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Ever since the Senate Chief Whip, former governor of Abia State and supranational entrepreneur, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu—one of Africa’s 50 richest men according to credible and respected Forbes international magazine—defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC), it has been serial bedlam and interjectory hoopla.
On copious occasions thereafter, I have had to come up with explications and elucidations concerning the epochal development in Nigeria’s political evolution. Yet, some incorrigible chaps persist in amplifying their blissful ignorance in public domains. As an emeritus editor, I get astonished and utterly embarrassed when I see such asininities in standard newspapers acclaimed nationally.
There is need for specificity in these matters—not just drunken blanket petitions and frivolous probabilities (“may cause”).
These anti-Kalu children and their expiring paymasters need to be civilized: in politics, there will always be disagreements, agreements, alignments, realignments, defections, garrulity, antagonisms, gobbledygook, combativeness, rancour, reunions, friendships, unity and divisions, enmities, misquotations, squabbles, pugilism, rambunctiousness, betrayals, treachery, fixations, suspicions, distrusts, fisticuffs, backbiting, backstabbing, ingratitude, hatred, love, denials, rebuttals, fatalities, fatalistic tendencies and other innumerable untoward and unwholesome manifestations.
Overall, there are no permanent friends, but fixed/stock interests. Therefore, to childishly say or fear that Kalu’s inalienable comeback to the PDP family would have had the potentialities of igniting or reigniting any of these domestic elements of our brand of democracy is to advertise shallowness!
The misbegotten youth also talked about Kalu “reintroducing politics of division in Abia”. I will not expend my precious time on this non-issue except to call the attention of these boys to a full-page advertisement in major national newspapers of October 30, 2014, including DAILY SUN (Page 9), by Abia Senators’ Caucus of the National Assembly, Abuja, entitled “Petition Against Illegal Congress/Primary Election Committee in Abia State”. Is this exemplar a creation of Kalu? Where then lies the phony unity? The scales are belatedly falling off the eyes of our representatives and they are beginning to see clearly the truck-loads of lies, deception and dubiousness that characterize Abia PDP and its vicious leadership.
Another gangster deceit by the youth wing: “The Youths (unnecessary capitalization and ‘youths’ or ‘the youth’) were (no longer?) insistent in (on) their rejection of the admittance (no, re-admittance) of Orji Uzor Kalu.” Are these boys members of the PDP NEC and NWC to dogmatically prescribe entry, exit and re-entry parameters in the party? In a sane society, can these characters look Kalu in the face for whatever reason? I can understand the leadership grouse about Kalu in the state, but where do I place these boys in the entire scheme of politicking and intrigues? Are they equally detractors of Kalu and over what? Even if anyone sends you to commit patricide, must you do it no matter the recompense?
Still on the infantile deviancy from the boys under reference: “Orji Uzor Kalu seems (an efficacious dose of uncertainty!) to have fraternized with those who are in opposition with (against) PDP more than any person living or dead. There are ominous signs (suspicious realm!) everywhere that PDP’s political enemies are his friends.” Who are these political neophytes and kindergartners?
Pre-eminently, Kalu is a nationally-known pan-Nigerian with friends and associates across all the country’s six geopolitical zones: he is at home in all places. No apologies for this. In any case, these messengers should be educated on the norms of democracy to wit that there are no more associational Berlin Walls or ideological rigidities/obstinacies in politics globally. The current trend is that it is a thin line between one party and the other. What matter most are the people—not the platforms. And this explains why the Constitution allows defections and political party mergers. In fact, if there was independent candidacy, Kalu would be in the forefront.
These boys also quoted the personal opinion of my friend Ochereome Nnanna which contradicts Section 36 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended) on freedom of association in morbid support of their ludicrous advertorial. No columnist has the right or freedom to challenge/question or misinterpret any part of the Constitution no matter the grounds or subject. The moment we allow this kind of subjective effrontery and journalistic rascality, the society becomes irredeemably endangered, if not doomed. If anyone is disenchanted with the laws of the land, there are cumbersome constitutional methodologies for amendments and reviews. Nothing else is acceptable!
At the risk of overemphasis, Kalu is the only political asset in Nigeria that is grossly misunderstood, most mismanaged, rabidly maligned, viciously mud-slung and ruthlessly misperceived to the hilt! His political sagacity, clout, envious entrepreneurship, local famousness and international popularity have combined to be his antithesis where his jealous hypercritics tread vanishingly!
In rounding off, my gladness, always, is that Kalu incontrovertibly has more inestimable political (and economic) value than all his opponents in Abia State PDP put together! The national leadership of the party is conscious and cautious of this irrevocable fact and unimpeachable point! And the rich history of the party’s early beginnings is not lost on them, too—the futility of amnesic recreations and disruptive emergence of transient power drunks who satiate in pre-occupational blame-game and buck-passing arising from bohemianism notwithstanding!
With Kalu in the Senate as Chief Whip, the ruling party will soon reaffirm that the eagle has landed with an Iroko joining them.
As I had consistently avowed, murderous calumniation and demonization of Kalu through mechanistic and sponsored advertorials, bizarre analyses informed by professorial naivety, hack interviews in the print and electronic media, character assassination via libelous leaflets and other specious and provincial publications in the South East (and Abuja for strategic reasons), withdrawing his honorary degree certificate which has been duly revalidated by a competent court, futilely demystifying him, planning to attack The Sun offices and printing location in Aba and its environs, among other clownish stupidities, do not and cannot vitiate his senatorial ace.
Ludicrous miscreants who in their imbecilic idiocy declare that my defense of Kalu is essentially to justify my pay must be suffering from psychoanalytic contagious disorder! What else am I supposed to do? It is only buffoons who will question our relationship and my critical stance on the rape of Abia from 2007 to 2019 on the waterbed inadvertently inaugurated by my assiduous principal for his ungrateful stooge and successor. I have the conviction that Kalu will make a difference in the Senate. People from his Abia North constituency are already feeling his impact in just four months of his senatorial ace.
Concluded
