Senator Orji Uzor Kalu has said what many people inside the All Progressives Congress were already thinking, but nobody wanted to say it out loud.
Stop following President Bola Tinubu from one rally to another. Go home. Go to your state. Go to your local government. Go to your ward. That is where the election will be won.
Kalu, who represents Abia North in the Senate and serves as the Coordinator for Parliamentary Mobilisation for the South East, made the call in a short statement he titled “The APC Presidential Campaign Council and the Need for a Leaner Campaign Train.” His message was simple. Let Tinubu move with a small team. The rest of the leaders should stay back and talk to real voters where they live.
The statement did not come out of nowhere. A few days earlier, the Presidential Campaign Council itself had issued a circular to control the crowd around the President. The circular was signed by the Director-General of the council, Senator Abdulaziz Yari, on November 3, and addressed to directors and heads of directorates. It said ministers, political appointees and campaign council members should only attend rallies in their own home states.
That is party discipline. It is not everybody doing what he likes. It is everybody doing the job where he was posted, and staying there until the work is done.
The council explained the idea behind the rule. It calls it the pyramid concept. You start from the bottom, not from the top. Polling unit first. Then ward. Then local government. Then state. You do not start with a big crowd in Abuja or Lagos and hope the votes will follow by themselves. You build it, one unit at a time.
Kalu understands that because he lives it. In May this year, he led more than 4,000 APC members in his own Igbere Ward A, in Bende Local Government Area of Abia State, to vote in the presidential primary. He did not travel to another state to be seen on television. He stayed in his ward. The returning officer at that exercise, Mr. Ulu Onwuchekwa, announced that President Tinubu scored 4,986 votes in the ward.
