Falana, Aturu differ on INEC’s law against defection

Mr. Femi Falana

Two  prominent lawyers have expressed divergent views on a recent proposal by the Independent National Electoral Commission which seeks a law against frivolous defection by politicians.

INEC’s National Commissioner in charge of Election Party Monitoring, Hajiya Amina Zakari, had made the comment on Tuesday at the opening of the National Stakeholders’ Forum on Electoral Reforms in Abuja.

She said the law would also empower INEC to enforce internal democracy in the nomination and substitution of candidates for election by political parties.

Reacting to INEC’s position, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Mr. Femi Falana, told Saturday PUNCH that INEC’s intention was in order.

He said that when politicians moved from the platform of the party on which they were voted to another, they shortchanged the electorate who had voted them on the basis of the party’s ideologies, manifesto and programmes.

He said, “What INEC is saying is in order; it is simply saying that things should return to status quo ante. Before the case between Atiku Abubakar versus the Attorney General of the Federation, it was illegal in Nigeria to cross from one party to another. Then such a person was bound to lose his mandate so that he could contest on the platform of a new party. That was the law.

“Unfortunately, it was the Atiku Abubakar  case that allowed for political prostitution.”

Falana said that INEC registers parties based on ideologies and it is empowered by the electoral Act to promote civil education and to register voters on a continuous and not periodic basis.

He therefore tasked INEC to go beyond changing a law to also educating the electorate to empower them to reject political prostitutes.

However, in a sharp contrast to the view expressed by Falana on the appropriateness of a strict law on defection, a lawyer, Mr. Bamidele Aturu, told Saturday PUNCH that any law from INEC to check defection would be unconstitutional.

He said that though the politicians’ actions were worrisome, the constitution made it their right to belong to any group they wanted.

He said, “Political parties are not secret cults so you cannot make a law that tries to make people belong permanently to a political party. Any law like that should be condemned.

“That doesn’t mean that I support the prostitution that we see everyday among politicians. It is worrisome in the political sense but not in the legal sense. It only shows that they don’t have ideologies, they are just looking for a platform. When they see that the Peoples Democratic Party is no longer moving fast or that the tyre is punctured, they look for another vehicle with brand new tyres. These movements show that they don’t believe in democracy neither do they have ideologies, all the parties are the same. They have no developmental agenda.