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By hardball (PIX) A federal high court in Abuja lately highlighted an aspect of Nigerian law that people most concerned would prefer abides in permanent abeyance. The court sacked Abubakar Gummi, representing Gummi/Bukkuyum federal constituency of Zamfara State in the House of Representatives, for defecting from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to the All Progressives Congress (APC). Cross-party defections by political actors is the in-thing currently in Nigerian pollical culture. But Justice Obiora Egwuatu, late last week, held that Gummi’s defection was unconstitutional since there was no division in the PDP at the time he left the party in 2024. The judge restrained House Speaker Tajudeen Abbas from further recognising the Zamfara lawmaker as a member of the green chamber. Among other things, he also ordered the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to conduct fresh election to fill the vacant seat within 30 days. In a suit filed through their lawyer, Ibrahim Bawa, SAN, the PDP and its Zamfara chairman, Jamilu Jibomagayaki, had asked the court to determine whether Gummi’s defection from the PDP – that sponsored his election – to the APC was lawful, and whether the House speaker’s failure to declare his seat vacant violated Section 68(1)(g) of the 1999 Constitution (as amended). The referenced section states: “(1) A member of the Senate or of the House of Representatives shall vacate his seat in the house of which he is a member if – (g) being a person whose election to the house was sponsored by a political party, he becomes a member of another political party before the expiration of the period for which that house was elected; provided that his 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.” Read Also: FEC approves $396m loans for northern IDPs, Sokoto health project Gummi, in his defence, argued that his defection was warranted by “lingering unresolved internal and external crises” within the PDP at both national and constituency levels. He said the situation made it impossible for him to effectively represent his constituents and ensure equitable distribution of democracy dividends. Justice Egwuatu, however, dismissed Gummi’s defence and criticised the growing trend of political defections, describing it as a betrayal of the electorate’s mandate. “In a situation where the electorate have made their choices between different political parties and their candidates based on the manifestos and marketability of such a political party, it is legally and morally wrong for a politician to abandon the party under whose platform he or she was elected into office and move to a rival party without relinquishing the mandate of his or her former party. If a person must decamp, don’t decamp with the mandate of the electorate. Don’t transfer the votes garnered on the platform of one party to another party,” he ruled inter alia. As His Lordship pleases…
