Umahi: Onu Served Our People as Good Leader, I Only Complemented Him

Emmanuel Ugwu-Nwogo in Umuahia

The Minister of Works, Senator David Umahi, has said that he had always regarded the late Dr Ogbonnaya Onu as “our leader” despite their divergent political leanings at some point in time.

Both politicians hailed from Uburu community, had been state governors, and while Onu was a former minister, Umahi is presently a serving minister.

But Umahi insisted that even with his own political attainments, “Onu remained our leader till his death”, adding that he only complemented him.

Speaking with media people on the passage of his kinsman and former Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Umahi said that he was a political disciple of Dr Onu right from the second republic.

“I came very close to Onu when he was contesting the governor of Abia State and I came to see him as a man that was very peaceful and very intelligent,” he said.

According to him, Onu was a likeable person hence “we became his followers because of the kind of qualities he possessed at a very high level of content that young ones like us could emulate”.

“We followed him and campaigned for him for his election,” he added.

Umahi, who is the immediate past governor of Ebonyi State, stated that he enjoyed a very cordial political relationship with Onu at the beginning and “we were his boys, serving him as we all supported him in his first election”.

He said that the support that they gave to Onu was undiluted, extending to his second attempt to become a governor, this time in Ebonyi when he ran against Dr Dam Egwu in 1999.

However, Umahi recalled that he parted ways with Onu after the governorship as both of them did agree on challenging the outcome of the poll in court after Egwu was devlared winner.

He said: “I objected to that(litigation) because I saw Dr. Sam Egwu emergence as divine intervention and I saw the hand of God in his victory as the governor of Ebonyi State. I was not in support of contesting his election in court”.

Umahi said that their political differences widened in 2007 when he left Onu in the All Peoples Party(APP) and joined the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in support the governorship ambition of Egwu’s successor, Martin Elechi.

The two Uburu politicians did not bridge their divergent political differences as they stuck with their own political platforms, even when Umahi became the governor of Ebonyi State.

According to the works minister, his relationship with Onu thawed “when I moved over to All Progressive Congress(APC), Onu’s party, in 2022 and we became one party and began to attend meetings together, that the separated union became united”.

He said that Uburu his community was honoured to have produced two governors in a lifetime, adding that “when I was a governor, he(Onu) was a minister and it was very rare for a community to have a governor and a minister at the same time”.

The former Ebonyi governor said that he held Onu in high esteem, describing him as a man of very good moral, a sound Christian with deep religious virtues and very serious attributes of a good Christian, a good father and a good husband, and a national leader.”

He said: “Uburu, his home town, will miss a very peaceful man; Ebonyi, his state, will miss a very intelligent man and Nigeria, his country will miss a very courageous man who was ambitious to contribute his quota to the development of the country.”