The National Auditor of the All Progressives Congress (APC),
Chief George Moghalu, has called for more stringent laws against defection.
He said any defector should be made to forfeit the position
he was occupying in his former party.
Moghalu, who is also an APC governorship aspirant in the
forthcoming election in Anambra State, described indiscriminate defection by
politicians as the bane of democracy in the country.
Of recent, the APC had become the bride of hundreds of
defectors from the PDP and other parties, heightening fears that opposition
politics would soon be a thing of the past.
Delivering a paper entitled ‘Political Ideology and
Consistency in Party Politics: A Case Study of Contemporary Nigeria’ at the
Correspondents’ Chapel forum of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) in the
state, Moghalu said it was personal and lack of continuity in party politics in
Nigeria that caused defection.
He therefore suggested that a law should be made
whereby those who win elections under a certain platform would not be allowed
to defect unless there was clear, verifiable and unambiguous crisis in their
party.
He said: “Once it is impossible to continue promoting
personal interests in their original parties, politicians begin to move from
one party to another, abandoning ideologies once held with such quick
succession that can be compared to the frequency of the lightning that
accompanies a thunderstorm.
“The poverty of political ideology seen in the Nigerian
political sphere has shown such negative effects on both the political parties
and the nation at large.
“The project of national rebirth has been most hit
because rather than consolidating development, parties have been used to
promote sectionalism and opportunism,” he said.
By Emma Elekwa
