Bayelsa Guber: The Battle Continues at the Courts
On November 16, the people of Bayelsa trooped out in their thousands to choose who will lead them in the next four years. The process leading to the poll was not devoid of mudslinging, accusations and counter-accusations.
Like a phoenix, the opposition party, the All Progressives Congress ( APC) in Bayelsa resurrected from its slumber of over four years to give the Peoples Democratic Party ( PDP) which had been the only rook tree in the political forest of Bayelsa state a fierce fight.
This newly found confidence of the APC was not too sudden though. Only during the 2019 general election, it had to wrest one senatorial seat, two House of Representatives sits and a House of Assembly position from the PDP.
Before now, the PDP had had a field day determining the political direction of the state for the last 20 years, but in a flash, the party has found a match in the APC led by Chief Timipre Sylva.
It appeared old rivalries had suddenly developed. Governor Seriake Dickson and his archetypal political adversary, Sylva, were again up in arms against each other.
To be sure, Dickson’s name and Sylva’s were not on the ballot. But it was about their stooges or protégés if you like. Like a bolt from the blues, the former governor had almost unilaterally picked David Lyon as the face or the standardbearer of the APC in the election. Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, who many believe appeared more prepared for the job was left in the lurch.
After waiting for an eternity for the APC leadership to approach him or assuage the bitterness he felt after his alleged unfair treatment, Lokpobiri approached the court to declare him the winner of the September 4 APC primaries in Bayelsa.
He did not get what he said he prayed the court, but the Federal High Court in Yenagoa quashed Lyon’s emergence as the APC candidate, thereby throwing spanners in the works of the party.
On the other hand, Dickson backed Senator Douye Diri, his former Secretary and Deputy Chief of Staff to pick the PDP ticket. On the face of it, it was Lyon against Diri, but on a deeper look, it was a proxy war between two rivals, Dickson and Sylva.
But the election has come and gone and a winner declared officially by the Independent National Electoral Commission ( INEC); while the PDP and the incumbent and his preferred candidate, Diri, in the meantime, continues to lick their wounds, hoping to get a respite from the courts.
Before the APC and its leadership can finally breathe a sigh of relief, they must of necessity cross three main hurdles: the tribunal hearing which would go through the entire gamut of the courts up to the supreme court.
The APC, the governor- elect of the party and his deputy, Degi Eremienyo must also convince the Appeal court that some of the documents presented by Eremienyo to INEC, were not forged or fraudulent, according to an Abuja High Court which gave a ruling to that effect last week. The court stated that having presented conflicting documents, the Nembe- born politician was not fit to run for the primary election.
The judiciary will also determine if disqualifying a running mate to a candidate in an election invalidates that of his principal, the party’s standard- bearer.
Secondly, the party and its candidates must tell the Appeal Court, most likely in Port Harcourt, why it should upturn the judgment of a Yenagoa Federal High Court, which summarily declared that the APC never had a candidate in the last election.
The court led by Justice Jane Inyang, based its conclusion on the fact that the rules were breached when the APC national electoral committee chairman, Mai Mala- Buni, Yobe State Governor, failed to announce the result as provided by the party guidelines. Instead, Emmanuel Ocheja, a senator and secretary of the committee made the declaration in a hurriedly put together event in a hotel in Bayelsa.
It also said that instead of an 11- man committee, the APC set up a 7- man body.
A third leg which is still pending in court and rarely talked about is the one instituted by Mr. Preye Aganaba, who also told another court that he believes that the party primaries that threw Lyon up as the winner was largely flawed.
If the APC succeeds in winning all the pre- election battles, it has to again, face the election petition tribunal to be set up soon to look at the validity of Monday morning’s announcement of Lyon as the governor- elect. The case may proceed to the Appeal Court, then to the Supreme Court, Nigeria’s apex court. In all these, nothing is guaranteed for any of the two contending parties.
The PDP, on the other hand, has a sword hanging directly in the middle of its head. Chief Ndutimi Alaibe, the former Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC) Managing Director and a frontline aspirant in the September 3 primaries, who came second, is also in court to quash Diri’s declaration as the winner of the PDP primaries in September.
Alaibe is contending that some of the ad- hoc delegates to the September primary election, including eight local government chairmen, their deputies and 105 ward chairmen were not qualified to vote in the primaries because the period of their election did not satisfy the statutory length of time before the party went into the internal poll.
If Diri succeeds at the tribunal or by extension in invalidating Lyon’s announcement as governor- elect, he too must be ready to face Alaibe in court. If he fails to defend his choice in the primary election and the court declares the process unsatisfactory, the implication would also be that the PDP never had a candidate going into the November 16 election. The pendulum could swing anywhere.
But for now, the PDP continues to kick, while the APC revels in its newly found victory. David Lyon, the press- shy governor- elect a day after the election visited President Muhammadu Buhari, former President Goodluck Jonathan and his wife Patience and the national leader of the APC and former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, on what his team described as a “thank you” tour.
In a moment of ecstasy, leader of the party in the state and former governor, Sylva “thanked” governor Dickson for making the job of winning the election easier than expected. He described Dickson as a bad husband to the people of Bayelsa in the almost eight years he has been governor.
Giving an analogue of a bad husband who does not deserve a second one, Sylva contends that because Dickson governed badly, it was easy to convince Bayelsa people to support the APC.
“Unfortunately ( Dickson) made our job very easy because he married the wife very badly. Of course, this proverb pre- supposes that if you marry a wife badly, you will not get another wife. So he did not marry the state very well, so the state roundly rejected him.
“Like it’s been said earlier, we had a good candidate and when you have a good product; it’s very easy to sell it. So, we went around and sold this good to Bayelsans and the result was an overwhelming success.
“We are happy with this victory because, for us, it is very significant. This gives our party a footprint in the Niger Delta, which is very key to us. It gives us more of a national outlook, we have always been a national party but this gives us even a bigger national outlook’’ he said.
In contrast, Dickson, Diri, PDP and their team have continued to throw aspersions on the election and indeed calling for a declaration of the PDP candidate in the election as the winner of the poll by INEC.
Indeed Diri has released his own figures to the public how he won six out of the eight local governments in the state during the election.
He argued that he was at a loss as to how the INEC got the figures it announced after the poll, insisting that he polled 98,582 votes to the APC’s 55, 903, according to the ‘ Situation Room’ he set up for the purpose of collating the ballot from all the wards and local governments.
In the second leg of his argument, Diri contended that INEC couldn’t show the court ruling setting aside the judgment of the Federal High Court, which the APC claims to have and therefore should not have been seen in the collation room or even on the ballot.
“The subsisting court judgment was two and at the time of conducting the election, APC was not by the law on the ballot. We contested the election not with the APC but with other political parties. With the results that INEC has released which should not comprise the APC candidate in that election, the PDP led in those results.
“We urgently call on the INEC to declare me and the PDP as the winners of that election. I am the winner of that election and I am the governor- elect” he said.
He added that “the rule of law is under threat in this democracy, anarchy is looming in this democracy; democracy is being raped. For us, the election on that day, especially what came out was a charade.
“To stop that process would have been that the PDP would have run into a war with state actors, those who have the instrument of coercion. What we witnessed was not a competition between PDP and APC but one between soldiers and the PDP.
“We have not lost our election. The onus is on them. We should be celebrating because victory is ours whether today or tomorrow, INEC will announce us, winners,” he asserted.
But not so fast for either the PDP, which has urged members to clink glasses in readiness for victory or the APC which is already in an ecstatic mood since the party’s declaration in the early hours of Monday.
For many observers, it’s still a long road ahead for both parties with twists and turns whose results could turn out very unpredictable. For these battles, both the APC and PDP must be fully prepared for a tough and tortuous route to victory.