PH Mundial – Port Harcourt Online Newspaper News Across The Region
Related Articles
… PDP Urges APC to ‘Join Hands with Wike’
The Supreme Court Thursday dismissed appeals by the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Rivers State and its factional governorship candidate, Tonye Cole, seeking to allow them participate in the 2019 general election
Cole and the APC in Rivers State had approached the court through three separate appeals, praying it to make them participate in the election.
The apex court however dismissed the three appeals on the ground that the notices were incompetent in law.
A seven-man panel of judges of the court, led by the acting chief justice of Nigeria, Justice Ibrahim Mohammed, struck out the appeals for being incompetent and defective, stating the matters could not be heard by the court.
One of the appeals was filed by the APC, with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) listed among the respondents; the second was filed by APC, with Magnus Abe and others as respondents, while the third was filed by Cole, with Magnus Abe and others as respondents.
At the hearing of the appeals, counsel to the APC, Jibrin Okutepa, argued that the Court of Appeal never affirmed the judgment of the Rivers State High Court delivered on the March 7. He claimed that the court only made a pronouncement that the appeals were academic.
But counsel to the PDP, Emmanuel Ukala, disagreed, informing the court of his preliminary objection challenging the competence of the appeals filed by the APC.
Delivering the first ruling, Justice Muhammad upheld the PDP lawyer’s argument that the notice of appeal filed by the APC was defective. He made similar pronouncements on the other two matters.
The APC was barred from fielding candidates for the governorship and House of Assembly elections. Although APC entered an alliance with the African Action Congress (AAC), the PDP candidate, Nyesom Wike, won by a wide margin.
Meanwhile, the Rivers State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party, has urged the apc to “join hands with Gov Nyesome Wike to move state forward.”
The Rivers PDP says the Supreme Court ruling has once more heightened the dignity of the Apex Court as the last hope of the common man.
A statement by the state PDP chairman, Bro Felix Obuah noted that “having exhausted all avenues of defusing the choice of Governor Nyesom Wike by the mass of Rivers people and failed, the APC has no choice but to acknowledge the obvious fact that the re-election of Chief Wike has divine endorsement and should joyfully join the rest of Rivers people in this divine mandate.”
Bro Obuah recalled “the barrage of litigations and unprecedented conspiracies by the APC just to stop one man, Gov Wike from being re-elected and yet he survived all and went on to win the March 9 governorship poll amid historic theatricals as never experienced in the history of elections in Nigeria, describing it as simply an ‘Act of God’.”
He however called for an end to the beating of war drums, “all the macabre songs and tintinnabulation of political jingoism by the opposition to satisfy the whims and caprices of one self-seeking man,” so that Governor Wike could concentrate on his service delivery and good governance to the state.
