Last week, a news magazine reporter sent an SMS to me in his professional search for elucidation on the abrupt withdrawal of former governor of Abia State and founding member of the Peoples Democratic Party, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, from next year’s senatorial battle. I swiftly called the reporter and made profound explications on why Kalu had to call it quits. It is only a man with a brain tumour that persists in a conflict in the face of present and clear ambush.
As if our discussion had gone viral, on Sunday, November 30, 2014, a fictive and moronic jester with a nomenclatural pseudonym of Romanus Uwa, smuggled a toxic article into THE GUARDIAN ON SUNDAY euphemistically classified as an analysis! Analytical discipline demands balance and fairness to all parties in a disputation. Beyond this dispassion, we all know the illicit financial component of smuggling, which is far more critical than objectivity in this vindictive circumstance. As an aside, The Guardian of yore would not have published such a diatribe no matter the level of inducement.
The bunkum who purportedly wrote the calumny said he wrote from Aba without properly identifying himself. The fact is the oppositional elements against Kalu are afflicted by cowardice so much that they are afraid to disclose their real identities. They are so fretful because they know that they are on a persecution and falsehood mission. I implore them to be bold enough and courageous by telling us who they are so that we can adequately respond to their interminably invidious outbursts. Using vicious leaflets and other propagandistic channels to foul up the space merely trivializes issues. And I keep telling colleagues of mine in the robust media team of Kalu that we should ignore most of these concoctive and insipid publications because our response will dignify the mercantilist hacks and their financiers.
As should be expected, the Kalu haters who mushroomed from his beneficence have relapsed to amnesia and are declaring that Kalu “chickened” out of the senatorial contest for “fear of being humiliated” by Governor Theodore Ahamefula Orji of Abia State. For Kalu’s vanishing detractors, capital must be made out of everything – both imaginary and real. Last month when President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan was declaring for his second term at the Eagle Square in Abuja, the voyeurs of volleys of lies went to town and stupidly misinformed the public through one jaundiced online portal that Kalu who routinely was abroad had been arrested at the venue by officers of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission! Such is the height of deviancy by the opposition.
As I hinted last week, the truth of the matter is that Kalu dropped his senatorial ambition on tactical grounds. He plays politics with a measure of strategy and contemporaneous realities. A sensible man cannot with clear eyes and sound state of mind walk on political landmines. His strategic withdrawal from the senatorial race was the best decision for reasons that will be adduced presently.
I blame the PDP for Kalu’s withdrawal from the senatorial battle for granting him qualified – instead of absolute – waiver to return formally to the party and to contest the forthcoming senatorial election as the party’s sole candidate for his constituency. This should have been the most ideal and logical step to take. The ruling party’s leadership knows the soured relationship between Kalu and his successor and the questionable political powers they have bestowed on governors vis-à-vis who stands any election in the state – be it the National or State Assembly, their successors and other tangential elective positions. The PDP erroneously believes that President Jonathan’s success in the upcoming February presidential poll depends exclusively on serving governors. How the party arrived at this point remains cloudy to me. The only rationalization I can make is that there must be a provincial manipulative underpinning in our electoral system that only state chief executives can engineer in their respective spheres of influence! Otherwise, it does not forensically add up at all. I stand to be challenged on this.
Considering PDP’s dubiousness on Kalu’s senatorial candidacy and other preceding issues, I do not blame Gov. Orji for Kalu’s tactical withdrawal. The blame rests majorly on the confused party. Gov. Orji is a mere accessory to the fact of the PDP’s duplicitous management of Kalu. The landmines I mentioned earlier were procured by the PDP and generously given to a ready and willing governor to lay on all oppositional paths, particularly that of Kalu in all its essence.
Therefore, with Gov. Orji unilaterally drawing up the delegates’ list for the primaries, singlehandedly, in line with the Wadata veiled mandate, it would have been foolhardiness and politically suicidal for Kalu to have gone into the senatorial competition on such a monstrously annihilative platform. I am certain that those who hatched the exclusion plot knew from the outset (onset, correctly) that Kalu would not go beyond expression of interest and declaration of intent as long as the humiliation scheme was in place.
Let me mention it here for the first time and possibly to the chagrin of my principal. I had always believed since 2011 that the PDP has been playing games with Kalu. And my boss seems not to realize the institutional treachery. When people point the finger at Gov. Orji with regard to the travails of Kalu in the PDP, I vehemently disagree because if the party meant well, Gov. Orji will not be subtly equipped and officially emboldened by the PDP to slyly incapacitate his predecessor in office. It is this political empowerment by the PDP being mismanaged and abused by Gov. Orji that has become Kalu’s nemesis and responsible for his associational vicissitudes and floundering perceptions.
It becomes vexatious when clowns like Uwa embark on their incognito buffoonery by speciously “analysing” the context of what they do not have the cerebral capacity and competence for political ecology to pontificate. The irony is that the Uwas of Abia State and their benefactors know that their adversarial conduct borders on lie blatancy, crass mischief and psychotic brazenness. In the farcical days of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the second republic there never existed this kind of traitorous behavior on needless and unjustifiable political expediency that alienates some key members. Such sacrificial altars should be left for fledgling party subscribers, not a global brand like Kalu whose unflinching and resolute commitment and loyalty to the PDP are unparalleled. Who does not know about this fact?
The faceless and fictitious Romanus Uwa refers to Kalu as belonging to “men of yesteryears (sic)….” Lesson number one: ‘yesteryear’ is non-count. If a youthful Adonis like Kalu could be so described, what terminologies shall we then employ for his senile persecutors and beneficiaries of his political miscalculations? I am sure the clown who wrote the trash published by The Guardian under reference is far older than Kalu and still does errand/messengerial assignations for the establishment which Kalu bestrode illuminatingly, superlatively and incomparably for eight years far back (1999-2007), long before the current pitch darkness!
Another extract from dunderhead Uwa comprising lessons two and three: “The scenario (sic) (wrong context)…which culminated to (sic) (in) Kalu’s recent, sudden withdrawal from the Abia North Senatorial seat race.” There was no suddenness in Kalu’s timely appreciation of the subterfuge and unconventional punctuation of it. In these matters, time is of essence lest the wiles of the enemy camp encircle and constrict you irredeemably. Why procrastinate when you are dealing with devilish foes, murderous antagonists and governmental principalities? Hesitation could be inimical. You need to always be ahead of your traducers and detractors! Keep them perpetually busy with your masterstrokes since they are averse to good governance.
Lessons four to six still from Uwa’s yellowish intervention: “…he (Kalu) quickly fell back on (to) his (the) PPA, under (on) which platform he….” Political associations do not belong to individuals. I am sure the mercenary who paid to get his master’s trivia published in The Guardian, which failed to edit the horrible script due to ignorance, carelessness or shoddiness, has never set his eyes on political party guidelines for registration as enunciated by the INEC. Even Nigeria’s 1999 Constitution (as amended) recognizes political harlotry, just as defection from one party to another is accepted worldwide. I do not understand why and how Kalu’s case assumed a life of its own exceptionally! The unprecedented resistance to Kalu’s formal return to the PDP shortly before the tangential waiver requires sociological enquiry and anthropological investigations.
We move to lessons seven and eight: “In a soft-landing tactics (tactic)…Kalu recently wrote an open letter to the national chairman of PDP announcing his withdrawal from the senatorial race and demanding for (sic) a refund of the money he paid for the form.” ‘Demand’, when used as a verb, does not admit ‘for’—except its noun form! No administrative fees for this scholarship!
The phony Uwa also talks about Kalu’s desperation in his bid to return to the PDP and wonders at his insistence to “cohabit with people who do not want your association.” I am getting tired of this guy’s brainlessness. Associations do not belong to individuals. Individuals—stakeholders or whatever name they bear—belong to associations. Nobody has the right to disallow anyone from being a member. Organisational or group constitutions and, indeed, any other constitution are inferior to a country’s Constitution. If you cannot be accommodative and tolerant of other people’s idiosyncrasies, it squarely rests on you to quit and not try to muscle out potential threats to your grassroots political fiefdom. This, more than any other suspicion, is the choking albatross for Kalu, who is rightly seen as a domineering and dominant person not pliable—or submissive to a tribe of harebrained elders, anaemic and poverty-ravaged stakeholders and other nondescript stomach infrastructural deficient clan of political jobbers on the fringes of Umuahia and its environs.
The final lesson for masked Uwa: “The saying that devil (sic) (evil) thrives where good men do nothing is real.” (No quotations apart from mine and attribution) For the first and last time in this intervention, I agree holistically with pseudonymous Uwa that evil is thriving in Abia State because the few good men, a handful of elders, ungrateful patriots and political rascals and gangsters in the state have compromised, sold their consciences for messy porridge and turned a blind eye to the ruination of our state in the past seven-plus years amid propagandistic legacies that diminish mirage. Photo-shop deceitful manipulations, robotic advertorials, sponsored interview raves, facile supplements and ad hoc media insurgency including abduction, intimidation, clandestine and juvenile proscription of The Sun titles in government offices in Abia State cannot rewrite the history of the prevailing rot and stench in my state (ask multi-billionaire Prince Arthur Eze)!
It is only a question of time before Abians will be inevitably exposed to the stark realities of the present disastrous tenure of Gov. Orji. In rounding off, let Kalu’s persecutors get people with credible and known pedigree and at least average scholastic attainments to do their dirty media jobs and legacy ventilation as mercenaries and mercantilists—not the Romanus Uwas of hellish descent and crass illiteracy profile as advertised collusively with The Guardian on Sunday as the vessel!
For Kalu and his exponential followers, there is a better life outside the senate. And there is always another time after this currency of travesty, with a predisposition to ferocious karmic retribution.
Wabara (ewabara@yahoo.com/08055001948
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