President Bola Tinubu is not just a leader who sits inside the Presidential Villa, waiting on his aides to supply him information on the state of things in Nigeria or relying on reading security reports alone, but actually ventures out alone at night to gather first-hand information, which equipes him with adequate knowledge in that regard......See Full Story>>.....See Full Story>>
This startling revelation was made on Thursday by Orji Uzor Kalu, former Governor of Abia State as he tried to put up a strident defence for the government of the All Progressives Congress (APC), the ruling party under which he was once former Chief Whip of the Senate, and to underscore what he believes was the President’s continued effort to deal with the parlous state of the economy.
Kalu, like Tinubu, a member of the class of 1999-2007 governors, was emphatic that the current situation in the country was not peculiar to Nigeria, saying the rest of the world, was also engulfed in one financial crisis or the other, only that because of their structured economy, which Nigeria did not have there was little noise about them.
Swearing to a robust friendship with the President, Kalu, a guest of Politics Today, a current affairs programme on Channels Television, told his host: “I’m concurring with what Steve Orosanye said that we don’t need these much (ministries, agencies and parastatals). If you want to hear, I have also told President Tinubu that we don’t need these much. But the man is under fire because he is working day and night to see what he can do.”
He also spoke of his closeness with Tinubu, thus:
Host: He’s your close friend
Kalu: Yes!
Host: Are you still very close?
Kalu: Yes!
Host: You’ve resolved your differences?
Kalu: We’ve no differences. We’ve never had differences. I don’t know where you’re getting this news. Before he travelled, only two days before he travelled he was in my house. So, what shows friendship?
Elaborating on Tinubu’s penchant for being at home with relevant information on the feeling of Nigerians, Kalu, added: “The President himself knows that Nigerians are suffering and hungry. He is a street person; he knows the street very well. The president some nights uses his car to go around and know what is happening in Abuja here.”