Ikechukwu Amaechi takes a look at the Abia State helmsman and Legacy Governor warts and all seven years after mounting the saddle …
His admirers, and they are many, affectionately address him by his traditional chieftaincy title, Ochendo. And he likes the title which was given to him by his native community, Ibeku.
But he has also earned, by sheer dint of hard work, another appellation – Legacy Governor. When he leaves office on May 29, 2015, after two terms as Governor of Abia State, Theodore Ahamefule Orji, the quintessential “home boy in Government House”, will like to be remembered as the man who left enduring legacies in the course of serving his people. He wants a place of honour in the Abia pantheon of leadership, and that is why “I am passionate about all my legacy projects and they are in all sectors,” he says animatedly.
Ochendo goes ahead to categorise the projects into visible and invisible. Both are dear to his heart because they are needed for the Abia of his dream to materialise. Before he assumed office on May 29, 2007, the state was polarised. The elite were at each other’s jugular. The crisis stultified growth and the state was decaying. Orji remembers. “The condition I met Abia was very precarious. Our internally-generated revenue (IGR) was nothing to write home about. I inherited a debt of almost N29 billion and the political system was polarised. Stakeholders ran away, most of them were living in Abuja, some were living in Lagos. When I came into office, we had this issue of Taliban; Abians were calling fellow Abians Taliban. There was no development. The economy was nothing to write home about. There was no structure on which to build Abia.”
Orji should know because he was around in the years of the locust. He was the Chief of Staff to his predecessor, Orji Uzor Kalu (OUK). But in Nigeria’s highly stratified leadership, that amounted to little because the bulk stops at the chief executive’s table.
Breaking the yoke of internal domination and political godfatherism, to Orji, is, perhaps, the single most important achievement because it is the substructure on which his visible legacy projects were erected. He talks about the achievement with nostalgia. Abia is now in the hands of God, he says.
“We have broken the yoke of polarisation, domination and intimidation in Abia. We can now take decisions without unnecessary influence from outside. We have taken the face of Abia towards God and no longer to any effigy. These are certain things that people overlooked which held us down for a very long time,” he says with a big sigh.
Reconciling the people with God means so much to him. For a state that bears the sobriquet, God’s Own State, idolatry should be a misnomer, a contradiction of sorts, an incongruity. But that was the situation before he assumed office, he insists. “Before now, idolatry was rampant in Abia, put in place by the preceding political structure; but with my emergence, we started to seek God’s face, and since we started behaving like God’s own children, things have started turning around.”
Asked if Abia is really God’s own state, a smile breaks on his face.
“Yes, it is,” he says matter-of-factly. “It is the only state that has its name in the bible, Matthew 1:7. That is what is significant about us.”
As important as the achievements with intrinsic value are, Orji says the appellation of Legacy Governor is a tribute to the visible projects he has on ground.
“The legacy governor is a name I have been given by Abians,” he says smugly. And why not, he seems to ask. “I am doing legacy projects that will outlive you and I. They are projects that were not on ground, but were supposed to be on ground before now because they are foundational projects for proper take-off of any state genuinely committed to development. The people knew that there were no legacy projects on ground before I took over; so they know I was the person that put those legacy projects you see today on ground, and that is the reason they call me Legacy Governor.”
And he starts reeling out the projects. “The Government House that we are building is compulsory for every state, but we had none. You can see the gigantic state secretariat we have constructed; we had none before now because we were operating from rented apartments. The International Conference Centre that we are building is of the best standard you can get; that is a legacy project. It will be there for ever. Even when I am out of office, generations will come and ask: who built this? And they will be told that it was Ochendo. The markets that we are building are timeless projects. Is it the ASUBEB (Abia State Universal Basic Education Board) building? Have you ever seen that type of building in Abia before now? It is only now that I am governor that you see cranes in Abia as we see them in Abuja. Just go to Ogwurube Layout and you will see three or four cranes at work because we are now constructing high rise buildings with lifts. The state has become a huge construction site and the people are wondering how we are able to do what we are doing, realising how hopeless the situation was before now,” he said almost breathlessly.
“In these past seven and half years, my achievements have surpassed all the achievements of all my predecessors – civilian and military put together. The evidence is there, very clear. What I have on ground is there to speak for me.”
Then, lowering his voice, as if he didn’t want to be heard, he said: “The secret of our performance is just being focused, determined and prudent.”
Born 64 years ago in Amaokwe Ugba, Ibeku, Umuahia North Local Government Area of Abia State, T.A. Orji has every reason to post a sterling performance as governor. Unlike most other public servants, he has no other place to run to. He is a “home boy” in every sense of the phrase and he is proud of his heritage. If he fails, he will live with the consequences of his failure.
A career civil servant, Orji was there at the beginning when Abia was created 23 years ago (August 27, 1991).
He attended Santa Crux Secondary School, Olokoro Umuahia; Holy Ghost College, Owerri; and obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from the University of Ibadan (UI) in 1977.
After completing his National Youths Service Corps (NYSC) programme in Sokoto State where he was a teacher at the Government Secondary School, Shinkafi, he began working as an administrative officer in the old Imo State civil service in December 1979. He subsequently served in various capacities in the Cabinet Office, Ministry of Lands and Survey, Ministry of Agriculture, and Imo State Government House.
When Abia was created in 1991, Orji returned to Umuahia where he served in Government House, Bureau of Budget and Planning, and Ministry of Agriculture. On March 1, 1996, he was seconded to the National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (NECON), now known as Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Abia State as Administrative Secretary and was later redeployed to Enugu State in 1997 where he supervised the elections that ushered in the democratic government in the state in 1999. Thereafter, he returned to Abia as Principal Secretary, Government House, Umuahia, and Chief of Staff to Governor Kalu.
In December 2006, Orji won the governorship primaries of the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA) to contest the 2007 governorship election in Abia. On April 14, 2007, he resoundingly defeated his closest rival with over 200,000 votes to emerge governor. It is his wealth of experience as a career civil servant and an administrator par excellence that put him in pole position to excel as chief executive. Even his detractors confess that he brought order to governance by creating a sustainable structure.
On August 27, Abia will celebrate its 23rd anniversary. Asked how he feels superintending over the affairs of the state he was a pioneer staff of, he smiles again, this time very broadly.
“The significance of the anniversary, to me, is that now we have a state of our own called Abia, a state that is managed by its own people, by a governor that is the people’s choice; a state that is now free of political godfatherism, a state that is now united, a state that is now focused. Even when you travel, and you remember Abia, you are happy and you want to come back because of the system that is on the ground,” he told TheNiche.
And his happiness derives from the fact that Abia people are no longer melancholic, miserable and gloomy.
“That is what makes me happy. Abians are happier right now. They participate in their own government. They have a say in what concerns them. This is a government that is now touching the lives of all Abia people. So, I feel happy that my people are happier. And that is the essence of governance,” he says with a glint in his eyes as he sat back languidly on his sofa.