No Way!! You Can’t Be Governor Again, Dickson Tells Sylva

The Bayelsa State Governor, Seriake Dickson, has asked his predecessor, Chief Timipre Sylva, to drop his ambition of returning to the Government House in 2016, saying the people of Bayelsa State are wiser.

Dickson told the former governor, who is also the leader of the All Progressives Congress in the state, that he could not be governor of Bayelsa State again.

Sylva was stopped from contesting for the second term in office in 2011 by the Peoples Democratic Party, allegedly due to pressure from former President Goodluck Jonathan.

Sylva, who said the PDP “is dead in Bayelsa” and that the APC would capture the state, however, stressed that his decision to run or not was dependent on his party.

During the interview, he had accused Dickson of ruling the state by fear and intimidation.

Sylva had said, “Governor Seriake Dickson is ruling the state by fear and intimidation. And when you rule your people by intimidating, then the loyalty is liable to break under any form of stress.

“Once you rule a people by fear and not love, it will break. The time for that loyalty to break is now.”

But Dickson, in a statement on Monday by his Chief Press Secretary, Daniel Iworiso-Markson, said Sylva’s remarks epitomized those of a man who had lost focus and not in touch with realities on ground. It is heart-warming that Sylva is not accusing Dickinson of multiple crimes and criminality, secret killings, cultism, large scale corruption and brigandage which were the hallmarks of Sylva's tenure as governor of Bayelsa State.

Sylva’s era as a governor of Bayelsa was the darkest in the history of the state. Bayelsans have become wiser and would not be cajoled or hoodwinked by his antics. If Sylva is a wise man, he would have seen the writing on the wall that Bayelsans have since rejected him by voting massively for the Peoples Democratic Party in all the recent elections.

Dickson wondered how Sylva would, in his wildest of imagination, think that he and the APC would stand any chance of defeating a performing PDP governor in the forthcoming election in the state.