Peter Obi, the Presidential candidate of Labour Party (LP), yesterday, gave a response to the opinion piece penned by the governor of Anambra State, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, setting the stage for a feisty verbal exchange between the two leading lights of Anambra and the Southeast region.
Reacting to Soludo’s treatise titled, ‘History beckons and I will not be silent (Part 1), where the governor disclosed that the investment he (Obi) left in government was worth close to nothing and the LP candidate can’t win the 2023 presidential election, Obi said he did his little as governor of Anambra and urged the incumbent governor to do his best in the state as an economics professor.
Speaking at the 2022 Lagos Business School (LBS) Alumni Conference, Obi described Soludo as his brother.
“He (Soludo) remains my brother, we are very close. I remain prayerful for him. For other things, which I d
idn’t succeed, God has given him opportunity to do it and succeed. So, if there is anything pending, governance doesn’t finish, people are still in government in America, so, you stop where you will stop, other people will continue from there.
“He is the governor of the state; he is my senior brother, he is even more intelligent than me, because he is a professor, I am a trader, so, he knows more and will be able to do things better than I did.
“I have done my little as a trader, now the professor is there, he will do his own as a professor, the schools I didn’t roof, he will roof them, that’s how government goes.”
The former governor said he left office with N75 billion savings, adding that his administration saved $50 million each in Access, Diamond and Fidelity banks with an interest rate of 6.5 per cent.
He further clarified: “The one they said is worthless, we invested N3.5 billion in International Breweries. That facility is there employing directly and indirectly over 10,000 Anambrarians. The shares were at a time being sold at N50, today, the share is about N5 or so.
“When you spread your investment, some will go up some will come down but overall the company is still there, the company is still doing well, it is still part of the global chain. I needed to explain it not because I am defending comments by my brother,” he said, adding that he left the office without owing any contractor or supplier who had executed his or her job.
