How Kalu built not only roads but students who’re now leaders

• By Dr. Violet Akifagbowo

If you grew up in Abia between 1999 and 2007, you remember the buzzing. The new roads being pushed through Aba traffic. The first time government money actually bought desks for a classroom.

The feeling that something was moving, even if it moved fast and messy. That was the Orji Uzor Kalu years. And if you tell the story of Abia politics today without saying his name, you are skipping the first chapter.

Kalu who is today a senator, was governor of Abia State when Nigeria’s Fourth Republic was still learning how to walk. The country had just returned to civilian rule in 1999 after years of military government. People were tired of waiting.

They wanted roads, jobs, light. Kalu came in at 39, one of the youngest governors in the country at the time. He did not come with a long CV in government. He came with a business background, a trading mind, and the belief that a state could be run like a project you had to deliver on.

Leadership is easy to measure when you look at one man’s name on a plaque. But real leadership shows up years later, in the faces of people you never expected to see in power. That is where Kalu’s story becomes bigger than his time in office. Because beyond the office he held, he spent two decades identifying young people, pulling them close, teaching them how the system worked, and pushing them forward. He did not just occupy space. He made space for others.

Walk through Abia today and ask simple questions. Who gave this commissioner his first job in government? Who told that local government chairman he could run? Who stood behind the legislator when nobody knew his name? Again and again, the answer comes back to one man.

Many of the political figures who have shaped Abia over the last twenty years either worked directly under him, learned inside his political structure, or got their first big chance during his administration. He built a school, but the classroom was government.

Take the commissioners who served in the early 2000s. Take the advisers who drafted policy memos at 2am. Take the local government chairmen who first learned how to manage a budget because Kalu’s office gave them the chance. For many of them, it was not about loyalty to a party.

It was about access to a mentor who would answer their calls, correct their mistakes, and let them fail without throwing them away. In politics, that kind of access is rare. Most people guard the door. Kalu opened it.

Even those who later took different political paths crossed his road at some point. Dr. Alex Otti, the current governor of Abia State, had a professional relationship with Kalu during his years in banking. Otti was a rising executive at the time, and Kalu was a governor who understood business.

Their paths crossed in conversations about how to bring investment into the state, how to talk to banks, how to think about money beyond government allocation. That meeting of minds did not make them political allies forever, but it shows how wide Kalu’s network ran.

He talked to traders in Ariaria Market. He talked to bankers in Lagos. He talked to young graduates who had ideas but no platform. He believed talent could come from anywhere, and he acted on that belief.

It is hard to tell the story of modern Abia politics without mentioning his political structure. For years it functioned like a training ground. If you wanted to understand how elections were won at the grassroots, you spent time around his people.

If you wanted to know how to move a project from paper to pavement, you watched his administration. Whether you ended up as a commissioner, an adviser, a council chairman, a House of Assembly member, or a political appointee, the odds are high that your first break had Kalu’s fingerprints on it.

He did not create clones. He created opportunities. The people who passed through his system went on to disagree with him, compete with him, and even oppose him. That is how you know the mentoring was real. He did not raise followers. He raised leaders.

The influence did not stop at Abia’s borders. When Nigeria was putting together the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, at the end of the 1990s, Kalu was in the room. He has said many times that he was one of the early financiers who believed the party could hold the country together after military rule.

Records and interviews from that period show he put over N500 million into the party’s formation at a time when money was scarce and the future was uncertain. He also contributed more than $1 million to the presidential campaign of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo in 1999.

Those are numbers he has repeated publicly over the years. Whether you like PDP or not, that was a moment when a few people decided to bet their resources on democracy coming back to stay. Kalu was one of them.

Money alone does not build a democracy. But in 1999, money helped print posters, rent halls, move people, and keep the lights on while the idea of civilian rule was still fragile. Kalu’s contribution was part of that story. He was not just thinking about Abia.

He was thinking about Nigeria. He believed that if the center held, the states would have room to breathe. That belief led him to take risks that many politicians at the time were not willing to take.

People argue about his style. Some say he was too bold. Some say he moved too fast. That is normal in politics.

Disagreement is part of the game. But disagreement should not delete history. A society that pretends its builders never existed will keep making the same mistakes. We have to be fair, even when it is uncomfortable.

If a man put young people forward, if he funded a democratic party when it was fragile, if he gave thousands of people their first taste of public service, those facts matter. They do not erase criticism. They sit beside it.

There is an old saying in Igbo: ingratitude is worse than witchcraft. It sounds harsh, but the meaning is simple. When you forget the hands that lifted you, you lose your memory. And a people without memory cannot plan a future.

That is why we have to talk about Kalu’s role honestly. Not as worship, not as attack, but as record. Because history will judge every political actor by one question: what did you leave behind?

•Violet Akifagbowo writes from Australia.