The Deputy National Publicity Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Comrade Timi Frank, has blamed the defeat suffered by the party in the just concluded governorship election in Bayelsa State on unresolved intra-party squabbles.
Frank, who made the observation while speaking with reporters yesterday at his Abuja home, said that the party’s internal crisis, which arose from the primary election, was not resolved.
According to him, the APC’s governorship candidate in Bayelsa State, Chief Timipre Sylva, did not take reconciliation seriously ahead of the election.
Frank, who said he was making a personal observation as a stakeholder and not speaking on behalf of the party, also threatened to drag the APC to court if the party’s leadership continued to deny him the right to function as the Acting National Publicity Secretary – as enshrined in the party constitution – following the appointment of its former spokesman, Lai Mohammed as Minister.
He said: “Before this election, Bayelsa APC had issues, which were not attended to. I have been shouting about these. I made it clear that if we didn’t resolve our issues and went into the election, we were going to lose Bayelsa. But nobody listened. I cried and cried, spoke to our leaders and many other people about the need for reconciliation and its importance.
“But the governorship candidate, Timipre Sylva, refused to listen, thinking he could do it alone. Today, look at the result! When some of us told him to make peace, he refused. After the primary, he never spoke to anybody; thinking he could do the job alone. I said then that with Sylva, we would lose Bayelsa. But nobody listened to me. The result has played out.
“It was important to make peace so that all of us will come together. If we had done that, the result would have been different. It is quite painful that we lost Bayelsa. But it is an eye-opener”.
