Twenty-three serving governors across 18 states have defected from the political parties they were elected to other parties since the return of democracy in 1999, investigations by 21st CENTURY CHRONICLE, have shown.
This figure didn’t include governors who defected after leaving office. Thirteen of these defecting governors are from the north, while the remaining 10 are from the southern part of the country.
This gale of defections happened within 10 political parties with some of them currently deregistered or fused to form new ones. The parties are Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), All Progressives Congress (APC), All Peoples Grand Alliance (APGA), All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP), Progressives Peoples Alliance (PPA), Democratic People’s Party (DPP), Alliance for Democracy (AD), Action Congress (AC), Labour Party (LP) and Zenith Labour Party (ZLP).
The highest number of serving governors who abandoned their political parties was recorded in the last six years after President Muhammadu Buhari came to power.
Electorates are always outraged whenever a governor they elected on a particular party platform defects to another. However, defection remains a moral issue rather than legal, because a governor can’t be removed from office for simply abandoning his party.
The four ways through which a serving governor can be removed from office as provided for in the 1999 Constitution (as amended) are death, resignation, incapacitation and impeachment. Cross carpeting is not one of them.
The defection of Zamfara State Governor Muhammed Bello Matawalle on Tuesday spiked the number of incumbent governors that defected to 10 since 2015.
Findings revealed that five governors had decamped between 1999 and 2007, while seven defections were recorded from 2007 to 2015.
The highest number of defection was recorded in the Northwest zone, where eight governors abandoned their parties while in office in Sokoto, Zamfara, Kano, Kebbi and Jigawa states in the last 22 years reviewed by this newspaper.
The Northwest is closely followed by the Southeast, where five governors from Abia, Imo, and Ebonyi defected while in office.
Also, three defections were recorded in the Northeast states of Bauchi and Adamawa; while three governors in South-south states of Rivers, Cross River and Edo defected since 1999.
There were only two defections in the Southwest states of Lagos and Ondo; and another two in North-central states of Benue and Kwara.
Sokoto state has the highest number of serving governors that defected while in office. The state’s three successive governors from 1999 to date – Attahiru Bafarawa, Aliyu Wamakko and Aminu Tambuwal – had defected from the parties they originally won elections. Bafarawa defected from ANPP to DPP, Wamakko from PDP to APC, and Tambuwal from APC to PDP.
Imo, Abia, Zamfara, Adamawa states recorded two defections each during the period under review. In Imo, Ikedi Ohakim defected from PPA to PDP, and Rochas Okorocha from APGA to APC. In Abia, Orji Kalu decamped from PDP to PPA, while his successor, Theodore Orji moved from PPA to PDP. In Adamawa, Boni Haruna cross-carpeted from PDP to AC, while Murtala Nyako abandoned PDP to APC. Mahmuda Shinkafi ran from ANPP to PDP in Zamfara, and Matawalle from PDP to APC.
There are instances where a governor changed parties twice during his eight-year tenure. In Kwara for instance, Governor Abdulfatah Ahmed, had defected twice, first from PDP to APC in December 2013; and from APC back to PDP in July 2018.
Despite this defection galore, there are states whose elected governors never defected to other parties while in office. For instance, Kaduna and Katsina are the only states in the Northwest whose governors remained in the parties they were first elected till the expiration of their tenure in the last 22 years.
In the Northeast, there were no defections in Borno, Yobe, Gombe and Taraba states. No governor in Plateau, Nasarawa, Niger and Kogi states defected in the Northcentral.
In the Southwest, there was no jumping of ships in Oyo, Ekiti, Ogun and Osun states. Bayelsa, Akwa Ibom and Delta states didn’t experience any defection during the period under review. No serving governor in the Southeast states of Anambra and Enugu decamped.
