The gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in the November 11, 2023 elections in Bayelsa state Mr Timipre Sylva said the ‘backdoor tactics’ of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that give the party advantages won’t work this time around.
Sylva said this Thursday while fielding questions from the State House correspondents after receiving the party’s gubernatorial flag from President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.
The APC candidate also dismissed insinuations that the party has no chance of winning the elections.
He said the party would not be distracted by the litigation challenging his candidature, stressing that case was instituted by a “meddlesome interloper.”
“Yes, I am running against an incumbent governor but you will agree with me that this incumbent governor is one that came in through the back door. He didn’t win an election to get there.
“The problem in Bayelsa is like that of a dog that has tasted blood. They’ve come once behind through the back door so it has now become something they want to do all the time, they want to come through the back door.
“What does that signify? It signifies fear, they are actually afraid of the elections because as a government they have performed poorly and the only way they think they can stay in office is to come through the legal door, through which they came the last time. But I can assure you that time they will not succeed.
“They tried it this past week and you saw it, it was a case of meddlesome interloper, who had gone to court. Somebody we had to part in the contest, whose membership of APC was even questioned, taking me to court. And of course you can see that was just part of the plan they had.
“But that has not deterred us at all, we did not stop campaigning, we decided to continue with our village to village campaign, house-to-house campaign. And today, even the PDP is aware that in a fair contest that they can never win that election. So if they brag on TV that they are going to win, they know they can never win this election.
“If you go back to 2015, the APC won that election. They had to cancel the result of Southern Ijaw and ordered a re-run and of course we all know what happened for the PDP to win. In 2019, the APC won clearly nobody could even challenged that victory, they went to court and challenged the credentials of a serving senator who was now our deputy-governor elect and they annulled the results based on that.
“That serving senator served out his term and nobody challenged it. So his credentials were good enough to serve as senator but not good enough to serve as a deputy governor. So this time they have come with the same strategy going through the courts. But I can assure you that this time around we are going to win and this time we are going to keep this victory,” he said.
