Dr. Eze Chikamnayo, the Abia State Commissioner for Information and Strategy, who held the same post under Orji Uzor Kalu, spoke to OKAFOR OFIEBOR on the media war between Chief Orji Uzor Kalu, the former governor of the state and the incumbent, Theodore Orji.
Recently there has been media altercation between Governor Theordore Orji and Orji Uzor Kalu, the former governor of the state and his predecessor. Why?
There has not been any media war. What has been happening is the struggle of Abia people extricating their neck from the stronghold of that man, Orji Uzor Kalu.
Does that include the accusation by Kalu that agents of government are planted around his homes in different parts of the country to monitor who visits him and those persons when reported to the Governor are vindictively dealt with?
So, even as we talk, you still take somebody I told you is in political wilderness and still needs help seriously? Now, let me ask you a question….
Okay. Let me answer you by posing a rhetorical question: When 40 human beings were discovered dead in a container and dumped in a refuse bin in Aba under Orji Uzor Kalu’s administration, who monitored him? When two young men were murdered leading to the arrest of his Secretary to the State Government, SSG, chief details and some of his goons, who was monitoring him? When he established “Bakassi” ( a quasi-paramilitary outfit), arming them with sharp knives and unlicensed guns, who monitored him? Before the very eyes of Abians, people were extra-judicially murdered in cold blood on the streets. Who monitored him? When suspected political opponents were murdered without trials, who monitored him? Orji Uzor Kalu is not being monitored by anybody; rather, his conscience is monitoring him. What he is going through is hallucination.
We sympathise with him. We wouldn’t want any serious minded people to take to heart any of his gibberish. If he claims that whenever people visit him in his houses they are monitored and victimised by the state government, does it synchronise? He is telling you that he is recriminating over his loss of grip he had on Abia State. I am telling you about a man who saw a state dedicated to Jesus Christ as God’s Own State deciding to dedicate it to Okija, Nsukka and others, where he took the crème de la crème of his government to swear to oath of allegiance to him and his mother. How would you turn God’s own state into those things and you won’t be hallucinating? So he is under the spell of his own machination. As for the Abia State Government, the Governor is too busy and too focused to the delivery to the people of the state the dividends of democracy to be bothered about an inconsequential political accident like Orji Uzor Kalu.