…Fashola Would Have Betrayed Tinubu If He Were Igbo – Kalu

Igbos who have often blamed the Federal Government for the lack of development in the South-East zone have been told that they have no one but themselves to blame for their woes, a former Abia State governor and businessman, Chief Orji Uzor Kalu, has said.

This is even as he declared that the minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, would have betrayed his political mentor, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, if he were to be a Igbo man.

Kalu made the disclosures in the current edition of The Interview magazine, saying: “Igbos are their own worst enemies,” adding that a number of the elite in the region are not only selfish but also get their politics wrong.
According to the Managing Director/Editor-In-Chief of The Interview, Mr. Azu Ishiekwene, in a statement issued yesterday, Kalu was referring to the fractured relationship between Tinubu and Fashola in the latter’s second term as governor of Lagos State, and comparing it to his own internecine war with his successor, Senator Theodore A. Orji, which led to the extinction of the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA), the party he founded.

“Let me tell you,” he said in an emotion-laden voice, “there were more problems between (Asiwaju Bola) Tinubu and (Babatunde) Fashola, than there were between me and TA (Theodore Ahamefule Orji). But it is the discipline of the Yorubas that kept them at bay. Igbos have no discipline in terms of politics. They are very good traders; they’re good in anything they do, but they don’t understand politics.”

In the interview, described by Ishiekwene, as “the political equivalent of the ogbunigwe (Biafran improvised explosives),” Kalu illustrated his point with a conversation he claimed to have had with President Muhammadu Buhari, who wondered aloud why previous high profile Igbo appointees had done nothing for the region.

Kalu also spoke on the agitation for a state of Biafra and the travails of the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra, Nnamdi Kanu; his relationship with former President Ibrahim Babangida and former Governor Ikedim Ohakim; the recent statement of former Governor Peter Obi; and allegations that while he governed Abia for eight years, his mother ruled.