Defection of govs to APC embarrassing, democracy threatened – Forum

The President of women in politics forum, Ebere Ifendu, has described as very embarrassing the gale of defections of Nigerian governors into the ruling All Progressives Congress, APC.

Speaking during an interview on Arise Television monitored by DAILY POST on Thursday, Ifendu raised the alarm that Nigeria’s democracy is under threat.

She was reacting to the gale of defections by some state governors from their own political parties into the APC.

DAILY POST reports that the governors of Enugu, Bayelsa, Delta, Rivers and Akwa-Ibom states have all defected to the ruling party.

Reacting, Ifendu said, “It’s an embarrassing situation if I must be honest with you. In politics, we expect that political parties have different ideologies. It’s either you’re a socialist political party like you find in the Labour Party or you are a conservative political party. There must be an ideology.

“And so when you see these people move from one party to the other, you begin to wonder, is it that political parties in Nigeria are not built with ideology? Because when we vote for a political party, we vote based on those things that we believe that the political party is presenting before us.

“And I think that democracy in Nigeria is threatened because people no longer believe in the people they have voted for.

“Let me also say here that a candidate of a political party is carrying the mandate of the party, and not the person’s personal mandate, and so you get elected based on what your party presented, and then you just dump that party to go to another political party. Are we turning to a one party state in Nigeria?

“If there is no opposition, then there is no democracy. So I think it’s very wrong seeing what is happening in Nigeria today.”