The state PDP chairman noted that there was no way Kalu could have been registered a week after the ward executives had resigned and submitted party documents in their possession. “If they gave him (Kalu) any card, it is fake,” he said, adding that the serial number of the cards issued to members in Igbere Ward A starts with “95” whereas the card purportedly issued to Kalu has “97” as the first two digits. Besides, he pointed out, brandishing a membership card was not enough to qualify anyone as a PDP member, but that the person’s name must be in the party’s register.

Soon after that, the leadership and stakeholders of PDP in Bende Local Government Area held an emergency meeting and refuted Kalu’s claims. The meeting, which was convened “to put the records straight” on Kalu’s purported return, was attended by those in charge in Bende PDP. They included the two state legislators from Bende, Princewill Onyegbu, Bende South, and Ndukwe Ojukwu, Bende North, as well as the chairman and secretary of PDP in Bende, Eke and Oji Idika.

In the three-point communiqué signed by 47 persons, the leaders and stakeholders declared that the PDP in Bende “has not changed its position nor lifted the embargo on the readmission of Chief Orji Uzor Kalu into PDP in Bende.”

Similarly, members of the state House of Assembly faulted Kalu’s bid to return to the PDP fold and adopted a resolution at a plenary session where they refuted Kalu’s allegation that they told him that they were not getting anything from the government of Orji, describing the allegations as “blackmail and blatant lies” aimed at causing disaffection between the state legislature and the governor.

On the heels of the renunciations by the Abia PDP, Governor Orji led chieftains of the party in the state to the national secretariat of the PDP in Abuja, to confer with the party’s national working committee on the issue. The national vice-chairman, South-East, of the party, Col. Austin Akobundu (rtd.), who read the position paper of the Abia stakeholders on the re-admission of Kalu to the party, submitted that such return would undermine the peaceful co-existence and camaraderie existing among party stalwarts in the state. He cautioned that any attempt to readmit the former governor would return the party in the state to the battlefield of hostilities.

Akobundu further noted that Kalu’s readmission to the party would be inimical to the growth of the party in Abia, asserting that the former governor was not an asset to PDP: “Since his exit, PDP in Abia State has gone round the crisis and emerged from those experiences as an entirely different entity which today celebrates a prevailing atmosphere of unanimity, being relieved of the common source deep seated animosities and resentment.” Akobundu also pointed out that Kalu’s exit was the rallying point in reconciling aggrieved members and setting the party on a sound electoral footing, but cautioned that if the rumours making the rounds that Kalu was making surreptitious moves to be readmitted into the party’s fold were correct, then there would surely be cataclysmic consequences for the party in the state.