Senator Orji Uzor Kalu said on Monday that his loyalty to the All Progressives Congress outranks ethnic and regional ties, and that he has no obligation to support Igbo politicians who contest elections under other parties, including the All Progressives Grand Alliance.
Kalu, who represents Abia North and is a former governor of Abia State, spoke in an interview on Arise Television’s Prime Time. He was discussing his allegiance, his support for President Bola Tinubu and the position of Igbo politicians ahead of the 2027 general elections. The decisions of Igbo candidates in other parties are their own business, he said, and he sees no reason why they should invoke his name when he belongs to a different party.
He traced his own record to explain the position. He said he began in the Peoples Democratic Party, moved to the Progressive Peoples Alliance, and now sits in the APC, which he described as his third and final political home. A politician in those circumstances, he argued, cannot be asked to campaign for a rival on another platform. “Party loyalty is number one,” he said.
Pressed on whether party, ethnicity or the benefits of power matter most to him, Kalu said he is Igbo by birth and has served and defended Igbo interests, but that he will not let ethnicity decide his political choices. He said his stance changes with the setting: in his village and in Abia he is an Igbo man with ethnic loyalty to match, and when he comes to Lagos he sets that aside to act as a Nigerian among Nigerians. He also said his support for Igbo interests does not translate into a duty to back every Igbo candidate, and that if an Igbo politician wants to support another Igbo candidate, that is that politician’s affair.
The remarks landed three days after APGA formally lined up behind Tinubu. At the inauguration of APGA’s national campaign in Awka on Friday, Anambra Governor Charles Soludo, who is the party’s national leader, said it will field no presidential candidate. “Tinubu is our candidate,” he said. He told the gathering that the party has historically backed the ruling party’s presidential candidate, set a target of 50 percent of Anambra’s votes for Tinubu, and acknowledged that the state gave him only about 5,000 votes in 2023. He framed the target as a way to gain bargaining power with the federal government for the South-East. An Igbo group has rejected the adoption, according to a headline The Eastern Updates found, though the text of that report was not accessible.
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So the two statements sit side by side without contradicting each other on the presidency. Kalu and APGA both back Tinubu; what Kalu ruled out was supporting APGA candidates in other contests. The reports do not say which elections he had in mind, and no one from APGA was quoted responding to him.
Abia, Kalu’s home state, remains the more contested ground. Governor Alex Otti won in 2023 on the Labour Party platform, and his government says he remains a committed Labour member. FCT Minister Nyesom Wike said in September, also on Prime Time, that Otti backs Tinubu’s re-election. Abia’s information commissioner, Okey Kanu, did not confirm it, called Otti’s ties with Tinubu very cordial, and said any confirmation would come from the governor at an appropriate time. Otti has not publicly endorsed Tinubu, unlike Soludo and Osun Governor Ademola Adeleke, according to a report from that period. The same report says Otti has vowed to back the Labour Party’s candidate against Kalu in the 2027 Senate race.
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Kalu has argued in the past that his party’s southeastern strength will carry Tinubu. In 2025 he said the APC’s South-East caucus, chaired by Imo Governor Hope Uzodinma, had endorsed Tinubu weeks before other groups did and that it started the national endorsement wave, while praising the removal of the fuel subsidy and the unification of exchange rates as necessary despite hardship. Those were his claims at the time and the reports reviewed here do not test them. He also said earlier that Tinubu could win Abia while Otti stays governor.
The Abia APC itself has been unsettled. It issued a 14-day ultimatum to Kalu and a federal lawmaker, Chris Nkwonta, over alleged anti-party activities, according to the same September report, and later pardoned Kalu and others.
The presidential election is scheduled for January 16, 2027, and the governorship and state assembly elections for February 6.
