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Orji Uzor Kalu Can Not Be Serious
By Uche Nworah
Author of
The Long
Harmattan Season
I really admire
this guy’s guts, hate him or love him but the very
ambitious
Dr Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK for short), the executive
governor of Abia state does have a way of affecting your
sensibilities; he simply wears on you, or rather creeps
under your skin with his antics.
In the days when
every other governor was sucking up to the resident
tenant at Aso Rock to ensure their political survival,
OUK it was who fired a poisonous salvo and threw
missiles at President Obasanjo (OBJ) culminating in the
now
infamous interview with Omoyele Sowore in which OUK
accused OBJ of corruption and called him a killer in
addition to other unsavoury names. Obasanjo in turn
retaliated and hit back where it hurts, he revoked the
operating license of SLOK airlines, one of the companies
belonging to OUK.
Before the
father-son relationship between OUK and OBJ turned sour,
the president had during a visit to Abia state nicknamed
OUK the action governor, but that was then, when OUK
used a the-more-you-look-the-less-you-see trickery on
Abia indigenes. He had tried to tag on former governor
Dee Sam Mbakwe’s coat tails of road construction,
but unlike Mbakwe who used Monier Construction Company (MCC)
and Reynolds Construction Company (RCC) for most of his
road constructions, OUK opted for Elite Construction, a
fly-by-night outfit belonging to him. Elite quickly
rented moribund bulldozers which it positioned in
strategic locations in the state thus creating the
impression of work-in-progress. In the few roads that
were eventually built, only below-par materials were
used and the results became evident only after a few
months, the famous Abia rains flushed away the
substandard road surfacing along with any hopes Abia
residents had of redemption but by that time OUK had
already secured another 4-year term.
Worse hit is Aba;
the commercial city of Abia state which eventually
became the rubbish city of Nigeria. The indigenes
wallowed in filth by day and dodged armed robbers’
bullets by night leading to a situation that many people
including Eziuche Ubani, the This Day columnist
described as a
meltdown in his Friday back page column. And what
did their governor do? OUK ‘abdicated’ his duties as the
Chief Security Officer of the state and chose instead to
write to his arch enemy (OBJ) for help. Aso Rock
laughed, the people watched in bewilderment while many
others succumbed to the hopelessness of their situation.
OUK and OBJ’s love
hate relationship continued; perhaps with the intention
of teaching the younger OUK a lesson, OBJ set the EFCC
after him and his mother,
Mrs Eunice Kalu whom the governor had elevated to
the status of Mother Excellency, the title she bore
until her sudden disappearance from the scene having
previously gone into hiding from the EFCC.
But the questions
sill is; what makes this young man of my generation
thick? For sure we can not fault him for lacking brevity
and courage, in fact he has those in plenty but his
undoing may lie in the fact that he only applies such
cherished virtues when it concerns only his personal
interests, else having risen to power he wouldn’t have
reneged on his promise to Abia people, especially Aba
indigenes. As an Aba boy or Aba Brought Up (ABU) as we
are wont to call those of us born in the Enyimba city,
he did not deliver and would be leaving Aba worse than
he met it. We should have been campaigning for him but
we are not and that is indeed a shame. He has not given
us enough to work on, we trusted him with the little (Abia
state government treasury) and he disappointed, how
then can we trust him with the national treasury?
It is such a pity
that the story of this Igbere man whose rise to riches,
fame and political prominence should have inspired
millions of other youths in Nigeria to greatness and
even spurning off Nollywood films, but instead it has
become a mocking example of what might have been.
As the
presidential candidate of the PPA, a paperweight
political party by every standard, one need not look
into the crystal balls to see that both the party and
their presidential candidate are not going anywhere in
the May 2007 presidential elections, but such
embarrassments will not be new to OUK, a man that rose
to national prominence in 1985 when he allegedly donated
the sum of 500,000 naira at the University of Maiduguri
fund raising event but who ‘made good’ his promise by
sending instead cardboard boxes stuffed with used
newspapers, when confronted later, OUK exonerated
himself from the debacle and claimed that the boxes were
tampered by his messengers.
What should be
OUK’s fate after 2007? He must have worked it out by
now, one way or the other, heads or tails he would still
win. He has been busy building bridges in the north and
we thought he was stupid all along. He has cushioned a
soft landing for himself because with power predicted to
be going back to the North in May 2007 by soothsayers,
and with OUK having been widely acknowledged for
reconciling Ibrahim Babangida and Muhammadu Buhari, one
could see that OUK will be safe and sound should the
Northern Oligarchs have their way again in May. We
should not be surprised if OUK is found lurking around
the corridors of power in an unofficial capacity post –
OBJ. Of course there is always his SLOK business empire
to rebuild, many of which have suffered and benefited
from his 8 year stay at government house Umuahia.
We will still
expect OUK to eventually come round to telling us what
went wrong with the dream, what ever happened to the
promise of making Aba the Taiwan of Africa? Not that we
would have cherished such an accolade since Taiwan’s
days as an economic and commercial hub has waned, but
still we may not have minded, didn’t our elders say that
half bread is better than none at all. Also he may need
to convene all the industrialists and budding
entrepreneurs in Aba who have since relocated to other
towns and tell them why the factories in Abia state
decreased in numbers under his watch. Such promise, such
waste!
Those that will
write OUK’s legacy including
Ohaneze Ndigbo surely would wish to include his love
for sports and support for Enyimba FC as some of his
achievements which is all good. Looking closely, perhaps
the failed attempts at player transfer in the
international market may weaken any arguments of good
intentions on his part.
So what happens
next in Abia state?
Ngwa people may argue that it is their turn to
produce the next governor, a struggle that has consumed
their son
Dr Chima Nwafor, OUK’s late embattled deputy. They
had hoped that Chief Chuku Wachuku, an Ngwa man would
fulfil that yearning. Only time will tell but perhaps
that may still remain a dream, not with the likes of Aso
Rock - anointed Onyema Ugochukwu seriously warming up to
step into OUK’s small-sized shoes.
As per OUK, Abia
people would be wishing that his era blows away so
quickly, like the proverbial ill wind.
* * * *
*
The writer is
an ABU and his new book
The Long Harmattan Season is out now. February 2007.
info@uchenworah.com
posted 10 February 2007 |
