Orji Uzor Kalu not endorsed for senate president

BY CHNINYEMIKE TORTI

Recently, some self-conceited partisans went to town speechifying and preachifying the unwary that Senator Orji Uzor Kalu had been endorsed by the south-east caucus of serving and new senators-elect as their preferred candidate.

In order to give their nebulous press release a veneer of credibility, they concocted a communique listing the names of senators-elect from the south-east.

Confirmed sources say some of the senators were not even in the country when the meeting was held. A cursory look at the photograph will show who was at the meeting and who was not.

The said document, amongst other issues, referenced Senator Godswill Akpabio’s selection by his party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), as preferred senate president of the 10th senate as being tantamount to the continuous exclusion of the south-east from the commanding heights in the polity.

The bogus communiqué allegedly claimed that the south-east senators excoriated Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu for wrong-footing the principle of equity, unity and fairness to the tripod of Nigeria’s Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba and the geopolitical zones.

The truth of the matter is that the informed critical mass in the south-east perceives Orji Uzor Kalu’s bid as not a derivative of his capacity, competence or loyalty to the substratum, and values of Ndigbo. Rather he is an embodiment of a political philosophy that is alien to us.

Most community and opinion leaders in the south-east are in congruence with the view that Orji Uzor Kalu’s antecedents will not fly to meet our aspirations.

During the presidential electioneering campaigns, he treated and subverted our group aspirations in preference for his strange bedfellows.

An Abuja-based public policy analyst recently said that he is very happy with the APC arrangement that locked out all the APC senators like Orji Uzor Kalu and Governor David Umahi, who had hoped to clinch the senate presidency by throwing Ndigbo under the bus.

As far as the people of the south-east are concerned, “we don’t want distraction. We are building bridges”.

This comment is believed to be an aftermath of the 2023 presidential election, during which some notable politicians from the zone said that Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) was wasting his time and that the south-east was not ripe for the position.

Politics apart, many persons believe that the south-east since 1999 has had more than its fair share of five senate presidents that did not rake in dividends of democracy to the region. They were all yanked out of office with ignominy.

This time, we in the south-east earnestly seek to restore the presidential mandate and not the third fiddler position of a senate president.

Given his antecedents, all the key stakeholders in his Abia North senatorial district have refused to endorse him.

Chninyemike Torti, a public affairs analyst, writes from Enugu.