A MANDATE BUILT ON LOYALTY: APP ANOINTS CHIMA AMADI FOR THE OWERRI ZONE SENATE
Owerri, Imo State, 23 May. There was no contest at the Glass House today, and that absence was the point. Inside the Action People’s Party secretariat on Okigwe Road, Ugwu Orji, the party did not fight over its ticket for the Imo East senatorial district. It closed ranks behind one man. Dr. Chima Matthew Amadi, known across the zone as Mazi Gburugburu, emerged as the consensus candidate of the APP for the Owerri Zone seat, and by the time Barrister Obed Agu, the party’s National Organising Secretary and chairman of the Owerri Senatorial District Primary Election Committee, had steered the exercise to its end, the party had bound itself to a single name and a single argument about what the state has become.
The room carried its own weight. Officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission stood as witnesses. The party’s local government chairman was present, alongside a body of executives and members. The national chairman, Barr. Uche Nnadi, lent the occasion its federal seal. This was not a backroom handshake. It was a declaration staged in front of the people whose endorsement it needed.
The seat is also not the whole of the plan, and any honest account has to say so. Through The Mazi Organization, Amadi has declared that he will contest the Owerri Zone Senate seat in the 2027 general elections and the Imo State governorship in the off-cycle vote that follows in November of that year.
The senatorial run is presented as the first move in a sequence, a way to deepen grassroots mobilization, establish a federal foothold, and assemble a coalition before the governorship contest opens. That reframes today’s consensus. It is the opening position of a longer campaign, and it should be read that way.
The strategy carries an obvious risk, and naming it is more useful than ignoring it. A candidate who treats a Senate seat as a staging ground for higher office invites the question of whether he wants to represent Owerri Zone or merely to pass through it. The voters know the difference. Amadi’s answer will have to be the work itself, not the elegance of the plan.
A primary decided by consensus is easy to misread as weakness. The more honest reading is colder. A consensus conserves money a contested primary would have burned, denies rivals an internal wound to exploit, and lets the party enter the general election with one voice rather than the grudges of a beaten faction. The cost is that a candidate who never faced a primary fight has not yet been tested under fire, and that is the only test that counts in the end.
Amadi opened not with policy but with the people in front of him, and he named the price of their loyalty out loud. Many in that room, by his account, could have crossed to larger and better-funded parties and collected what such crossings pay. They did not.
He treated that not as sentiment but as evidence, the proof that the people behind him were moved by conviction rather than the going rate. This is the logic of a smaller party trying to grow. It cannot outspend the machines that dominate the state, so it sells the one thing they cannot, which is belief.
The address sharpened when it reached security, and here the charge was concrete rather than rhetorical. Amadi pointed to the killing of David Onyegbula, a community vigilante cut down by assailants in Umuguma, Owerri West, and he had already carried the point to the family’s door on a condolence visit. He returned it to first principles.
The first duty of any government is to keep its citizens alive, and a government that fails that has failed at the only task it cannot delegate. Then he closed the trap. Money has been allocated for security, he said, and yet the vigilante is dead. The gap between the budget and the body is the indictment, and it points at the party that holds the Government House.
The ground beneath the whole contest is not party. It is geography, and here Amadi stands on solid arithmetic. He hails from Umuekwune in Ngor Okpala, and within Owerri Zone the rotation of the seat is contested at the council level. In the PDP’s own primary, an aspirant argued openly that the Senate ticket was Ngor Okpala’s turn to hold. That is the claim Amadi can press. By contrast, the ruling APC’s choice runs straight against it.
An APP chieftain, Chief Ugochukwu Ndudiri, has condemned the emergence of the APC’s Sir Alex Mbata as a violation of equity, faulting the party for handing the ticket to another aspirant from Owerri North immediately after the outgoing senator’s eight years from that same council.
He does not walk into the general election alone, and the field is heavier on paper than the APP can match. The seat is open. The incumbent, Senator Ezenwa Onyewuchi, who has held it since 2019, has turned toward the governorship rather than a return to the Senate. The vacancy has drawn names built for a fight.
The Peoples Democratic Party gave its ticket, also by consensus, to Prince Eze Madumere, a former Deputy Governor of the state, who saw off Hon. Greg Egu and High Chief Summers Nwokie. The All Progressives Congress has fielded Sir Alex Mbata.
From the Labour Party, the former Ondo State First Lady, Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu, has declared for the same seat.
Against a PDP heavyweight, a ruling-party nominee already accused of breaking the zone’s rotation, and a nationally known figure with no roots in the district, the APP’s narrow path runs through fairness and through the security failure Amadi has made his charge. Both arguments point at the same target, the party in power.
The state chairman, Hon. Njesi Ernest Anayo, brought the primary to its close, and with that the easy part ended. The APP achieved unity in a single afternoon. It now has to convert that unity into reach, money, and turnout against opponents who command more of all three. Today the party answered the only question it controlled. It chose its candidate without a fight. Every question that matters more waits in the 2027 general election, where consensus earns nothing and votes are the only currency that clears.
Anyanwu Glory Ammarachi
Director, Public Relations and new Media for TMO.
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