APC is best platform for change — Sylva

By Samuel Oyadongha

APC candidate, Chief Timipre Sylva says his party remains the best platform to bring the desired change in Bayelsa just as he has dismissed claims by his rivals that the PDP is an Ijaw party.

Sylva in an interview in Yenagoa urged the Ijaw to embrace the APC, declaring that the state has a history of aligning with the ruling party at the centre.

He described as cheap sentiment the claim that the PDP is “Ijaw party” saying the only true Ijaw party was the National Solidarity Movement (NSM) formed by the late Chief Melford Okilo.

The former Bayelsa State governor said though the forthcoming election is not about him or his main rival, Governor Seriake Dickson of the PDP, “it is about Bayelsans and the Ijaw people.”

Sylva said he was one of the founding members of the PDP in the state before he left for the APC and described the incumbent governor as a beneficiary of the PDP  having crossed from the, Alliance for Democracy, AD.

“I have said in other fora that none of the parties, either APC or PDP is an Ijaw party, they are national parties. I was one of those who brought PDP into Bayelsa; he (Dickson) was not even a member of the PDP. He was a member of AD at that time.

He was never even a member of the PDP and that is, he doesn’t know that I know the PDP more than him and what the PDP stands for even though I am not a member of that party now.

“The APC is also a national party. The true Ijaw party we had was called the NSM, the National Solidarity Movement, formed by the late sage, Chief Melford Okilo. That party, when Chief Okilo realize that PDP has won the national government he decided to subsumed that party into the PDP because he thought that we cannot survive without the centre.

“So, if we are talking of Ijaw patriot, I consider myself one as I think today that well meaning Ijaw people are quite happy with me because they believe that without me, there would have been no link with the centre, there would have been no bridge builder.

“It is not the Ijaw people that lost the election because Ijaw people did not contest an election, I didn’t see Ijaw people on the ballot. I saw the PDP and the PDP Presidential candidate, who was an Ijaw son, but he lost and we have to carry on in this state, we have to carry on in this country,” Sylva said.