PDP Closes Gap

The All Progressives Congress (APC) yesterday lost its short-lived majority in the House of Representatives, in a reversal of fortune caused by the defection of one of its members to the ruling People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Rep Joseph Haruna Kigbu from Nasarawa State yesterday announced dumping the APC, a week after two of his colleagues from Adamawa took the same action.

When 37 lawmakers left the PDP on December 18, APC emerged as the new majority party with 174 to PDP’s 171 members in the House.

But the numbers kept changing since the resumption of the House from recess last week Tuesday.

That day, four defections happened that pushed the PDP up one notch to having 172 members, while APC remained where it was following a reduction of two and addition of two lawmakers in its fold.

The two APC members who cross carpeted to the PDP last week were Mr. Titsi Ganama and Mr. Haske Hananiya from Adamawa State. On the same day, Benue PDP lawmaker Emmanuel Jime and Democratic People’s Party (DPP) member Yahaya Kwande from Plateau moved to the APC. This left APC slightly ahead with 174 to PDP’s 172 members—until yesterday when Kigbu’s defection tilted the scale to the middle.

Media reports that Rep Opeyemi Bamidele’s announcement of defection to the Labour Party (LP) on Wednesday did not affect the APC-PDP calculations, because the Ekiti lawmaker was never counted in the original 174 numbers that the APC had.

During yesterday’s session, Speaker Aminu Waziri Tambuwal read a letter from Rep Kigbu in which he announced his defection to the PDP, a decision he said he took after wide consultations with his constituents.

Kigbu said his resolve to leave the APC was due to the merger of his former party, the Congress for Progressives Change (CPC), something he said he was not comfortable with.With yesterday’s development, each of APC and PDP has 173 lawmakers in the House.

The remaining 14 seats are occupied by the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), Accord Party, LP and DPP.

Most of the lawmakers in the four smaller parties tend to tilt towards the PDP when major decisions are taken. On Monday, a number of them appeared together with House Leader Mulikat Akande-Adeola in a new group called Unity Group, where they vowed to fight APC lawmakers if they moved to block the 2014 budget as directed by the APC national leadership.

Yesterday’s reversal of fortunes for the main opposition party will also call to question the attempt by the APC lawmakers to take over the majority leadership of the House.

Defecting senators down to 15

Meanwhile, the number of senators planning to defect to the APC has dwindled from 22 to 15, 

Late last year, 22 PDP senators were mentioned among likely defectors to the main opposition party.

One of them, Senator Bukola Saraki from Kwara, said at the weekend that the defectors would announce their movement in the Senate this week.

But this did not happen yesterday, and instead, a lawmaker told Daily Trust that only 15 have so far signed a joint defection letter being prepared for submission to the Senate and “their numbers keep dwindling every day.”

Our correspondent reports that the Senate leadership might have perfected plans to declare defecting senators’ seats vacant, and this might have sent the jitters down their spine.

The Senate yesterday announced that senators who intend to defect must do so individually, and not collectively as was done by the 37 House members who cross carpeted in December.

Senate spokesman Eyinnaya Abaribe (PDP, Abia) told journalists in Abuja that the constitution has stipulated the process by which a senator can defect and that process cannot be circumvented.

He said senators were individually elected by their constituents under a given platform and as such they cannot defect collectively.

“The process of defection is well stated in the constitution and cannot be misunderstood,” he said.

“Senators cannot write a joint letter of defection to the Senate President. They have to do it individually and until we see that letter we assume that nobody is going anywhere.”