Femi Gbajabiamila, Speaker of the House of Representatives, has expressed dissatisfaction over the spate of the defection of members of the house to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC).
Gbajabiamila made this known during plenary on Thursday while responding to a comment by Ado Doguwa, the House Majority Leader, that two members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will defect to the All Progressives Congress (APC) “next week”.
Chisom Dike, the lawmaker representing Tai/Eleme/Oyigbo federal constituency of Rivers State, had earlier during plenary announced his defection to the APC.
“In keeping pace with the legislative notice like you rightly said, I want to put on notice that Thursday, next week, there will be two more defecting to our great party,” Doguwa said.
But according to Gbajabiamila, Nigeria cannot afford to become a one-party state.
“No, we can’t continue like this. We cannot have a one-party state. We can’t continue like this,” he said.
The speaker asked Chinedu Akabueze, clerk of the House, to update the membership register to reflect the current standing of lawmakers based on recent defections.
“Clerk, please you have a responsibility to fix the register of party membership in the house, so that we will know the correct [figure], because it doesn’t look like have the same numbers we started off with two years ago,” he said.
Over 10 lawmakers, many of them from the PDP, have defected to the ruling APC in recent months.
