The contrast between them cannot be more stark.
One is a systems man, until now a dapper figure in western suits. Akwete does it these days. The other forswears formality, even his smile threatens the peace like an overcast sky. He does not wear western suits, but he is always outfitted like a soldier even though in his Igbo attire.
Other than cutting a dapper figure, Chukwuwma Soludo is a man of figures. But Nnamdi Kanu is morphing into a sort of figurine in the souls of his followers. One has the guttural eloquence of a broadcaster. The other a soothing but seductive note of a rabble rouser. One nurtures the vote. The other tortures it.
But when both of them appeared at a photo op not too long ago, it was obvious that the helmsman of Anambra State, Dr. Soludo, rose early to the familiar Mohammedan refrain. If Kanu does not go to Anambra government, Anambra government would go to Kanu. So did the state chief executive visit the detainee.
A contrast, again. The detainee was the chief detention officer of Anambra State, in fact the Southeast region. Down in Abuja, in the wordless silence of his detention room, his region quakes for him. In his name, blood is shed, clerics kidnapped, Monday is quiet, the bushes night and day crawl with marauders, loved ones mourn, loved ones die.
But the governor came in peace, and he extracted the right words from Kanu, a rare smile from the lips of the usually sullen folk hero. When this essayist asked the governor how it went. He said it went well. Kanu said he never ordered the stay-at-home order, never asked for the sanguinary spasms, never called for kidnaps and ransoms.
I asked the governor, is the IPOB chief not playing humble because he is de-toothed by the state? The governor said he was no clairvoyant. He could not read the mind of the man. He was, like myself, being a faithful reporter. He might have reeled out the English bard: “There is no art to find the mind’s construction in the face.” But the heart of man, to quote the prophet of tears, is “desperately wicked, who can know it?” Soludo is not God “who searches the heart. I try the reins.” The Anambra governor has no such lofty, divine self-congratulations. He is no officer in Saint Augustine’s City of God.
One hundred days down the line, the Anambra State governor understands his first task as the chief executive of a state of entrepreneurial brio. For there to be commerce, he needs to have peace. He needed the trip to Abuja. With it, he could not only delegitimise the violence of his streets, he got the anointing for it. From the lips of the man by whom they swore and slaughtered. Soludo does not have to rely on official rhetoric alone. His voice, a boom of the Anambra orchestra, is backed by Kanu’s consent.
Only a few days ago, he affirmed that it was for most part a matter of criminals on the rampage. The state unearthed some criminal lair, but what did they find? Not materials of political subversion, or revolutionary tract. Nothing on Half the yellow sun, or invocation of Adichie absorbing novel of the war. They clutched a book of gory accounting, not the sort Soludo saw while crunching the figures of the nation as a governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The book had records of names of kidnap victims, how much they menaced out of their frightened pockets, how they disbursed. It was the accountancy of the hood, of the blood.
Soludo has taken the war to them, but he knows it is a necessary distraction. He has set many goals, and the criminals have to be out of the way.
He wants to set the energies of the thinker to work. He thinks of Nnewi and Onitsha, and I drew his attention to the need to reach the state’s potential. He once told me and a few editors about a decade ago on how he lamented why Anambra can be elite in entrepreneurs and out of reckoning in internally generated revenue.
This is one of the issues the so-called OBidients have not asked their hero. He was there for eight years, but he is busy encouraging false narratives about his financial prowess, or lack of it. When the Soludo government clarified the figures of his so-called investment, they kept mum on it but continued with glorifying lies and more lies. They need to follow how the work is being done by the former CBN chief.
That is one of the cardinal sights of the man in the saddle. The way he puts it, he wants to set the tone for the markets to modernise. But he must put the right institutions in place, raise the stakes of the environment, and of course secure the peace. He reminds me that it is not just the Onitsha-Nnewi duopoly that is at stake. There are many areas of dynamism to unleash, and he is at work.
It is not just in making the business arena good, but connecting the state to the world, using its airports on its way to commissioning for that purpose, and leveraging its connectedness to the north, south and west. It chimes with his inaugural speech assertion to bring Anambra to the world and the world to Anambra.
It is a heady task, and he has been at it since he inaugurated a high-powered committee headed by the inimitable Oby Ezekwesili that included such iconic names as Pat Utomi and Olisa Agbakoba.
As I noted in an earlier piece, few are as prepared for public office as Gov. Soludo. He has shown the spirit in his first 100 days. There are quite of few more hundred days, and we watch his acts unfold.
NB: Omatseye is a respected columnist with The Nation.
