By Austin Ogwuda
Labour Party governorship candidate in the March 18, 2023 general election in Delta State, Hon Ken Pela says he was happy that the Court of Appeal Abuja Judicial Division has ordered that his petition be returned to be heard afresh.
The verdict of the Court on Thursday was earlier misinterpreted by a section of the press, painting the picture that the Appeal Court had unseated Governor Sheriff Oborevwori thereby declaring him (Pela) winner.
That misinterpretation actually rattled a lot of Deltans particularly those sympathetic to the governor while there was mild jubilation among the ‘Obidients’ (members of the Labour Party)
Jubilant Pela told the press that he was happy about the order for retrial.
According to him, ” pre-trial hearing started after it had been adjourned for one or two days to complete all the processes and everybody had responded to the pleadings and all the issues, only for the lawyers of one of the respondents to stand up on the day of pre-trial hearing to say that we had abandoned our petition because we had filed our application for pre-trial hearing before it was due to be filed and as such our petition had been abandoned.
“How they can say that our Petition has been abandoned when everybody was responding to all the issues in court, I do not understand and when judgement was given against all logic, against us, we determined to go on Appeal.”
“We (Labour Party) basically are happy with the decision and we are going back to the Tribunal. That petition wey dem dey fear since…dem go face am.
“So we are going back to the tribunal to start our petition that they’ve been afraid to hear and we hope that within the next six weeks before the 180 days are completed, we will complete the process”.
He however noted that a new tribunal might be set up to hear the matter since this present one may have been deemed to be biased and while speculating that the tribunal might also sit outside Asaba too.
Recall that the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) officially announced that Oborevwori won the governorship election with a total of 360,234 votes to defeat his closest opponent, Ovie Omo-Agege of the All Progressive Party (APC) who scored 240,229 votes.
Ken Pela of the Labour Party came third with 48,027 votes, while Great Ogboru of the All Progressive Grand Alliance, APGA came fourth with 11,021 votes.