 PDP governors are reportedly eyeing the seats of their senators and the present occupants of the seats also anxious to return to the chamber. The trend for governors to come to the Senate after their tenures started in the Sixth Senate and the fever had since caught on. Anyway, the rumour of possible defection of large number of PDP members to the opposition was confirmed in November 2013 when 37 members of the House of Representatives moved to the newly-registered APC, an amalgamation of three major opposition parties in the country. Never in the history of the National Assembly from 1999 had there been a gale of movement from the ruling party to the opposition party. Thereafter, the focus shifted to the Senate. The nation waited with bated breath because right from the outset, although 22 senators were publicly released as belonging to the nPDP, some ‘members’ never really owned up when asked publicly. At informal meetings, some senators who were purportedly on the list gave myriad reasons how their names happened to be on the list. Some senators simply expressed surprise that they found their names on the list while some said it was the handiwork of their state governors as they never expressed any desire to leave the PDP. Again, some senators, along the way, grew weary of the in-fighting in the PDP and saw no need to move after Tukur exited the party. Moreover, as soon as the new chairman, Adamu Mu’azu came on board, he began peace move. Regardless, while the defection gale hit the chambers of the House of Representatives, it didn’t immediately happen in the Senate until December when reports filtered in that a former governor who had crossed over to APC would formally defect on the floor. His defection was supposed to signal the gale of defections in the chamber. It didn’t help that it was a full house on that day, with all the nPDP members present in the chamber turned out in resplendent national dresses.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Feb 2014 13:12:57 +0000
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