The bid by a member of the Governor Rotimi Amaechi group to reclaim control of the crisis-ridden River State chapter of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has suffered another setback.
This is as the sacked chairman of the State chapter of PDP and a loyalist of Governor Amaechi, Chief Godspower Ake, on Tuesday lost an appeal to reclaim his office as two members of his former executive committee betrayed him as they told the Court of Appeal siting in Abuja that Ake did not have their mandate to institute the appeal.
An Abuja High Court, had on April 15, 2013 declared Chief Obuah Amaechi Felix and Walter Ibibia Opuene supported by Minister of State for Education, Chief Nyesom Wike, as validly nominated and elected chairman and secretary respectively and sacked the Ake led committee from office.
Ake was to approach the appellate court seeking to stay the execution of the judgment which sacked him and other members of his committees from office.
At the trial, the duo tendered an endorsed list of elected officials at the congress with the number of votes secured by each of the elected officials and their party membership numbers and voters card details clearly written against their names.
The list which bore the signatures of the chairman and secretary of the electoral panel was contained in the letter headed paper of the national secretariat of the party and showed that Obuah Amaechi Felix and Walter Ibibia Opuene were nominated and elected as chairman and secretary with 721 votes and 713 votes respectively.
They contended that as winners at the state congress conducted by a properly constituted electoral panel and monitored by INEC, they ought to be the ones occupying the office of the chairman and secretary of the state chapter of the party and not Ake .
Ake challenged the jurisdiction of the Abuja court to hear the matter and exhibited a list of the members of the executive members and the offices they were elected into to support his claims that they, and not Felix and Opuene, were duly nominated and elected unopposed as the party’s state executive committee.
Ake’s list however appeared on a piece of paper, not letter headed, and only bore a purported signature of the secretary of the electoral panel, Barrister Steve Emelieze who had denied signing the list.
Emelieze and Chief Orbih who led the electoral panel that conducted the Rivers State congress distanced themselves from the Ake’s list and told the court that the list exhibited by Ake was a forged document.
Also on Tuesday, some loyal members of the state executive shocked Ake at the court as they approached the court with applications seeking to join in the matter claiming that they did not authorise Ake, who instituted the appeal on behalf of himself and other members, to file the appeal.
Evelyn Nkechi Weke, an ex officio member of the state executive committee of the state chapter of the party, as well as Barrister Emmanuel Utchay, the Assistant Legal Officer asked the court to join them to enable them have the locus to ask that the appeal be struck out.
The duo claimed that the appeal was incompetent having not been filed with their consent as members of the state exco on whose behalf the sacked former chairman allegedly filed the appeal , insisting that Ake misrepresented their interest in instituting the appeal without their authorisation.
Weke, in her application, submitted that Ake ought to have brought the appeal in his personal or private capacity, saying there was no common interest in the subject matter of litigation to warrant his initiating the appeal in a representative capacity.
She stated that other members of the state executive committee of the PDP in Rivers State had no intention or basis to pursue the appeal and wanted the court to make an order striking out the appeal for being incompetent.
Ake’s lawyer, Chief Joseph Daudu, SAN, tried in vain to persuade the court to ignore the applications of the exco members seeking to join the matter and to hear his application for leave of the court to appeal the FCT High Court’s decision that sacked his client from office. The court therefore held that the applications brought by the exco members were already before the court and that they were fundamental to resolving the matter.
Daudu had argued that the applications filed by the exco members were calculated to frustrate the hearing of the appeal which he urged the court to resist.
“This is an appeal from a High Court and nothing has changed in the parties before the court. It does not lie in the mouth of the applicants to say that they did not authorise the appellant to institute this appeal.
“They should not be allowed to frustrate and truncate this proceeding which I think is what they are here to do.,” Daudu had pleaded.
The three-man panel of the court, however, observed that the applications had been filed and had something to do with the appellants.
The court said the applications were important and would be heard.
Chief Godwin Obla, SAN, who represented the new Chairman of the party and the Secretary, Chief Obuah Felix Amaechi, and Chief Walter Ibibia Opuene, respectively, told the court that his clients had filed a preliminary objection challenging the competency of the appeal.
He said 27 out of the 28 persons and their positions in the Rivers State PDP executive committee that the appellant purported to represent were not affected by the decision of the lower court which sacked him (Ake), and that these persons were not deprived of their positions in the party’s executive committee in the state.
He noted that these 27 persons not so affected by the lower court’s decision were not aggrieved by that decision.
He told the court that Ake and his sponsors were no longer members of the PDP having joined another party which they called “New PDP” and that the PDP which was a party in the appeal was not the “new PDP”.
He urged the court to set aside the record of appeal compiled and forwarded to the court in connection with the appeal as well as the brief of argument filed by the appellant and the notice and grounds of appeal filed thereto.
The court thereafter directed parties to file written addresses on the issues raised and adjourned further proceedings to January 15, 2014. ###
