Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress in Rivers State, Darlington Nwauju, speaks to DENNIS NAKU on allegations of the use of thugs and the judiciary against opposition parties in the state among other issues
There are claims that your party members are being attacked by thugs. How true is this?
Let me be specific with an experience we had on November 23, 2022 at Abuloma Ward 20 in the Port Harcourt City Local Government Area. While we were having a ward-to-ward assessment tour, some political thugs attacked some supporters of the All Progressives Congress in order to prevent them from accessing the venue of the event, left them with bodily injuries, vandalised two vehicles – a red Toyota Camry car belonging to one Miss Vivian Nwonekorom and another Camry belonging to our Asari-Toru Constituency 2 Assembly candidate.
Now, whether we like it or not, leadership entails owning up to responsibilities and it is the duty of the leader of a group to take responsibility for the misdemeanours created by the followers and in this instance, the body language of the state governor towards the opposition has been that of ensuring that no space is allowed for them (opposition parties) to campaign or gather. The ruling party (the Peoples Democratic Party) here is doing all within its powers to use state resources to constrict the political space and by extension rubbish democratic tenets and ethos. Even when the framers of the Electoral Act, 2022 have done sufficient work to reduce the incidences where opposition political parties are denied access to public places and the media, the state government here is busy creating its own set of laws and unfortunately, even making use of the state Assembly to churn out laws alien to the constitution.
While thugs are sponsored to make physical attempts like the November 23 case, legal thuggery is being deployed to ensure that rallies and gatherings of opposition parties are eliminated. I dare say that anybody who understands what democracy is, Rivers State is not serving as a good example of a place where everybody, irrespective of political leanings, can freely express their political beliefs.
There are also allegations that the Rivers State Government is using the judiciary against the opposition. How will you react to this?
I think Nigerians are already aware of the multiple court cases instituted by the PDP in Rivers State against other political parties and how the same court, which gave judgement in favour of the PDP, threw out the complaints of the APC against the PDP by quoting copiously from the same portion of the constitution and interpreting it differently for different parties. Does it not show that something is wrong and nothing else could have influenced such a sad situation other than obvious reasons?
Has your party suffered from such action?
I have already mentioned an example where my party approached the same court and the judge ruled that the court lacked jurisdiction to hear our matter because our party had no right to pry into the internal affairs of the PDP. The same court had given judgment on October 25, 2022 in favour of the PDP in a matter they brought before the court to challenge the process that led to the nomination of our party’s candidates. This is entirely an internal affair of a political party, and it is the constitutional responsibility of the Independent National Electoral Commission to monitor and supervise such activities, and the commission had come to court to say we did the job of monitoring and the process was faultless.
But many of the judgments against the APC have been overturned by higher courts?
We expect that the higher courts will continue to overturn such cases where political parties will choose to nose around the internal activities of other political parties. From reports available to us, the Court of Appeal, Akure, Lagos, Asaba, Abuja and even Port Harcourt has held that a political party does not have any business with the internal affairs of other political parties. For us, we are aware that the trigger for the multiple court cases we have recorded in our party is the handiwork of fifth columnists who masked themselves prior to 2019 as party faithful, but worked in cahoots with the ruling PDP in Rivers State to ensure that we did not field candidates in 2019. These same individuals filed cases against us using pseudonym, claiming to be party members interested in contesting ward, local government, state and national delegates for our party primaries and convention. We knew that they were all out to silence the party through these sponsored court cases.
Has the Rivers State APC won all outstanding court cases now?
Justice Turaki Mohammed of the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt cleared our National Assembly candidates in a case filed against them by the PDP and the most recent judgment we got from the Court of Appeal set aside the October 25, 2022 judgment of the Federal High Court delivered by Justice Emmanuel Obile, which delisted all the APC candidates from the ballot. The Appeal Court overturned the order of the High Court in a unanimous judgment by judges delivered on Thursday, December 15, 2022 by the lead judge, Justice Muhammed Lawal Shuaibu, who restated the position of the law that delegate congresses are purely internal party affairs.
Those who took our party to court did not participate in the congresses or primaries of the APC and therefore cannot challenge the outcome of that process, which is fundamental to the case at the Federal High Court, which invalidated all our party’s candidates. We canvassed that these individuals were not even members of our party and that even if they were, the Supreme Court held in Dele Moses versus the APC that members of political parties were bound by the rules and regulations of such parties. The Appeal Court also agreed with the APC that the petitioners at the Federal High Court did not exhaust the party’s internal dispute resolution mechanism before approaching the court. So, they rushed to court because they weren’t our members and could not go through internal party mechanisms since they did not know how to go about it, but only knew the way to the Federal High Court.
What about the citizenship case that disqualified the state APC governorship candidate, Tonye Cole?
There are judicial precedents we can readily point to and as a layman, I do not believe that anybody can input strange interpretations to what we have in black and white in the Nigerian constitution. Our governorship candidate is a citizen of Nigeria by birth and there was no reason in the first place for Justice Emmanuel Obile of the Federal High Court in Port Harcourt to disqualify him as a candidate on this ground since he is not a citizen by naturalisation. Another court of coordinate jurisdiction sat on a similar issue in Calabar and decided that a citizen by birth, who holds dual citizenship, cannot be stopped from contesting the governorship of his state. In fact, the governorship and deputy governorship candidates of the APC in Cross River State were both dragged to court on this issue of dual citizenship, but the court dismissed the suit against them.
Have the cases affected your political party’s campaign in Rivers State considering the fact that elections are close?
Each party has its own campaign strategy and schedule. For us, both the legal hurdles and the Executive Orders have not been able to dissuade or discourage our people from taking the message of progressive governance to the electorate whose rights as kings and queens of the ballot have been underlined by the workings of the BVAS. Votes will now count and the people’s level of interest in how they will be governed has greatly increased. Our party has resorted to direct messaging to convince and woo voters right at the polling unit level and we shall keep talking to them until the close of the INEC campaign window. Fortunately for us, it’s a bit easier given the fact that we have structures across the 319 political wards and 6,860 polling units across the state.
