REJOINDER: FAMILY FIRST, CONSTITUENCY LAST: Obi Aguocha Has No Moral Ground To Lecture Anyone On Dynasty, Having Spent 3 Years And 9 Months Feeding His Own Kitchen With No Scorecard To Show – By Mandate 27 Group 

REJOINDER: FAMILY FIRST, CONSTITUENCY LAST: Obi Aguocha Has No Moral Ground To Lecture Anyone On Dynasty, Having Spent 3 Years And 9 Months Feeding His Own Kitchen With No Scorecard To Show – By Mandate 27 Group

A rejoinder to the article titled “The Audacity of a Failed Political Dynasty: After Years of Influence, What Did the Orji Establishment Deliver to Abia State?”

We have read your piece, and we must admit that it lives up to its title. The audacity is real, but it belongs to the author. Only a man with a short memory and a thick skin could lecture a whole constituency on family influence while standing in the middle of his own family arrangement.

Let us deal with your central question first. You ask what the Orji establishment delivered. The people of Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South do not need a lecture to answer it. They have seen the boreholes, the electrification across many communities, the scholarships, the empowerment programmes and the mini stadiums. These are not slogans or flyers. They stand on the ground, and they were delivered by Rt. Hon. Engr. Chinedum Enyinnaya Orji, a former Speaker who used his platform to bring dividends home. His record is open for inspection, and he has never hidden from it. He is simply asking the people to send him to the Green Chambers to do more, because he has done it before.

Now to your favourite excuse. You say a legislator is not the Minister of Works and cannot be blamed for every abandoned road. Nobody said he awards contracts. But advocacy, budget interventions, oversight and pressure on ministries and agencies are the very tools a legislator carries. In 3 years and 9 months, where is the evidence that those tools were ever used? You have spent paragraphs telling us what your principal is not responsible for, and not one line telling us what he has actually delivered. A scorecard is not written in excuses. It is written in projects, locations, dates and figures, and so far the page is blank.

Since you have chosen to preach about dynasties, let us go there together, and let us be honest.

Dr. Aham Uko, the in-law of Hon. Obi Aguocha, is a former commissioner who served under the PDP administration in Abia State. He sat inside the very system that your camp has told this constituency was wasteful and rotten. Today, the same Dr. Aham Uko is the LGA coordinator for the Labour Party governorship campaign. The man from the old order is now the face of the new politics, and he is always exonerated, always welcome, and never once described as part of an establishment. Why is a family connection a crime in another man’s house and a virtue in yours?

It does not end there. Uzo Uko, another member of the same family circle, was imposed as the councilor in the incumbent’s own ward. The immediate aides of the representative all come from his own kitchen. Here is a man who represents three Local Government Areas, a constituency overflowing with qualified, brilliant and hardworking young people, yet his circle of trust ends at the gate of his compound. Is that the openness and fairness you are selling? Is that the new politics?

This brings us to the challenge, and let it be clear that the challenge is still open. The bragging rights are valid. Former Governor T. A. Orji can stand tall and boast about what he did in Aguocha’s own kitchen, and Rt. Hon. Engr. Chinedum Enyinnaya Orji can do exactly the same. Both are able to point to works in the very home territory of the incumbent. The big question is therefore simple. Can Aguocha do the same in his own kitchen too?

Note that we are not even asking him to account for the constituency at large, though the people are entitled to that. We are narrowing it down to his own backyard, his own immediate surroundings, the place where he should be strongest. Let him show one project, one road, one borehole, one school or one empowerment scheme that he personally attracted and delivered there. If he can, we will say so. If he cannot, the answer is simple, and we can give it on his behalf: he is a failure.

Let us say it plainly. A man who has turned his legislative office into a family cooperative has no right to point at any other household. You cannot attack a family establishment from the inside of a family establishment, and you cannot demand a scorecard from others while yours is missing.

So, in the absence of a record, and in the presence of these facts, the incumbent should be cautious, and his naive supporters should be more cautious still. What looks like politics is fast becoming political madness, where a man throws stones from a house of glass and then wonders why the windows are cracking. Those who are close to him should pay attention and advise him well, because the voters are watching and they are counting.

The challenge stands. The floor is open, and the people are waiting for his list.