Defections and Supreme Court’s responsibility

This is a crucial matter over which one has kept quiet over a long time. The reason being that when people stay on too long on the wrong path, trying to make sense from what appears to have grown into a normal,  can become a crime. Political defections have somehow become like a virtue and acceptable value in our political culture. But it shouldn’t be at least up to a level. I will explain later as we go on.

Political defection for any person who may not have known what it is, means to switch allegiance from one political group or more appropriately political party to another.  Many equate it to desertion, but it is not. The latter is a more horrendous act which touches on principles in a negative manner. Defection is allowed when it takes place within a reasonable context.

Ideals, ideas, processes and policies can engineer a switch and that would be right. England and America do have so many other political parties unknown to many across the world, parties that are just there to pursue a given line of vision or thought. It could vary from religion through environment, agriculture, race, to policy directions on infrastructure and foreign relations. These parties don’t bother about winning the presidency or seats into the parliament. Most of their members pulled off from what we know in our country as the mainstream parties. These pursuits give some degree of validity to their moves.

On the other hand what we have in the form of defections give the act a bad meaning. Our politicians defect mainly on account that they want to have a chance to contest for political office. This would appear wrong because ambition is elevated over vision. This is happening because our political parties have since become soulless.

There is nothing ideological about them, strange bedfellows consumed by personal ambitions gather and decide to push the threads of the society in the direction of their intentions. This is why contest into political offices that ordinarily should be like a carnival has become like war. Citizens indeed raise “armies” and infact do kill so that their paymaster can have a foothold in the power chambers. This is partly why insecurity has grown to become an industry. When strongmen fail they unleash pains on the larger society, pull back and on the approach of another dispensation they either form new political parties or run to a different one entirely.

Someone made an observation in a discussion forum that appears worthy of serious attention. He said: “Our politicians are like the periwinkle, they are all kings wearing crowns.” Some of us add that they are more like crabs poured into a basin, none wants the other to climb out of the seeming encasement – the one that takes a go is pulled down by the rest. This is why “rat race” has become part of our political culture. One would not do justice if we don’t mention “stomach infrastructure”.  Pervasive state of hunger has caused so many citizens hitherto considered noble and reasonable to lose their minds and focus. Today they have become so vulnerable and do fall for everything.

The unprincipled version of defection isn’t acceptable anywhere in the worse. It is pure rascality taken very far. It ought not to be condoned at all. Its effects on the polity and health of the country are unquantifiable. This version of political behavior has thrived because some leaders led the rest of us to legislate into being what ordinarily ought to abhorred.

The constitution takes cognizance of possible political defection and the negative effect by the mention of the phenomenon but the drafters missed the point when it limited the application of restrictions on the legislature leaving out those who might win elections into the executive side of the government. Let’s make the point very clear.

The law says only those elected into parliament will lose their seats if they defect to another political party. It is silent on what happens to those on the executive, it didn’t say if the governor and president would lose their seats in the event they switch party allegiance. The constitution says well one can defect retaining his seat if there is crisis in his political or the party enters alliance.

Right thinking citizens insist the right prescription would have been if for any reason the holder of an office decides to elope away from his party to another,   he or she must first vacate the office he got on the former platform. The activation of the clause should be automatic, it should not be at the instance of anybody or organ of any institution whatsoever. This is not the case in our current practice.

Even lawyers encourage a bad precedent when they insist someone must activate the provision even as badly designed as we have it. The failure of the Supreme Court to give clarity or even make a correction to the anomaly remains a big issue for concern.

Most of the democracies we look forward to as examples didn’t grow from acts of parliament. National laws and the frontiers of jurisprudence were either straightened or expanded through sound and visionary judicial verdicts. Why are our courts lacking in this vital aspect of nation building? Why has the Supreme Court chosen to take cover under a conspiratorial passivity? Why? Who can tell us why this is so? We ask again why has the Supreme Court remained non-committal on this vexed matter this long?