Sylva seeks disbandment of Bayelsa governorship tribunal over ‘bias’

 Timipre Sylva, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), in the Bayelsa governorship poll, has applied for the disbandment of the state election petition tribunal.

In a petition addressed to the president of the court of appeal, Sylva and the APC said they no longer have confidence in the ability of the three-member panel led by Adekunle Adeleye to deliver justice in the electoral dispute.

The petitioners said they were only allowed to call 49 witnesses out of the 224 they had proposed to bring to the tribunal.

Sylva and his party also alleged that they were denied a fair hearing, noting that the tribunal was distorting its record of the proceedings to favour the respondents.

“It was a clear breach of the right of fair hearing to prevent the petitioners from calling all their witnesses when the lifespan of the tribunal still has over 3 (three) months to its expiration date,” the petition reads.

“Upon the perusal of the record of proceedings, we were perplexed to find that the tribunal had already made their findings and decisions in respect of the authenticity and weight of the documents (polling unit results) tendered by the petitioners even before the conclusion of the case.

“The records of proceedings show several distortions of what actually transpired in court.

“It is obvious from the forgoing that the petitioners cannot get justice from the tribunal as presently constituted, since it is obvious that the tribunal chairman has descended into the arena of the legal conflict between the parties.”

Sylva and the APC are asking the appeal court president to urgently disband the tribunal and reconstitute a new one.

They said the new panel should be set up early enough so that the petition can be heard before the 180 days allowed for electoral disputes elapse on May 28.

In a separate letter addressed to the tribunal, the petitioners prayed for an indefinite adjournment of the matter pending the outcome of their petition to the appeal court president.

At the court session on Monday, Adeleye, chairman of the tribunal, acknowledged receipt of the petition.

Reacting to the petition, Charles Edosanwan, counsel to the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), said the action of the petitioners was “highly regrettable and embarrassing to the legal profession”.

“The petitioners opened and finished their case and upon realising their very poor fortune, rather than to man up and accept the result, resorted to this kind of conduct which I describe as a blackmail to this tribunal and the judiciary,” Edosanwan said.

“It will be prejudicial to the 1st respondent (INEC) to adjourn the sitting at the instance of the petitioners that have completed their case.”

Other lawyers in the matter, including Chris Uche, counsel to Douye Diri, Bayelsa governor, and Chukwuma Machukwu Ume, counsel to Lawrence Ewhrujakpo, deputy governor, also accused the petitioners of attempting to portray the tribunal in bad light.

They urged the tribunal to either dismiss the petition with a huge cost or grant the request for indefinite adjournment of the case.

In a brief ruling, the panel suspended proceedings indefinitely to await the directive of the court of appeal president.

On November 13, 2023, Diri, candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was declared the winner of the off-cycle election held in Bayelsa after he scored 175,196 votes to defeat Sylva and other candidates.

Sylva, a former minister of state for petroleum resources, polled 110,108 votes.

Diri was reelected for his second term in office.

However, not satisfied with the outcome of the election, Sylva and his party filed a petition before the tribunal alleging that INEC wrongly excluded election results from three LGAs –Southern Ijaw, Ogbia and Nembe.

Sylva submitted that contrary to INEC’s position that the election did not hold in the affected LGAs, APC agents supervised the poll and sent results from the various polling units to the collation centre.

He described the three LGAs as his strongholds, arguing that results from the areas would have given him victory in the election if they were added.