Defections Threaten Majority Of Nigerian Leader Jonathan’s Party

ABUJA — Thirty-seven legislators of Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) have moved to the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), threatening the ruling party’s parliamentary majority.

The legislators cited the emergence of “divisions and factions” in the ruling party as their reasons, speaker Aminu Tambuwal said during yesterday’s session, reading from a letter written by the defectors.

“We’re inching toward the majority, it’s just a matter of time,” Lai Mohammed, spokesman for the APC, said yesterday from the capital, Abuja. More would join from the House of Representatives by the new year and “hopefully more members also from the Senate”, he said.

With the change, the APC now has 172 members to the PDP’s 171 in the 360-member House of Representatives. The remaining seats are shared among smaller opposition parties and independents.

The ruling party retains its majority in the 109-member Senate. Five out of 23 state governors elected on the platform of the PDP quit on November 26 to join the APC.

“Parliamentarians don’t really vote en bloc as party representatives,” the head of macroeconomic and fixed-income research at FBN Capital, Gregory Kronsten, said yesterday from London. “So the fact that a number of them have crossed the floor doesn’t necessarily change voting patterns.”

The move could trigger more defections, or shifts in the opposite direction, UK-based risk consultancy Drum Cussac said yesterday. Both parties “will likely try to entice additional lawmakers in the coming weeks” to get the 181 seats required to control the House, it said.

PDP spokesman Olisah Metu called the legislators’ defection “treacherous and a huge betrayal”, in a statement on the party’s website. “The PDP remains unshaken by the departure.”

With increasing membership gains, the APC has emerged as the party capable of dislodging Mr Jonathan’s PDP, in power in Africa’s biggest oil producer since 1999, from office in elections due in 2015.

Nigeria depends on crude oil exports for about 80% of government revenue and more than 95% of foreign income.

A southern Christian who won elections in 2011, Mr Jonathan, 56, has not said if he will run in the next election. His administration is battling Boko Haram Islamist militants in the north, rampant oil theft, falling revenue from crude oil exports, and piracy off Nigeria’s coast.

Mr Jonathan is facing the biggest test of his three years in office after the central bank questioned the lack of accounting for $50bn in oil revenue and a former leader criticised him for failing to tackle corruption.

Former president Olusegun Obasanjo, a stalwart of the PDP, said in a letter to Mr Jonathan this month that he had failed to tackle graft and security threats in the country of more than 160-million people. He also accused Mr Jonathan of widening a split between the mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south in a bid to retain power.

Mr Obasanjo’s criticism came after Central Bank of Nigeria governor Lamido Sanusi wrote Mr Jonathan a letter alleging that the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation was withholding more than three-quarters of the oil revenue earned from January last year to July this year.

The cumulative effect has been to dim Mr Jonathan’s chances of winning Nigeria’s next election, scheduled for 2015.

Bloomberg