A Contemporary Legal Overview of Party Switching of Elected Legislators of the National and State Assemblies Under the Nigerian Constitutional System
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The 1999 Nigerian Fundamental law came into effect on May 29 1999. It provides that an elected legislator in the National and State Assemblies shall vacate his legislative seat if he switches from the sponsoring political party to another political party during his tenure in the legislative house, save on the ground of division or factionalisation in the sponsoring party. The Constitution is, nevertheless, mute on the issue, regarding political executives, including a governor. The relevant statutory provisions, that is sub-section (1)(g) of sections 68 and 109 of the Constitution above have been abused, as some Nigerian courts have utilised them to sack elected legislators above for party switching of the same during their tenure in the legislative houses despite their constitutional rights, including the equal protection of the law and not to be discriminated against right, as enunciated in section 42(1) of the Constitution above. The article undertakes a contemporary legal overview of party switching of elected legislators of the assemblies above against the backdrop of relevant case-law and statutory provisions. The research methodology used by the authors is fundamentally doctrinal analysis of relevant primary as well as secondary sources. The article finds that the sacking of elected legislators above by some Nigerian courts on account of party switching as indicated above is unconstitutional. The article suggests that Nigeria should expunge from its Constitution the said relevant statutory provisions in tune with what obtains in other countries such as the United States of America (USA), United Kingdom (UK), Canada and Australia.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".