THE DISHONESTY OF DEFLECTION: Obi Aguocha Cannot Hide Behind The Orji Name – By Mandate 27 Group

THE DISHONESTY OF DEFLECTION: Obi Aguocha Cannot Hide Behind The Orji Name – By Mandate 27 Group

The most dishonest part of Obi Aguocha’s campaign and his Media Team is its attempt to make Rt. Hon. Engr Chinedum Orji and the Orji family the issue whenever Obi Aguocha’s record is questioned.

Ask a simple question about what he has delivered in three years, and the answer is never a document, a project list or a delivery note. The answer is always a story about someone else. That is not leadership. It is a man holding a mirror up to another person’s past because he cannot bear to have a lamp held up to his own present.

The people of Ikwuano, Umuahia North and Umuahia South did not send Obi Aguocha to Abuja to litigate the Orji family. They sent him to represent them. The only record that matters in this election is the one he has written himself, and it is a record his campaign is desperate to keep out of the conversation.

Start with the palliatives he keeps pointing to. The House of Representatives has publicly said that no member received cash from the Executive. It said the food interventions were procured through the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security. So where are the contractor’s award letters? Where are the bills of quantities, the delivery notes and the ward-by-ward distribution lists? Obi Aguocha has spoken of rice and fertiliser for the 32 wards. Speaking is cheap. Show the receipts.

Constituency projects tell the same story. Every Representative has access to constituency intervention allocations. Mr. Aguocha has had three years to tell his people which projects were funded, at what cost, by which contractor and with what result. Instead, we get excuses about funds not being released and a campaign machine that treats every request for evidence as an attack. A representative who cannot account for public resources has no moral standing to lecture anyone on accountability.

Then comes the hypocrisy that his Media Team hopes you will not notice. Mr. Aguocha and his handlers love to rail against the so called wasted years of old Abia. Yet his own in-law, Dr. Aham Uko, served as Commissioner of Finance under Governor Okezie Ikpeazu from 2019 to 2023, a full four years at the very centre of that government’s finances. Is he conveniently exonerated from the narrative? Is the “old Abia” sin only inherited by families Mr. Aguocha wants to defeat? Family members now sit in council appointments and serve as his legislative aides. A man cannot preach against family dominance while building his own.

This is what the deflection is for. When you cannot defend your scorecard, you change the subject. When you cannot show projects, you invent a villain. The Orji name is not an answer to a single question about solar lights, classrooms, roads or food distribution. It is a smokescreen, and the people of this constituency are too intelligent to mistake smoke for substance.

Rt. Hon. Engr Chinedum Orji’s record stands on documented projects, including electrification across the communities, boreholes, scholarships, empowerment programmes and his years as Speaker of the Abia State House of Assembly. People can see these things, touch them and use them. Mr. Aguocha is free to challenge that record, and he is welcome to try. But he cannot answer for his own three years by pointing at someone else’s twelve.

So here is the challenge to Mr. Aguocha and his Media Team. Stop attacking the Orji family. Publish your project schedule, the amounts released, the contractors engaged and photographs of completed work. Do it ward by ward. Do it this week.

If the record is as strong as you claim, it will speak for itself. If you cannot do it, the silence will be the only honest thing your campaign has said all year.