‘You can’t take swamp out of hippopotamus’ — Sylva hits Jonathan over comments on Bayelsa guber poll

Timipre Sylva, candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the Bayelsa governorship election, says the comments by former President Goodluck Jonathan on the outcome of the poll is “unfortunate”.

On November 13, Douye Diri, governor of Bayelsa and candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was declared the winner of the November 11 election after he scored 175,196 votes to defeat his close challenger, Sylva.

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

Diri was reelected for his second term in office.

In his reaction during a visit to Diri after the election, Jonathan said he would have relocated his mother to Abuja, the nation’s capital, if the governor had not been reelected.

The former president, who hails from Bayelsa, said cultism and kidnapping have reduced from the “suffocating level they used to be” during the administration of Diri.

“We should think about the development of the state starting from the issue of peace and security in the state which within this last period, three years plus, there are significant improvements in terms of cultism and kidnapping and so on and so forth,” Jonathan had said.

“I was saying before this election that if Diri loses this election, I would have relocated my mother to Abuja.”

But reacting to Jonathan’s comments, Sylva, in an Instagram post, said he “sincerely” hoped that the former president was misquoted.

“Former President Goodluck Jonathan’s statement is unfortunate,” he wrote.

“I sincerely hope he was misquoted. Let me just quote our respected Wole Soyinka: “you can take the hippopotamus out of the swamp but you cannot take the swamp out of the hippopotamus.”