A civil rights body, Human Rights Writers Association of Nigeria (HURIWA), has urged President Muhammadu Buhari and the leadership of the National Assembly to wade in by enforcing the constitutional provision against illegal cross-carpeting by elected political office holders to safeguard multi-party democracy from imminent collapse.
HURIWA said it was imperative for all relevant law enforcement authorities to take measures to ensure that all elected political office holders in the National and State Assemblies who have violated Section 68(1) (g) of the Constitution by illegally changing political parties to be expelled from the legislative houses to uphold the purity of the Nigerian law.
Section 68 (1) (g) states as follows: “A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his/her seat in the House of which he/she is a member, if being a person whose election to the House was sponsored by a political party, he/she becomes a member of another party before the expiration of the period for which that House was elected: provided that his/her membership of the latter political party is not as a result of a division in the political party of which he was previously a member or of a merger of two or more political parties or factions by one of which he was previously sponsored.”
In a statement by its National Coordinator, Comrade Emmanuel Onwubiko, and National Media Affairs Director, Miss Zainab Yusuf, HURIWA said there are no verifiable and/or justifiable reasons for the rampant cross-carpeting of elected legislators from the opposition People’s Democratic Party to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) since a subsisting Court of Appeal ruling recognized erstwhile Kaduna State governor, Senator Ahmed Makarfi as the authentic national chairman of PDP.
HURIWA alleged that some elements in the national hierarchy of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) are manipulating some law enforcement agencies such as the Nigeria Police, Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), the Department of State Services and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to deliberately depopulate the membership of the opposition People’s Democratic Party by blackmailing its legislators to move to APC.
Citing the recent illegal decamping of PDP Senator, Andy Uba from Anambra and Joshua Dariye from Plateau State, and another Senator of the PDP from Ondo State into APC as clear breaches of the Constitution, the group said these moves were a grave threat to multi-party democracy.
HURIWA condemned the silence and failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission to retrieve their certificates of return which they originally gained through the sponsorship of the People’s Democratic Party.
It called on the National Judicial Council (NJC) to sanction Justice Okon Abang of the Federal High Court for wilfully issuing illegal injunctions to suspected sponsored troublemakers who infiltrated the main opposition People’s Democratic Party from the APC to scuttle the viability of the party.
Besides, HURIWA also condemned as undemocratic and ominous, the leaders of APC for mounting pressure on the PDP Senator from Enugu State, Ike Ekwerenmadu, to either move over to APC or be dethroned from his position as the deputy Senate president.
The rights group regretted that it has become imperative amongst the political class that the best way to escape the persecution of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is to move over from PDP to APC.
“We are worried that the director general of Department of State Services (DSS) who is from the same locality with Mr. President and who was a campaign team member of the then Buhari Presidential Campaign Organisation, had on several occasions directed and authorized the invasion of homes of top members of PDP, including the home of the Akwa Ibom State governor.
“The Inspector General of Police whose shocking elevation from a mere junior AIG of Police to the position of IGP and displaced many senior officers, has deliberately converted the Nigerian Police to the armed wing of the ruling APC just as the unconstitutional roles of the police in the recently held rerun legislative elections in Rivers State are unambiguous evidences of the partisanship of the Inspector General of Police in favour of APC.”
HURIWA, therefore, asked the National Assembly to do the needful to save Nigeria from totally sliding into a one—party dictatorship.
since allowing that to happen could spell doom for the extant democratic Republic of Nigeria.