by Deji Abiodun
The Senate Leader, Victor Ndoma-Egba, yesterday lambasted the Peoples Democratic Party governors over the fallout of the party in the recently-held presidential election.
Speaking with newsmen in Abuja, Ndoma-Egba noted that the road to the March 28/April 11 electoral misfortunes of the PDP, actually started from the December 2014 primaries when the governors deliberately shut out “unwanted candidates” and imposed their own on the party.
He said, “The resultant effect was the exodus from the PDP without any corresponding influx.”
The leader of the Senate had, on Friday, delivered a paper, “Majority and minority parties in the Legislature: party cross carpeting (defection in the legislature),” at the induction course for the legislators-elect of the 8th National Assembly in Abuja.
He said, “In the case of the PDP, some politicians left because they felt that they did not fit within the governors’ calculations.
“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 it can also destabilise 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 overbearing 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.
“This has bred sycophancy, impunity and arrogance, and eroded internal party democracy. Within the parties, especially the PDP, government is no longer of the people and of the people. It is now government of the governors, by the governors and for the governors.
“This has resulted in brazen injustice and restricted the political space for many. Consequently, after the last so-called primaries, there was a lot of traffic out of the PDP and no corresponding traffic into it.
“The party simply imploded under the weight of governors’ impunity and arrogance. The PDP carefully choreographed its downfall. It worked very hard at it and got the result it deserved.”
“A party that does not have internal party democracy can only falsely promise the nation democracy,” he said.
