The governorship election for Anambra State is scheduled for November this year. Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo, of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), will be seeking reelection. He will be completing his first term on March 17 next year, having been sworn in as the governor of the state in March 2022.
The APGA as a political party has governed the state since March 2006, when Peter Obi became the very first governor in the history of Nigeria who retrieved his stolen mandate through the law courts. Therefore, by March next year, APGA would have governed the state for a cumulative 20 years in the present Fourth Republic democratic dispensation.
The major concern for political pundits is whether APGA should continue to retain the state based solely on sentiments or performance. Has the party justified its continued retention of the state, or should the state be connected back to the national political grid?
Before APGA took over the leadership of the state, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) had governed the state for about seven years between 1999 and 2006. Even in the second and third republics, Anambra State was not a lonely state as it is at the moment with regard to political party membership. Should the state continue its loneliness in the comity of states, or should it join the national party this time around?
Governor Soludo, a professor of economics and a former governor of the central bank of Nigeria, came to office with a lot of promise and expectation. However, has he lived up to expectation? The answer is a resounding NO. Soludo has proven the theory that theoretical knowledge of economics is quite different from the practical aspect of it. He has not been able to transform the state into the Dubai-Taiwan economic growth theory that he brandished and parroted during the campaign.
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What Anambra State needs at the moment is a governor who has created wealth in the private sector as an individual. The state needs a practical man and not a theoretician. That’s why the state needs Prince Nicholas Ukachukwu at this point in time to take it to a higher level. Anambra cannot continue to be under the bondage of APGA based solely on sentiments. After all, the founders of the party, like Peter Obi, Victor Umeh, etc., have all left the party. The current tenants of the party do not know how the party was founded, nor do they know where the umbilical cord of the party was buried.
As the November governorship election approaches, the federal government led by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu should lend maximum support to the candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Prince Nicholas Ukachukwu. President Tinubu should not be deceived by Soludo’s recent deceptive loyalty and friendship. It’s an open secret that Soludo, as the sitting governor of Anambra State, neither supported President Tinubu of the APC nor Peter Obi of the Labour Party in the 2023 presidential election. Why then should the APC-led federal government abandon its own candidate and support Soludo in the forthcoming election?
Since both the PDP and the APGA have had their turns to govern the state, this is the best time for the APC to also take its turn. Prince Nicholas Ukachukwu will give an unprecedented transformation to Anambra State if given the opportunity to become the governor of the state. Prince Ukachukwu has a rich pedigree to be trusted with the mandate of the state. He holds the unbeatable record as the first non-indigene to be elected as the chairman of the Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC) and also the first to be elected as a member of the House of Representatives for the AMAC/BWARI area council between 1999 and 2003. By this time, all his fellow contenders for the governorship election could not win a councillorship election. They were yet to be baptised in politics.
Anambra needs a God-fearing governor in the person of Prince Ukachukwu. He is a child of God, and I believe that God has heard the outcries of the people of the state by making him the governorship candidate of the APC, which is the party that rules the country at the moment. Prince Ukachukwu is not a perfect human being, but he’s a good man. My first encounter with him was through my late uncle (Louis Anowai), who was one of his engineers who supervised his housing estates in Abuja. That my late uncle didn’t die a poor man was primarily through the mercy of God and secondarily through the benevolence of Prince Ukachukwu.
Furthermore, the choice of Iyom Senator Uche Lilian Ekwunife as Ukachukwu’s running mate makes the ticket the best in Anambra State. Senator Ekwunife is a grassroots politician who was a member of the House of Representatives, a two-term senator, and a former governorship candidate of the Progressive People’s Alliance (PPA) in the state. No other ticket is as formidable as that of the APC in the forthcoming election.
President Tinubu should not be deceived by Soludo’s latest fake loyalty and friendship. Thank goodness that this time around, the federal government is controlled by the APC. The onus lies with the federal government to use its federal might to prevent Governor Soludo from rigging the election. If the federal government wants to be fair, transparent, and impartial, the least it can do is to prevent any candidate from manipulating the election. Let them go to the field and test their popularity. However, the federal might should not abandon its candidate if the incumbent intends to deploy the incumbency factors by applying state might to muzzle out other candidates, particularly the APC candidate. With Ukachukwu as the governor, APC is guaranteed a massive vote for the president come the 2027 presidential election.
Maduako writes from Owerri via [email protected]
