APOLOGY

Please bear with me. The past couple of weeks have been really tough for all sorts of personal and professional reasons. I didn’t write this column last week and can’t write anything this week.

So let me please leave you in the highly capable hands of my uncle, Jonas Odocha, who recently penned this thought-provoking piece:

If you happened to have heard this last night, as coming from a sitting governor, and you were neither shocked nor disappointed, then you must be part of why Nigeria is the way it is today.

Freedom of association is enshrined in the Nigerian Constitution but the issue of concern here borders on the propriety of such an executive order being extended to Nigerians, individually or collectively.

This trending culture of politicians defecting from Party A to Party B or Party C has become the order of the day, ignoring the conditionality embedded in the Nigerian Constitution, before such defection is declared legal.

Meanwhile, each recipient political party marks this defection with celebrations, as it favours them when the party’s numerical strength improves, putting aside the impact of this erosion of our Constitution on the stability of the political system and our democracy.

This governor is free to defect, provided that this defection follows the constitutional process; but he does not have the right to force his commissioners or members of his cabinet or state functionaries, to join him to defect under any such threat of termination or resignation. Period.

Nigerians must begin to appreciate the wider implications of this type of retrogressive order. Do we realise that this means that a performing commissioner or officer can be relieved of their jobs because they failed to switch political parties in order to follow the whims and caprices of the executive?

It also means that this new party affiliation takes precedence over the efficient and effective jobs these officers are carrying out, when they are forced to lose these jobs. These are all negative signals being sent to the electorate and the masses generally.

Nigerians must begin to understand that this trending mass defection and movement from Party A to Party B, being championed by sitting governors, must be deeper than what just meets the eye.

When it happened in Delta State, a few eyebrows were raised and a couple of insinuations followed. This is a clear manifestation that we are yet to understand what political representation means in this country. You have been elected on a particular platform by the people as their representative, yet when you are abandoning that platform these same people are neither consulted nor their approval sought and obtained.

This is also what goes on in the National Assembly, NASS, where the nebulous voice vote is constantly being used, even where it contravenes the Constitution, such that constituents would not know where their representatives stand on crucial matters which may even concern them.

In other climes you can very readily tell where a senator stands on any bill, because they openly express their views through vote counts. But not in Nigeria, where everything must be done

clandestinely, so that we can easily wriggle out when cornered. This is anomalous but we keep looking the other way.

Are we just being docile, timid, cowardly or basically ignorant of what we should do to align our politicians to the norms in other climes that are moving forward? Have we simply allowed ourselves to be compromised or we are under the influence of a mysterious spell?

Whichever way, Nigerians must wean themselves of this lethargy. It is not healthy for national development.

This dictatorial order from this governor is a manifestation of the buildup of impunity in a system or society. Governors are not emperors and we must not allow them to function as such in a democracy. The Delta State experience occurred and our body language showed that we felt unconcerned as “it was their

own business.”

Now a new format of a pronounced executive order for collective defection has followed. Who knows the form the next executive order from another state would take? But at the end of the day, whatever we have sowed is definitely what you and I are going to reap eventually.