Obi’s government is a disaster- Obele Chuka

It is no longer news that there is no love lost between Peter Obi government in Anambra state and Chuka Obele Chuka, the fiery Onitsha legal practitioner and former chairman of Nigeria Bar Association (NBA) in the state.

It is common knowledge that Obele Chuka, among other activists, doggedly fought for the restoration of Obi’s stolen mandate, a gesture which Obi himself never seizes to admit. But the centre no longer holds between the two erstwhile soul-mates. The past few weeks have witnessed an unprecedented media warfare (in which the duo had hauled verbal grenades at each other).

What has gone wrong between these two former ‘good friends’? And where is this face-off leading the state?

It has to be pointed out that Obele Chuka Obele is no stranger to political fights like this. On the platform of his Onitsha bar between 2002 and 2003, Obele battled former Governor Chinwoke Mbadinuju to a stand-still. Indeed, Obele’s anti-Mbadinuju’s crusades, especially, wth regards to his (Mbadinuju)’s alleged killing of the Igwes stands as a major reason Mbadinuju lost out in his second term bid in 2003.

Is a similar scenario playing out in Obele, Governor Obi feud? Only time will tell! Recently, Obele gave an insight into his face-off with Governor Obi of All People’s Grand Alliance (APGA). Obele, among other things, alleges that the administration of Obi is both a disaster and a huge fraud. You must not have read this elsewhere.

Having been in the fore front of human rights activism, how would you assess the state of human rights in Nigeria, particularly, in Anambra state?

Let me limit myself to issues of Anambra state for now. We have a crucial battle to rescue our people from the misgovernance of Governor Peter Obi of Anambra state- Nigeria. In Anambra, the present government did not only embargo employment, it is not also creating jobs it covenanted in his campaign brochures to use to fight crimes. The only attempt at creating jobs is the purchase of few mass transit mini buses and the terror machine known as Anambra State Traffic Agency (ASTA). Obi’s government unleashes the agency on hapless citizens to extort sundry illegal levies. ASTA and other Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) agents have constituted themselves into monsters which employ Gestapo tactics to terrify the citizens in the name of generating and hitting the N1billion monthly revenue benchmark set out by the state government.

Health wise, the situation is alarming. Doctors in Anambra are on strike, the second time in 9 months. And our Governor says he does not know why they are strike. Only God knows the number of persons who have lost their lives as a result of the doctors’ strike. Primary health-care in the state has virtually collapsed, and that is part of the reason the doctors went on strike. Go to the General Hospital and see the huge fraud that Peter Obi calls kidney dialysis centre. The building is collapsing and no single equipment is there.

People are trapped daily in horrible traffic snarls as a result of neglect of our road networks or shoddy rehabilitation of roads.

The lives of Anambra citizens have become, if you do not mind, miserable, nasty and brutish.

Education in the state is parlous. Even Agulu Boys Secondary School, located in the governor’s hometown, and his alma mater, St Joseph’s Boys Secondary School in Aguleri, are in a decrepit state. Agulu Boys was the best college in infrastructure some years back. Take a visit to the school and you will shed tears. Number of students per class is averaging 55. None of the workers was paid his/her salary last December.

Water Corporation workers are yet to be paid since Peter Obi came into office, and they are starving to death. Over 40 have died, over 20 bedridden by stroke.

Anambra State Environmental Protection Agency (ANSEPA) workers are owed over 22 months salary arrears, as well as other entitlements.

Awka, Nnewi and Onitsha are dirtier than Peter Obi met them.

And it is obvious that there is no pipe borne water in this state.

But why attack a Government you risked your life to recover its stolen mandate and to enthrone. KlinReports remember that you led a city wide protest in 2003 in Awka during which you miraculously escaped being killed by soldiers guarding the INEC office at Awka. In 2006, you dared a large number of mobile policemen and soldiers to confront and object to the former Chief Judge Chuka Okoli’s inauguration of the impeachment panel. Why the sudden turn around?

I risked my life for our society which includes me, my children, you and your kids. But I am, also, a strong believer that one is a true friend if one looks you in the face and tell you where you err. All that I am saying now, I have told the Governor Peter Obi in private. In 2008, I walked out of his work plan presentation at Sharon Hall, Onitsha and told him to leave former Governor Chris Ngige alone and go to work. Immediately this was published, he sent emissaries who came to my office. Some others called me on the phone – all to arrange a meeting with the governor, for settlement. My response was consistent: ‘Please ask him to go to work and use our money to give us quality development’. I was getting embarrassed on a daily basis everywhere I went by glaring evidence of wishy washy jobs being celebrated as achievements. I never knew Peter Obi or even heard his name in any circle until he entered the governorship race in 2002. I was never his friend in the real sense of the word, but what, perhaps, brought us together was the false declaration made by INEC that Ngige won the 2003 governorship election and my personal resolve, as had always been the case, not to allow that false declaration stand.

Could you respond to the allegation by Peter Obi’s government and its agents that you’ve taken up this fight against the Governor because he refused to appoint you attorney general and commissioner for justice of the state as compensation for your role in working for his emergence and sustenance in office?

This allegation is the surest sign of a dying regime. It has never been my habit to seek favors. I am an iconoclast of sorts. No doubt, Obi was always courting me, laboring always to tell people that I am his friend because he was the direct beneficiary of my modest struggle, alongside other activists and well meaning Ndi Anambra, to reclaim the stolen mandate. Then, I was a huge role model to him whose integrity was unimpeachable, and he never sponsored me and my integrity rubbed off on him. Today, I have become little Chuka Obele, that is how the advertorials he sponsors against me in the papers describe me, because according to him, Ngige is sponsoring me. I do not blame Peter Obi because it shows how petty he is, and that explains the pedestrian level he has brought down governance. I had rejected even gifts he offered me including cash before he became Governor.

When did you start observing these alleged short-comings of Governor Obi?

I must say that I started noticing some of these character traits of Peter Obi before the impeachment saga. Three months in office, I called him and expressed my dismay over his abandonment of roads started by Ngige. He claimed he knew what he was doing. But the notice of impeachment was a turning point. When I saw the items of offences listed by the pro-impeachment lawmakers and met the governor, I told him that he was guilty of most items in the impeachment notice which included what most of us who stood for the people’s mandate had been telling him in private- do not abandon roads started by your predecessor; stop giving preference to Fidelity Bank; do not save our funds in the banks while our people suffer; release allowances of members of the state legislature (N3m naira approved by his predecessor); stop awarding sensitive contracts to your friends who have no capacity to execute them; stop smearing your predecessor even on church pulpits; cease eulogizing former President Olusegun Obasanjo to high heavens. In fact, during the church service for the late justice Egbuna at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, Onitsha (this was before his impeachment), I stood up to leave the church when he mounted the pulpit and started ‘bad mouthing’ former Governor Ngige in spite of my advice. It took the intervention of a senior colleague in the Bar who is his lawyer to hold me back even as he, also, said he had advised him against it. I remember I reminded Governor Obi of his campaign vow to do 100 km of road annually. In fact, a coalition of human rights groups under my co-leadership had sent him a comprehensive memo detailing our misgivings with what we thought was his slow pace of governance. I ensured that the memo was delivered to him personally, because had it leaked, we would have been accused of supplying the ammunition for his impeachment. I told him pointedly even as I rejected a suspicious N500, 000.00 he offered me as a condolence token for my father’s burial in the night of October 16, 2006 (the day the notice of impeachment broke), that he was the one who provided the ammunition for the enemies of the state to annul our mandate, and that he should fight the battle alone. He assured me he had the total support of Obasanjo which made me laugh. The same night, I pondered over my decision not to be involved in the looming skirmish and told myself that posterity would never forgive me if I stood by and watched the lawmakers who had ulterior motives to succeed. I told the Governor the condolence token was an inducement to help him fight against his impeachment, because when he paid his condolence visit the previous day, he never gave nor promised to give me any such token. The governor gave either N5, 000.00 or N10, 000.00 condolence token to my family. I pointedly told him off for thinking he could cheapen and reduce my decision to fight against the impeachment in naira and kobo. In fact, I was so angry that I stopped taking his calls. So, it is surreptitious for the governor to sponsor his party chairman to do advertorials in newspapers, claiming that I rejected the N500, 000.00 because I considered it too meager for what I did at inauguration of the Kangaroo panel. Or, that I became angry because the governor refused to make me attorney general of the state as compensation for what the government described as my unsolicited grandstanding during the inauguration of the panel. My father was buried on October 13, 2006 and the rites ended on Sunday October 15. The Governor paid his condolence visit on that last day being October 15. A day after, 0ctober 16, the impeachment notice was initiated by the House. It was the same Monday that the governor called me after the solidarity rally and offered me the N500, 000.00 which I rejected as constituting an inducement. Even the Governor knows that I have a wider interpretation of the words, ‘bribe, gratification and inducement’. The Kangaroo panel was inaugurated on October 30. It was, therefore, absolutely impossible for me to have rejected the N500, 000.00 offered on October 16, as being meager for a condolence token in view of what the governor called my unsolicited act that took place on October 30. Again, by the time the panel was being inaugurated there was a sitting attorney general who had been appointed with my support because the governor called me to make a choice between two candidates. While I chose one, the governor preferred the other but later accepted my choice. And this attorney general was performing the duties of that office well for only four months by the time the impeachment saga broke. The governor was removed about four days after my so-called grandstanding. So the question is, would I have expected the governor to dissolve his about four month old cabinet to remove his A.G. whom I proposed and insisted on his appointment, for the him now to appoint me into the same office? Or would I have been expecting a governor who was impeached about four days after my grandstanding and who remained in political wilderness until February the next year to have appointed me his attorney general in exile? How can N500, 000.00 be a meager sum for a burial token. Even by the time I set out to filibuster the inauguration of the kangaroo panel, I was not on talking terms with him as I discovered gradually that he was always talking ill of people around him.

How do you mean?

If I tell you what the governor said of certain persons including current members of his cabinet and his legal team you will never respond to salutations from them. He was literally painting everybody black only to deny it if confronted in the presence of his victim. At one time after his return he invited me to Agulu and I went with my former partner who was to contest for the house of Assembly election. At Agulu, he flaunted a document claiming to be evidence of Etiaba’s embezzlement of N38 billion he saved, and employment of more than 2000 Nnewi indigenes into the government in her three months as governor and solicited our organization’s support to convey the information to Anambra people and to publicly support his tenure determination suit. When I requested for a copy of the document, he merely read out typical Nnewi names and said it was a sensitive document. During a particular period, I stopped taking Peter Obi’s calls because I was growing weary of his dishonesty, and as a result of my growing concern of his capacity to deliver on the huge expectations of people like us. It took the call made by the governor through the cell phone of his friend who was then my client, Chief Chris Emoka, and the latter’s pleas, for me to talk to him after a long while. This was during the impeachment saga. By that time, he was broken physically, spiritually and emotionally, and had discovered that Obasanjo and Andi Uba were behind his impeachment. That was when he made another wrong move by reaching out to the pro impeachment lawmakers to offer them money to avert the impeachment. I advised him, when he sought my view, against it knowing that it had gone beyond the lawmakers demand for their N3 million entitlements, but he said the lawmakers interest was money and their demand was N20 million each, and that he had also settled the Chief Judge with N60 million which he (C.J) demanded. About four days after delivering the second and last installment of N20 million per legislator, our governor was impeached. When I visited him in his hotel he was weeping and apologizing that he never heeded the advice of well meaning persons like me. He swore in the presence of a friend I took along, but who he is now using to malign me, that should he return back to office, he would depart from his old ways. Peter Obi broke down in tears. Sadly, when he returned he persisted in his old ways and, in fact, grew worse day by day. The same man who asked his deputy, Ma Etiaba, to take over to avoid the then Speaker from taking over as Acting Governor, turned round to accuse the old woman of betrayal, and went on to sponsor stories in the papers that she embezzled N38 billion he saved before his impeachment. He, also, refused to file the tenure determination suit as soon as he took office. I only discovered the reason when I learnt that he had entered into a pact with Andy Uba and Obasanjo to have Ngige removed through the courts with an understanding that he would serve for the unexpired residue of that four year term and make way for Andy Uba in 2007.

It is laughable for Peter Obi to allege that he offered me N500,000.00 as compensation, a man who gives all his security details N200.00 daily for their meals and who is alleged to be taking the entire so-called monthly security vote of N150 million to his personal account.

I really do not think that Peter Obi knows what he is doing. How can he fall so low as to sponsor adverts that I belong to secret societies and occult church, when he attended the opening of our church branch in Awka. Let me tell you, each time I hear people discuss Peter Obi’s membership of Seadogs and Ogboni Fraternity as the cause of his poor governance, I rebuke them on the ground that there is freedom of association and religion. Secondly, I know of members of Ogboni Fraternity who were honest and competent administrators, governors and premiers.

What could be said to be the origin of this face-off between you and Governor Obi.

The much he did upon his return from his unlawful removal was to call me on the phone offering N5m to be a plaintiff in a suit he wanted filed to have Andy Uba disqualified from contesting. I felt insulted and told him off. He told me he had arranged and paid Abuja based lawyers who would file the papers in my name because his lead lawyer was campaigning for Andi Uba to become governor and that he did not trust him. He called the President of ASA –USA and top APGA leadership to persuade me which also failed. I do not want to say, for now, the many ugly propositions of the Peter Obi which I rejected.

It is my hope that the next governor will probe and determine who burnt the Governor’s Lodge at Onitsha. But one thing is certain: the governor’s allegation that it was burnt by Andi Uba is absolute falsehood.

When the Water Corporation pensioners brought their predicament to me, I wrote the governor but he gave no heed. When I heard his argument on the matter on television, it flew in the face. I suspected he was playing pranks.

I took the matter before the House of Assembly for investigation. I was shocked to learn that the House had approved, in 2006, the sum of N805million naira for the payment of all arrears of salaries and pensions of the affected workers and retirees in 2007. To my greatest shock, on the floor of the house, the governor’s special adviser, Engineer Nick Obi, admitted that the N805m was kept in the bank since, and that the Governor was arranging to give out the money as a loan to a private federal contractor to revive the Water Corporation. It will surprise you to learn that till date that money is still lying in the bank accumulating interest and the loan is yet to be given and the workers are dying everyday. And the interests are yet to be accounted for. And the bank is trading with this money.

Over 40 staff and pensioners have died since 2006. A woman staff starved to death in her room. Over 14 are bedridden, lacking money to buy medication.

There was a case of the woman shot by soldiers who were ordered by the Governor Obi to shoot and kill members of the Movement for the Actualization of Sovereign State of Biafra (MASSOB) for which he (Obi), on television, promised that his government would pay compensation. I wrote him in connection with that, but he started playing pranks after replying my letter. It became apparent that he wanted to either create the impression to the widower that I was the cause of his non payment or here was a con man at his worst.

What are other instances of your disagreements with Peter Obi’s government?

As months went into years I observed the propaganda inclination of the government. Let me put it on public record that the only demand I made of the present government when it took office were four, namely, Good governance, comprehensive take over by the state of the upkeep and education of the three orphans of my chairman, B.C. and A.B. Igwe, re-naming of the street where they were butchered to death by Mbadinuju’s Bakkassi Boys, and recommending them for a posthumous national award. This was in March 2006 when he sent an emissary inviting me and then Chairperson of Civil Liberties Organization (CLO), Emeka Umeagbalasi, to the lodge to make an offer of appointment which, of course, I turned down. In fact, I had also requested him to empower the CLO Chairperson whose business had virtually collapsed as a result of his commitment towards retrieving the stolen mandate. Prior to this, in fact three days to the Court of Appeal Judgment, the governor sent his confidant, a reputed Agulu man, to sound me out on taking the A.G. appointment. I flatly rejected it and gave my reasons. The man asked me to recommend who the A.G would be. My question on how Obi knew he was going to win even before the day slated for judgment was never answered to my satisfaction. The same reasons I gave to his confidant was accepted by the governor when we met him in the lodge.

I am hugely disappointed with Obi’s government because everywhere I go I am embarrassed by our people who verbally assault me for what they consider as my sin in contributing to its emergence.

I learnt Obi has budgeted over N60million to print leaflets and produce tapes to sustain their smear campaigns against me. It is as bad as that. It shows the level of the person who calls himself a governor. My happiness is that my strident criticism is compelling him to rehabilitate, even though poorly, some roads in Onitsha city, to award contracts for the upgrading of his Pentium 1 Pcs to Pentium 3 and to reverse himself that he would not pay water corporation staff and so on. But we must watch him on the water corporation matter so that it will not be a conduit for any diversion of Anambra money.

Even his Agulu people have vented their spleen by destroying one of his campaign billboards and completely defacing another all located in the heart of the town. This government is an unmitigated disaster. My greatest worry is that this government is becoming a huge fraud.

Why did you say so?

Not only that the government is not performing, it is elevating the art of deception to a tool of governance. How will Peter Obi’s government package itself as performing when it is not? And use our hard earned money and scarce resources to project achievements that are un-existing or, at best, white elephant projects and procuring pseudo activists to parrot its so-called achievements. If the totality of what the governor and his so-called activists supporters are parroting constitute the achievements which cannot be up to N20billion then we must hold him to account for the over 120billion that has accrued so far to the state since he came into office.

Governor Peter Obi has always prided his administration as following due process and the rule of law. So, how would you reconcile the abuse by his agencies and these instances you have mentioned?

Peter Obi has never prided himself as one whose governance is predicated on the rule of law. It is President Yar’Adua who claims and, in fact, trumpets that. It is beyond dispute, however, that the present governor is a beneficiary of the rule of law. But in the three years of his governance, he has done the opposite. Where will I start?

Let me start from the markets. Go to all the markets and their associations, which in the main, are Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs), the governor has directly interfered and ensured that elections are not conducted in the market associations on the flimsy, lame and provocative excuse that the conditions are not conducive. Peter Obi is so unpopular that any time the elections are held, his preferred candidates whom he hopes to use for his second term campaign would be trounced. Like in the case of Local Government Election, he has imposed interim committees on all the markets. As I speak, the situation is very tense in the markets. I believe any moment from now the markets may close down in protest against the governor’s direct interference with the markets. I have lost count of the number of court orders which directed Peter Obi’s government to hold council elections in the state and restrained his appropriation of the council funds. I must be frank: am hugely disappointed by the governor. Is there any due process in a governor who uses all the state apparatus and resources personnel and properties of the State to campaign for his second term in office? The other day it was reported that Governor Peter Obi’s wife spends about N10m from the budget of the Ministry of Women Affairs on each of her tours out of the 177 communities. What I want the EFCC to immediately move in to investigate is if such an expenditure of public funds by one who is neither elected nor appointed into a government is allowed under the law. If not, the tour and the attendant expenditure must stop and a refund made. Multiply N10m by 177, it gives us over N1.7billion wasted on a second term tour! Let me be frank with you, EFCC needs to investigate the current notorious allegations of round tripping of government’s funds between contractors, some top government officials and Fidelity and Intercontinental Banks. EFCC should investigate the flying allegations of massive embezzlement of local government funds by the executive arm.


On a final note, Peter Obi has come, and like Mbadinuju, will soon pass away, only leaving behind bad memories for Ndi Anambra. My other worry is that Peter Obi will end up worse than Mbadinuju. What a tragedy!