A former Governor of Abia State, Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu, is a warrior and people’s delight anytime, any day. Whenever he speaks, he oozes out great ideas without being brutal. He is a powerful politician and businessman. And if he were a soldier, he would have attained veteran’s status.
His debate recently, while addressing newsmen at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos, concerning the Biafra impasse ongoing, exemplified Kalu as a man who would never hijack peace for troubles.
Kalu is a social democrat who would want the rights of everybody and group to be respected as far as such a person or group respects the right of others. This is why he said that the authorities have a right to protect the Biafra protesters, as far as they are non-violent, instead of maligning them.
The dude believed that the protesters should not only be protected, but should also be listened to, in order to avert the emergence of them carrying arms. He said: “If I am president, I will set up either traditional rulers or some political leaders to go and ask the boys what they really want, what is really their problem, what can be done to stop them from asking for this. This is how Boko Haram started killing members of Catholic Church, and as a Catholic, I spoke vehemently against it. I told you airport correspondents that they will finish killing the Catholic and will go and start killing everybody and it happened.”
Kalu reminded one of a speech by a notable man from the South-South zone on the Biafra issue. The person’s speech further elucidated the fact that Biafra has become part of history of the people from South-South-East zones, but regrettably, the Federal Government would not like to accept the glaring fact.
Imagine that a war took place in 1967-70 and parents were moved by scare to throw their children into pit toilets because they did not want their positions to be made known to the enemy. The ‘enemy’ here was the Federal force fighting the Biafrans. The irony was that hardly did the people from the northern part of the country experienced what the man captured in his speech thus.
“I saw devastation; I saw kwashiorkor; I saw hunger; I saw thousands of people and bodies littered everywhere and smelling while vultures had a field day every day. I saw houses destroyed; I saw families scattered such that till the end of the world, they can never gather themselves together again. There were children who were shipped away to Gabon, and they can never come back to Nigeria again because they were small. How would two-year-olds and three-year-olds ever know where they came from? They are now proud Gabonese and I don’t think Nigerians are even asking questions,” part of the speech reads.
These were Biafrans that the speech explained. “So, during the Silverbird Man of the Year Award, there were pictures that were shown of the Civil War. Somebody, sitting by me, who is from the West, was asking if those things were acted: the Kwashiorkor-ridden children with their swollen tummies, ugly shapes and bony structures because of hunger and starvation,” the speech added.
That was how bad the war affected the Biafrans. And today, Kalu was calling on the authorities not to allow the protests degenerate into a war, perhaps, because, it might not be only the Biafrans that would suffer like it were nearly fifty years ago. It’s obvious that the people from the South-South-East zones are in the protests to tell the world the pains of the 1967-70 genocide that the Federal Government of Nigeria carried against them which was erroneously christened civil-war.
The truth is that the people from these zones are warriors and no warrior gives up on what he or she believes so much in. They believe in Biafra so much that they find love in the Biafra. Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu is heroic that he would die for truth if need be. He is inspirational. Decency means a lot to Kalu and he never cheated truth for falsehood. There is a sense of straightforwardness and simplicity in Kalu. His visions have never ended up on cowardice. His message that the authorities should ‘manage’ the Biafra protesters was of utmost importance to realize that it should be done with straightforwardness.
. Obinna is of the Orji Uzor Kalu Media Centre, Abuja.