By Our Charles Thomas
There is a campaign gathering steam in parts of Ukwa West. It is loud. It is emotional. It has slogans and WhatsApp messages and the occasional media appearances. And it is built almost entirely on sentiment the kind that feels righteous in the moment but falls apart the minute you place it next to the facts. The central argument, stripped of all its packaging, is this: Ukwa East has held the federal House of Representatives seat for too long. The seat should “return” to Ukwa West. Hon. Chris Nkwonta has underperformed. Time to move on.
Let us be charitable and take each of those claims seriously because the people of Ukwa, both East and West, deserve a conversation that respects their intelligence. I have done my research. I have looked at the records. And what I found is that the louder the agitation grows, the thinner its factual foundation becomes. So in the spirit of that Ukwa directness we all know and love, here are five (5) things the Ukwa West agitators and indeed any opposition to Hon. Chris Nkwonta cannot say about the man:
1. That He Came Into Office and Forgot About Ukwa West
You often find politicians who collect votes from every ward in a constituency, then govern as though only their own village exists. They commission projects exclusively in their hometown, hold meetings exclusively with their kinsmen, and treat the other half of the constituency as an afterthought, and reserve others as an army of voters to be mobilized every four years and ignored in between. That is not Chris Nkwonta’s record, and nobody can honestly claim otherwise.
Within months of taking his seat in the 10th National Assembly, Nkwonta commissioned a constituency office in Obehie in Ukwa West Local Government Area. Not in Akwete. Not somewhere in Ukwa East. In Ukwa West. He hosted stakeholder engagements in Ukwa East on electricity restoration. He awarded 200 student bursaries drawn from across both LGAs. He undertook road palliative interventions on the Akwete axis a critical artery connecting both communities. He has been present, vocal, and visible in both LGAs in a manner his predecessor of sixteen years was never accused of maintaining.
So when some ill informed agitators say he has ignored Ukwa West, the question we must ask is: compared to whom? Compared to a man whose own constituents cutting across both LGAs, petitioned INEC to recall him after fifteen years of alleged invisibility? That bar was set underground. Nkwonta has already cleared it comfortably.
“He opened his constituency office in Ukwa West soil. That alone is more visibility than some lawmakers manage in an entire term.”
2. That He Arrived in Abuja and Sat at the Backbench Doing Nothing
There is a particular species of Nigerian federal lawmaker who arrives in Abuja, collects his salary and constituency allowances, identifies the best pepper soup joints in Maitama, and returns home every recess to commission boreholes and call it representation. They sponsor zero bills of consequence. They chair no significant committees. They make no national impact. They are simply there, occupying a green chair in the chamber. Nobody not a single one of the Ukwa West agitators, not even the most committed critic can honestly say that about Chris Nkwonta.
This man arrived in the 10th Assembly as a first-term member and was appointed Chairman of the House Committee on Climate Change, a nationally significant committee with oversight over Nigeria’s environmental policy and international climate funding frameworks. That appointment alone put Ukwa on the national legislative map in a way it had not been in years. Then, in October 2024, Nkwonta made a bold strategic move: he defected to the APC, the ruling party, aligning himself with President Tinubu’s national government. The immediate consequence? Speaker Tajudeen Abbas appointed him the pioneer Chairman of the House Committee on the South East Development Commission, the SEDC.
Let that land properly. Pioneer. Chairman. SEDC.
The South East Development Commission is the most consequential federal intervention in the Southeast since after the civil war. His committee approved N250 billion as the SEDC’s takeoff budget for 2025. He oversees accountability for every naira. He determines how projects are distributed across five states. He has the institutional power to ensure Ukwa gets its share.
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This is not a backbencher. This is a lawmaker who, in less than two years in office, has climbed to one of the most strategically valuable committee positions any Southeast lawmaker has occupied in the recent history of our democracy. The agitators want to replace this with what, exactly?
3. That He Is in Abuja Fighting for Himself and Not for Ukwa
The familiar accusation against Nigerian legislators is that they use the office purely as a vehicle for personal enrichment and ego — that the constituency is merely a prop, the people merely a crowd to wave at during commissionings, and the allowances the real purpose of the enterprise. Chris Nkwonta’s record before and during office makes this charge very difficult to sustain.
Before he ever held elected office, Nkwonta had already established the Chris Nkwonta Foundation in 2010 more than a decade before he won his House of Representatives seat. That foundation sponsored over 100 university students from both Ukwa East and Ukwa West, funded two postgraduate scholarships in the United Kingdom, trained 66 secondary school scholars across the constituency, and conducted annual food distributions to widows and the less privileged. The man was doing constituency work before he had a constituency to represent.
In the National Assembly, he has presented petitions on behalf of constituents murdered in cold blood. He has engaged personally with stakeholders on electricity restoration. He has used his SEDC committee chairmanship to publicly commit to accountability for the Southeast’s N250 billion allocation, insisting that every kobo must be traced and that projects must reach the communities they are designated for. When Governor Alex Otti flagged off the first-ever General Hospital in Ukwa East a project that drew attention to how badly the area had been left behind since independence, who was standing on that podium making specific requests for Abia Palm, the Azumini Blue River, and constituency road extensions? Hon. Chris Nkwonta. Working across party lines. Putting Ukwa first. Publicly.
“The man was doing constituency work before he had a constituency to represent. That is the character you want to remove?”
4. That He Is a Politician of Small Vision and Smaller Connections
Some politicians make it to Abuja and immediately become invisible to everyone outside their ward meeting. They cannot get a return call from a minister. They cannot influence a federal appointment. They cannot secure a federal project for their people because nobody of consequence knows they exist. They are legislators in title only, with no leverage and no reach.
You cannot say that about Chris Nkwonta. And if you try, the facts will embarrass you.
This is a man who has cultivated relationships with the Speaker of the House, with Deputy Speaker Benjamin Kalu, with APC national leadership, and with the executive arm of the federal government relationships that directly translate into institutional power for Ukwa. The Ukwa People’s Consultative Council visited Deputy Speaker Kalu in Abuja to lobby for Nkwonta’s inclusion in the NDDC House Committee. Nkwonta himself led that engagement. He understands that in Nigerian politics, access is everything. His defection to the APC was not betrayal. It was strategy. It was the kind of political calculation that a man of vision makes when he understands that the constituency’s interests require him to be inside the room where decisions are made, not outside it shouting. And it worked: he returned from that move as the chairman of the committee overseeing the most significant development fund the Southeast has ever received.
The people agitating for his replacement have not told us who their alternative candidate knows in Abuja. They have not told us what committee chairmanship their preferred Ukwa West candidate will inherit. They have not explained how a new, first-term lawmaker from Ukwa West will negotiate a N250 billion SEDC allocation in their favour. These are not rhetorical questions. They are the actual questions that determine whether Ukwa eats or goes hungry.
5. That the Equity Argument Is More Important Than the Results Argument
This is the most important point of all and the one the agitators least want to engage with honestly.
Yes. The seat has been held by Ukwa East for a long time. Yes. There is a legitimate conversation to be had about rotational equity. We are not dismissing that conversation. We are contextualising it.
Here is the context: the sixteen years during which Ukwa East held the seat before Nkwonta produced, by the documented testimony of stakeholders from both LGAs, essentially nothing. The roads were the worst in Nigeria. The electricity was gone. The hospitals were non-functional. A recall petition was filed. The verdict of the people across both LGAs, was that sixteen years of Ukwa East dominance had been, in their own words, a colossal waste. That is the legacy of unaccountable, unthreatened incumbency. That is what happens when a lawmaker knows he faces no serious challenge.
Now we have a different man from the same LGA, a first-term legislator who arrived with a foundation already built, a reputation for philanthropy already established, and an instinct for strategic positioning already demonstrated. In under two years, he has secured a committee chairmanship that gives him oversight of N250 billion. He has opened offices in both LGAs. He has distributed bursaries. He has fought for his people on the floor of the House. He is on record demanding accountability for SEDC funds.
And the proposed solution is to replace him?
With whom? To what end? So that a new lawmaker from Ukwa West can spend the first two years of a four-year term figuring out where the committee rooms are while the N250 billion SEDC opportunity passes?
Equity is a noble principle. But equity deployed at the wrong moment, in the wrong way, for the wrong reasons, does not produce justice. It produces regret. The equity argument becomes urgent when the sitting member is failing and the constituency is suffering. It does not become urgent when the sitting member has just secured the biggest legislative platform in Ukwa’s democratic history.
“You do not pull the farmer from the field in the middle of harvest season and call it fairness.”
What Ukwa West deserves is equitable representation in the projects Nkwonta delivers. What Ukwa West deserves is a seat at the table of every constituency engagement. What Ukwa West deserves is a lawmaker who makes their communities as visible as Akwete and Ndoki. Those are legitimate demands. Make them loudly. Hold him accountable to them.
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But pulling the man out of the chair in Abuja and handing it to someone who cannot yet see the building? That is not equity. That is self-sabotage dressed in the language of fairness.
FINALLY…
The noise around this agitation is loud. But noise is not argument. Grievance is not evidence. And the desire for change, however sincere, does not automatically produce change for the better. Hon. Chris Nkwonta is not a perfect lawmaker. No lawmaker is. He has more to deliver. The roads still need serious federal attention. The electricity question in Ukwa East is unresolved. The SEDC’s N250 billion has been approved but the real test is whether those funds will find their way into Ukwa communities in the form of tangible infrastructure.
These are legitimate pressure points. Use them. Demand scorecards. Demand town halls. Demand quarterly briefings on SEDC project schedules affecting the constituency. Demand that Ukwa West communities appear prominently in every federal intervention his committee recommends. That is productive politics. What is not productive is a campaign to replace a man who has climbed to the top of the legislative ladder on behalf of this constituency, at the precise moment he is positioned to pull Ukwa up with him.
The five things the opposition cannot honestly say about Hon. Chris Nkwonta are also the five reasons this constituency should look before it leaps.
Ukwa has leaped before, Into sixteen years of nothing, We cannot afford to leap again.
Charles Thomas is a trainned journalist from Ukwa East
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