Dissatisfied with the judgement, the immediate past minister of state for agriculture, Sen. Heineken Lokpobiri, who filed the suit, as well as Lyon, who has since been declared governor-elect, appealed the judgement.
Pointblanknews.com gathered that Lokpobiri’s suit is a source of worry to the APC national leadership, who fear that it could rob them of the Bayelsa governorship the same way a related matter made them lose Zamfara State.
A power tussle between certain Zamfara APC bigwigs led by Sen. Kabiru Marafa and the then outgoing governor Abdulazeez Yari had prevented the party from holding proper governorship primary election.
As a fallout, after the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) declared APC’s candidate winner with over 534,541 votes, the Supreme Court declared the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which scored a little over 189,452votes, winner.
On May 24, 2019, Zamfara APC lost all her seats as the Supreme Court invalidated all votes obtained by the party in the governorship, state, and National Assembly elections.
Justice Paul Galinji,, who delivered the lead judgment held that all votes cast for the APC in the elections amounted to wasted votes and efforts.
Galinji further said that the APC and all its candidates that participated in the elections gate-crashed having not conducted lawful primaries.
The five-member panel of the Supreme Court in a unanimous decision upheld the position of the Court of Appeal, Jos, that Zamfara APC failed to conduct primaries in accordance with the party’s Constitution, the Electoral Act and the 1999 Constitution respectively.
There is an uncanny relationship between Zamfara and Bayelsa APC. In Zamfara, it was APC chieftains led by Sen. Marafa who challenged the results of the party primary. In Bayelsa, the aggrieved party, Heineken Lokpobiri, was also a senator and a ranking APC member.
Like Marafa, Lokpobiri approached a court, praying to be handed the governorship ticket. Marafa, and by extension, APC lost at the lower court, the court of appeal, as well as at the Supreme Court.
Pointblanknews.com gathered that influential APC members in and outside Bayelsa State had unsuccessfully tried to make Lokpobiri withdraw his suit.
There are mounting fears that both APC chieftains will lose the appeal, and also lose at the Supreme Court, should the path of judicial precedence be towed.
“We tried to make Heineken kill the matter at the preliminary stage. He refused. He was so pained that for over three years, he build APC in Bayelsa with his time and money only for Timi Sylva to come overnight to hijack the structure and hand everything over to a barely literate Lyon who at best is a militant,” offered one APC chieftain.
“As things stand, we have a very bad case. Precedence has been set by the Supreme Court on the Zamfara matter, so how is Bayelsa going to be different?” he demanded, stressing, “and we deliberately brought this on ourselves by failing to simply do the right thing”.
Pointblanknews.com recalls that APC elders had prior to the controversial primaries failed to agree on whether to adopt direct primaries or use delegates.
“Sylva feared that Lokpobiri, who as minister, had helped build the party over the years, was in firm control of the structures in at least five of the eight local councils. That was why he opposed delegates’ election.
” This was why he pushed for direct primaries. Even at that, direct primaries must still be conducted by ward officers up to the local government area officials. Any how it was to be done, Lokpobiri will still carry the day. That was why heavily armed thugs disrupted the process, making Borno governor who was the chief returning officer, scamper for his safety,” another party chieftain offered.
“In Lokpobiri’s suit, he claimed that Ward Chairmen, Secretary and Youth leaders that are the Electoral Officer by virtue of the party guidelines conducted the direct primaries in five of the eight LGAs, and that got 110,000 votes.
The problem, however, is that since neither APC nor INEC officials from Abuja monitored Lokpobiri’s primaries in accordance with the Electoral Act, it remained a nullity,” reasoned one official who attended the court session.
He continued, “On his part, David Lyon David told the court he polled 43,000 votes, and that party electoral panel monitored the primary but the Chairman of the Panel did not sign the result. It was the Secretary who signed. This is the problem. According to our guidelines, no other member of the panel can sign except the chairman.
“Besides, if really Lyon David scored 43,000 votes as claimed, his votes are less than 50 percent of the number of accredited voters which means those disenfranchised are more than those who voted.
” To crown it all, Lyon does not have ward and LGA results because the party officials who are authorized to conduct the primaries did not carry it out which means the primary was not also valid” held the official.
In her judgement, Justice Iyang held that, since APC decided on direct primaries, only one primary could have held with party officers at the ward and local government areas as collation officers.
She declared that since APC violated her own rules, neither Lyon nor Lokpobiri can benefit from the flawed process.