Our Decision To Leave PDP Needs To Be Respected – Saraki

The Chairman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology, Bukola Saraki has said that the decision of some senators to leave the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) should be respected.

He said this today in a Channels Television programme Sunrise Daily.
Saraki and 10 other senators announced their defection to the APC on January 28.
Discussing the letter of defection which led to disagreements between the DPD and APC senators when the Senate President David Mark refused to read the letter, Saraki said:

"the practice has always been in the past that when Senators or members of the House of Representatives change their party for whatever reason, they come to the floor and indicate their interest by writing to the leadership, quoting section 68 of the constitution. The leadership reads it and it goes into the records of the Senate that you have defected to another party."

He further said that the arguments that senators who decamp will lose their seats are false as the trend is not new in the country.
The senator added that since 1999 there have been more than 20 cases when the politicians defected quoting the same section.

"There's not been any hullabaloo about it. There's been no noise. It's gone smoothly. People have left the opposition party to the ruling party, now it's the other way round, people are quoting and trying to hold on to what doesn't exist," Saraki said.

According to the senator, there's no law that stops senators or members of the House of Representatives to say that they have left their party.

"We [the senators] have moved. We have taken those decisions. I think that it needs to be respected."

Why APC?
When asked why he left the ruling party, Saraki said:

"I think largely, it is due to the kind of dissatisfaction that we've seen in the affairs of the party over a while with regards to key issues like the level of impunity, the regard for the rule of law, the level of inclusiveness, the consideration of the wishes of the people and party members at the different chapters, not ready for us to engage more in participatory democracy."

Saraki, a former governor of Kwara State, added that those who defected in Kwara did so because the leadership of the party had interfered in the State chapter's primaries.

"We were going to election, after electing our flag-bearers and then 24 hours before election, somebody who sat in Abuja, decided to just write another 193 names (of councilors) and sent it to the state INEC commissioner to say that these are the authorised candidates of the party," he said.

The senator also said that it was too late to return to the PDP despite the new Chairman of the PDP being "a nice chap."