“Now with the Government House, we’re breaking the 34-year-old jinx. As I said to you, here you are in the Governor’s Lodge in Amawbia. It’s in a different town from Awka, the state capital. When the state was created in 1991, this was supposed to be where the Chief Judge would live and I think the Military Administrator commandeered it as a temporary place.

“The Government House happened to be the yard for the construction company that built the Enugu-Onitsha Road, where they used as their construction yard and their office. That’s where they decided to use as a temporary office. And for some reason, the government got stuck there as well – in this makeshift arrangement.

“And when we came, we thought if we’re going to build the Dubai-Taiwan-Silicon Valley, there has to be a place called Government. So, we are intentional in developing what we called The Three Arms Zone, where you now have the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Government House, Governor’s Lodge – everything – all facilities there.

“As you go on that eight-lane boulevard, you will feel this is the centre of government. As for who would inhabit it, we’re building to last. We’re building for generations like you have the White House, built more than 200 years ago. We are building for a thousand years to come, the people of Anambra, will have a home, where they call their home as their Government House.”

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These were the exact words of Charles Chukwuma Soludo, Governor of Anambra State, on Monday March 17, 2025. It was a response to a question posed to him by Reuben Abati, versatile journalist and one of the major anchors of The Morning Show, a breakfast programme on ARISE NEWS network.

Abati was among the four journalists he hosted to a media chat as part of the celebration of his third anniversary in office, where he gave account of his three-year-old government, particularly the update on his Dubai-Taiwan concept, the pillar on which his administration is founded.

Now, for anyone not casting the net too far, the immediate reading derivable from the governor’s narrative, is that the Three Arms Zone, that magnificent edifice now reportedly an eye-popping picture, was his creation. This is an outright falsehood or at best well-intentioned untruth or mental dishonesty.

That particular project, has seen about six other governors before Soludo. Each of these governors, starting from the military administration, under which it was conceived had added one brick here and another rod there before the arrival of the incumbent.

What Soludo has done, or is about to do is to complete it. Now, need the governor not acknowledge this singular fact even if he was to take full ownership eventually? Therein lies the issues around the entire gamut of that encounter on Monday, in terms of what it was meant to achieve.

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Not a few believe that contrary to the impression that the parley was put together to showcase the governor’s real-term achievements within the period – an exercise very important to Anambra people home and abroad as well as other interested audiences, it was a contrived scenario to hoodwink the unwary.

Clearly, both the host and his visitors seemed to have struck a perfect setting for achieving a predetermined goal. There was clear evidence of attempts to serenade the governor towards making a pitch to capture the soul and spirit of his listeners that even a non-initiate would not fail to spot from the style of questioning.

More like the art of touching a partner at the right spot during a coital activity, it was indeed interesting watching the way Abati particularly danced around with eclectic prose before finally putting the question about the Three Arms Zone, for instance and how a receptive Soludo, chuckling with excitement, went into a voyage of self-glorification and pure adulation.

Anyone listening to him could have believed that every spot in Anambra is dotted with Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, and that at night, the streets transform into a galaxy of glittering stars from the skyscrapers similar to what Taiwan have become well-known.

But residents of the state and people conversant with its affairs, know that Anambra is nowhere near the alluring picture Soludo painted at that forum. Granted, he admitted that the process has not yet fully matured, but with what he has got so far, it would be a miracle to gift Anambra a Lagos or Abuja, even if he spent the next 20 years at the rate he is going, not to talk about a Dubai or Taiwan.

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Outside individual efforts from private citizens exploiting the immense opportunities prevalent in the state, the input of the Soludo government, does not appear to be as industrious or far-reaching as the claims he is making. If anything, the government is still very tall on flowery ideas and dwarfish on actual delivery.

Of course, it is expected that people would naturally cut a politician some slacks given that it is almost an agreeable art within their fold to bamboozle the public with beautiful pictures of their intents in seeking political power. Nobody, would therefore have blamed Charlie Nwa Mgbafo, if only he added a pinch of salt here and there.

But to add a bucket of sugar and a hunk of honey comb in the narrative he regaled that all-Yoruba crew from Lagos – save for one of them, said to have been selected from the Anambra Broadcasting Corporation (ABS), Awka – for obvious reason with, was far beyond the acceptable level superfluity.

In other words, for anyone who truly knows the subject matter in Anambra under Soludo, the claims he made in that encounter not only tapered towards the obscene, but even criminally so. The state is nowhere near the lofty picture the governor painted it.

But, this is not to take away that Soludo has added some bits and pieces, odds and ends to the infrastructural architecture of the state. Of course that is expected. Even Chinwoke Mbadinuju, considered by many as the worst governor the state has produced so far, did not leave it the way he met it.

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Ostensibly, because the selection of that crew was quite deliberate and the governor or his handlers must have intentionally gone for those who could not ask some hard questions, being blank on what the real issues were, the governor simply had a field day, feeding his visitors with some seducing tales.

No doubt, if the governor actually wanted to create the real picture of Anambra under his care as opposed to using that forum to achieve other personal ends, he would at least diced the arrangement with some local journalists.

Perhaps, as it has become the practice these in recent times, his intention was to mingle with the Big Boys. But outside Awka, there are a surfeit of such people with local names including Amaechi Anakwe, the anchor of Focus Nigeria, a prime breakfast programme on African Independent Television (AIT), who is even from Anambra.

But then, travelling that route could mean that the real questions that bother the people would probably be asked. Perhaps, Soludo did not need anyone to interrogate him for instance, on why his late frantic, wild and frenzied effort towards the security of the land is coming in an election year.

Only a few months back, Emmanuel Obimma, a Catholic priest in the state attempted to make a mincemeat of  him. The cleric even went to the extent of calling him a “reprobate spirit” for abandoning the people in the hands of merciless criminals. The obvious question from an informed mind, would be where was this magic wand he is now waving at the time Anambra became a killing field that caused the cleric and others to move against him as late as December last year? Did it mean enough people had not died to enable him so move?

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Yet! An informed journalist would have asked him whether the case of Okechukwu Akanaeme, former Chairman of the Onitsha Chamber of Commerce (OCC), who has remained in a vegetative state since last year, after men said to work for Anambra State Waste Management Authority (ASMATA), broke his spine with a pestle. Perhaps, if the questions posed to him included such disturbing case of pure dark-age tactics of local revenue drivers, he might have seen the need to be less adulating and looked at the picture differently from the alluring story of his fairyland Anambra.

He would have been asked if he had heard or seen videos of some henchmen practically torturing, maiming and crippling citizens with ako-odo – a specific local brand of pestle in use by these toughies used for all manner as official enforcers – in any part of Dubai or Taiwan, as many Anambra people daily experience.

Was it not quite interesting that in that two-hour encounter, nobody raise any question about the Owere-Ezukala Three – the three young men pulled from the site of a building they were working as artisans and gruesomely murdered in the same manner as the notorious Apo Six?

Unlike that incident, which shook Nigeria and parts of the world in 2005, in which the innocence of those five Igbo traders and one of their girlfriends was proven by a commission of inquiry, the case of these three men, who incidentally were indigenes of Soludo’s Isuofia community, has remained subsumed in a rather imprudent and offensive official silence that seems the trademark of the government.

If anything had been done to bring a closure to the unfortunate incident, the governor and his handlers obviously seem to believe that nobody outside their circle ought to know. But an informed journalist, unlike the Lagos crew, would have asked all the same. Incidentally, the case in question, sadly appears not isolated.

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Regrettably, new cases of indiscriminate shooting of citizens by the new security outfit now seem to be diminishing the much-touted successes of the outfit and belittling its impact. In fact, on the same day Soludo was regaling his visitors with exotic account, a video showing the body of another young lady reportedly felled by the bullets of the Agunechemba operatives, was on public display.

The victim was said to have been killed as the men fired indiscriminately while returning from an operation in Mgbakwu, Awka South Local Government Area of the state. Such recklessness! Such insensitivity! Hours earlier, another victim had been confined in a hospital after the same men reportedly shot him deliberately over disputes that had to do with riding a motorcycle without papers.

Yes! Soludo did not end his titillating story without chest-beating about how he would win his reelection. To him, the question would not be the nature of the landslide victory he would create, but whether this time, he would lose any ward in the state.

Naturally, nobody is likely to doubt him. After all, even an imbecile knows how elections in the country are won and lost. If Soludo actually wants every single vote recorded to his name in the forthcoming election, what would stop him? It would naturally depend on how much farther he could dip his hands in his pocket to get it.

What would make it so difficult in a country where a sitting governor, who supposedly won an election could not pronounce the monetary figure contained in his state budget. What could be more telling than that about the country’s electoral system?

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It is true as he said that his party still won overwhelmingly after his inelegant and insensitive, if not senseless dart at Peter Obi on the heels of the 2023 presidential election. Let him say so with his full chest, would he have attempted that if he really believed that his re-election would be based on the ballots instead of pleasing the powers outside Anambra?

His comments is even a confirmation that he knows that his envisaged victory, willy-nilly might not be about how the people feel now or by November 8, 2025 when they file out for another election. He would be a daft to think so, which he is not.

Okay, since he feels he is quite popular, why has he not developed the same courage to say anything against President Bola Tinubu? Or is he not an opposition governor, who ought to be attacking the policies of a government his party would be angling to take over from?

Yes! Since he has lined Anambra with gold and would definitely win every ward in the state, let him as much as make a whimper about anything against the APC or Tinubu and see where that gets him. He dares not. Instead, it would be his remit to promote the fart from the Presidential Villa in Abuja, no matter how smelly as the most enchanting aroma in the world.

So, Soludo should spare his audience that laughable line. What is important is the quality of that Monday encounter with the media quartet. Did it pass the test of credibility? Did it create the true picture of the reality of a possible Dubai-Taiwan tomorrow or ever? Or was it an opportunity for Charlie Nwa Mbafo, to put on display his globally-acknowledged and time-tested prowess for scholarly delivery of hyperbolic ideas that got him his current job in the first place?

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