The President Blessed Them Both. Now Watch Them Fight. By Chidi Ekeh
The President Blessed Them Both. Now Watch Them Fight
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How Tinubu’s favourite management tool the ambiguous mandate has turned Abia APC into a demolition derby, with 2027 as the prize and nobody in charge of the steering wheel
On the morning of Monday, April 27, 2026, two of the most powerful APC politicians from Abia State sat down — separately, in different locations, apparently without speaking to each other — and posted remarkably similar things on Facebook.
Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, former governor, billionaire, the man who built Enyimba into Africa’s finest and his own conviction into a procedural technicality, announced that President Bola Tinubu had given him “the confidence and the marching order to coordinate activities in Abia State” for the APC. Deputy Speaker Benjamin Kalu, the second most powerful officer in the Green Chamber, announced with equal serenity that President Tinubu had “reemphasised” that in states without an APC governor, “the highest-ranking political office holders like the Deputy Speaker” should take charge of party affairs.
Both men thanked the President warmly. Both men claimed the mandate. Neither mentioned the other.
The President, for his part, said nothing publicly.
He rarely has to.
This is not, at its surface, a story about two politicians squabbling over a party chairmanship in a South-East state the APC does not even govern. If that were all it was, we could file it under “Abuja noise” and move on.
But this is something larger. This is a live demonstration of how President Tinubu manages loyalty — and what happens to a party when the man at the top is more invested in keeping powerful figures dependent on him than in building institutions that function without his personal arbitration. It is also, and this part matters enormously ahead of 2027, a story about how APC is actively dismantling its own chances of winning Abia before a single campaign rally has been held.
These two things are connected. They are, in fact, the same thing.
Let us establish what we know precisely.
Abia State has been governed since 2023 by Alex Otti of the Labour Party — a man Orji Uzor Kalu has publicly described as “a joker” and “a one-term governor,” and whom he has told to “write his will” because the APC is coming for his seat in 2027. The Senator is not given to understatement. He has also declared, with the confidence of a man untroubled by arithmetic, that APC will sweep every single elective position in Abia in 2027 — governor, three senators, House of Representatives members, state assembly seats. All of them. “We are not leaving any position,” he said in March.
This is the same APC that, as of last Monday, could not agree on who is in charge of the party in the state.
Benjamin Kalu’s argument is constitutional in structure. The APC framework, as he reads it, places state party coordination in states without an APC governor in the hands of the highest-ranking federal office holder. He is the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives — the fourth constitutional officer of the Federal Republic. In Abia, he is the biggest APC card on the table. The logic holds.
Orji Uzor Kalu’s argument is historical and hierarchical. He is the most senior former governor alive from Abia State. He has been in Abuja’s corridors longer than most. He has delivered for the party — or claims to — and Tinubu, he says, knows this. He styles himself “the most senior governor in the state.” As a title for a man who left Government House in Umuahia nineteen years ago, it is an interesting choice. But in Nigerian politics, the past is always on the ballot.
Within hours of both posts going live, the Abia APC Publicity Secretary — who reports to the state party structure that Benjamin Kalu controls — issued a statement declaring Benjamin Kalu the “undisputed leader” of the party in the state. It warned that anyone else “parading themselves” as leader “does so at their own risk.”
The warning was not addressed to Alex Otti. It was addressed to Orji Uzor Kalu.
This is the point at which the Facebook posts became a war.
But let us be precise about what is actually driving this.
Beneath the constitutional arguments and the competing Tinubu endorsements is a simpler, older story: the 2027 APC governorship ticket in Abia. Whoever controls the party controls the primaries. Whoever controls the primaries determines the candidate. And the candidate Orji Uzor Kalu wants is not a mystery — his brother, Chief Mascot Uzor Kalu, has already paid ₦50 million for the APC governorship nomination form.
Benjamin Kalu, meanwhile, has spent recent weeks touring all three senatorial zones of Abia. He visited Orji Uzor Kalu himself — a courtesy call that must have been a masterpiece of controlled tension. In Isiala Ngwa, when crowds urged him to run for governor in 2027, he did not say no. He said: “I have received your request,” and promised to respond at “the appropriate constitutional venue.”
In Abuja, that sentence is a declaration of intent with plausible deniability attached.
So what we have is this: one man wants to run his brother for governor. Another man may want to run himself. Both are from Bende Local Government Area — the same constituency, the same political roots, the same network of loyalties that must now be divided between two competing claims. And the rest of Abia — Aba South, Umuahia North, Ohafia, Arochukwu, Isuikwuato — is watching two men from one local government try to allocate the entire state’s political future between them.
Appetite, in Nigerian politics, is not a sin. Unbounded appetite, with no institutional check, is simply another word for disorder.
And yet the richest part of this story is not in Abia at all.
It is in the Villa.
I have watched this pattern long enough to recognise it. President Tinubu does not, as a rule, create clarity where ambiguity serves him better. The managed rivalry — two powerful figures in the same space, both dependent on his favour, neither strong enough to move without his blessing — is not an accident of communication. It is a method of control. Keep them competing. Keep them calling. Keep them loyal to the centre because the centre is the only place the dispute can be resolved.
It works. Until it doesn’t.
Because what the Villa calculates in private does not always survive contact with Facebook. What reads as strategic ambiguity inside Aso Rock reads as leaderless chaos outside it. And the people who pay the price for that chaos are not the two Kalus — both of whom will retain their federal offices, their convoys, and their access to the President’s diary regardless of how this resolves. The people who pay are the APC ward chairmen in Aba South who do not know whose directive to follow. The House of Assembly aspirants who cannot raise campaign funds without knowing whose structure to align with. The party faithful who were told, confidently, that Abia was winnable in 2027.
It may still be. But not like this.
A party that cannot answer “who is in charge?” in April 2026 has no credible answer to “who should govern Abia?” in November 2027.
Alex Otti, for his part, has already responded to this entire spectacle. He called the opposition — Orji, Ikpeazu and the rest of the gang — “empty barrels.” It was dismissive. It was also, given what we witnessed last Monday, difficult to argue with on the available evidence.
There is a pattern here that extends well beyond Abia, and Nigerian political watchers would be unwise to miss it.
The APC is the ruling party of the Federal Republic. It governs the Executive. It holds the Senate. It holds the Green Chamber — its Deputy Speaker is, in fact, one of the protagonists of this very crisis. And yet in state after state, the party’s internal architecture is a maze of competing mandates, unresolved congresses, and factions that cohere only around the President’s name — not around any shared programme, ideology or governing vision.
When the President’s name is the load-bearing wall of your party structure, what happens to the building the day after the 2027 election?
Power in Abuja is not always taken by the strong. Sometimes it is simply abandoned by the disorganised — left in the road for whoever arrives at the scene with a clear head and a united column.
In Abia, Alex Otti is watching two men fight over the key to a house they do not yet own.
He is not worried. He is taking notes.
–Chidi Ekeh, a current affairs analyst, writes from Abuja. chidiekeh@yahoo.com
