As 2027 approaches, Bende Federal Constituency faces a clear choice: a Deputy Speaker with eight years of delivery behind him, or a well-meaning newcomer whose last electoral test as a deputy governorship candidate of Young Progressive Party (YPP) ended in a distant third place while loosing embarrassingly in his local government, that record suggests why in politics experience should not be traded for excitement.
Every election season, a familiar seduction returns to Nigerian politics: the promise of the “fresh face.” Voters are told that new energy will fix what old hands allegedly could not. It is a powerful pitch until the ballot is compared with the job description. The job of a federal lawmaker, and certainly the job of Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, is not decided by charisma or social media buzz. It is decided by legislative competence, national standing, and the ability to move a constituency’s interests through a system built to frustrate outsiders.
That is the choice now facing the people of Bende Federal Constituency comprising Umuimenyi Nkpa, Uzuakoli, Item, Alayi Igbere, Bende and other great towns make up the constituency. One of the biggest constituencies in nigeria bordering Akwa Ibom at one end and Ebonyi State at the other as they weigh a third term for Rt. Hon. Benjamin Kalu, the sitting Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, against the ambition of businessman Chima Anyaso, now flying the flag of the Labour Party.
Eight years, a paper trail of delivery
Benjamin Okezie Kalu did not arrive in Abuja as a stranger to public service. Long before his first election to the House in 2019, he had cut his teeth as the youngest Local Government Chairman in Bende’s history at age 31, and later served as Senior Special Adviser to two Abia State governors on local government affairs and on Millennium Development Goals. By the time Bende people sent him to the National Assembly, he was already a known quantity, a lawyer, an international businessman, and a man who understood how power worked from the inside.
What he has done with that platform since is the real story. In the 9th Assembly, he chaired the House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, serving as the chamber’s spokesperson. In June 2023, his colleagues in the 10th House elected him Deputy Speaker, the sixth-highest office in the country and the highest any Abia politician currently occupies at the federal level. As Deputy Speaker, he chairs the House Committee on the Review of the Nigerian Constitution and the House Committee of the Whole.
The numbers around his legislative output are not small. His record now stands at over 120 sponsored bills in the 10th Assembly alone, several of which have already become law with direct societal impact. Among them: the Constitution (Fifth Alteration) Act transferring Correctional Services to the Concurrent List for joint federal-state control, the reform of the Nigerian Meteorological Agency, the Federal College of Education, Bende bill, the Federal University of Medical and Health Sciences, Bende bill, and the Kampala Convention Act guaranteeing protections for Nigeria’s internally displaced persons.
Two of these deserve special attention, because they go to the heart of what the South East has demanded from its leaders for a generation.
The South East Development Commission. For years, the region agitated for a federal vehicle to coordinate reconstruction, economic revival and post-conflict rebuilding in the South East, the way the Niger Delta Development Commission has done for the oil-producing states. It took someone with real standing in the House to turn that agitation into law. Kalu’s contributions include landmark work on the South East Development Commission Act, alongside the Nigerian Startup Act and the Student Loan Act, all aimed at addressing the region’s socio-economic challenges. This is not a symbolic gesture. It is an institution, now signed into law, with a statutory mandate to channel federal resources into the region’s development for years to come, a legacy that will outlast any single election cycle.
The State Police Bill. If the SEDC Act was about economic justice, the state police reform was about security and structural change to the Nigerian federation itself. On June 11, 2026, as lead sponsor and chief advocate of the bill, Kalu steered through the House the Constitution (Sixth Alteration) Act establishing state police, granting every state except the FCT constitutional authority to run its own police force. Kalu argued on the floor of the House that the old centralised policing model “has not worked effectively for us as a country,” and that decentralisation would bring policing closer to the people, enabling faster response, better intelligence and stronger community trust. He did this as a member of the Presidential Think-Tank on State Police, working alongside the Inspector-General of Police, the Deputy Senate President, and the Attorney-General of the Federation.
Whichever way one looks at it, these are not the achievements of a backbencher coasting on incumbency. They are the achievements of a man trusted with drafting the actual rules that will govern Nigeria’s federal structure for a generation.
Ben Kalu is more than a lawmaker, He is a regional asset
Beyond bills, Kalu has built a reputation as a bridge between Bende and the federal centre. His Peace in the South East Project (PISE-P) champions a non-kinetic approach to resolving the region’s insecurity crisis, an initiative that has won him quiet respect even among critics who disagree with him politically. Traditional rulers across the constituency, from the Item Council to the Diocese of Uzuakoli have publicly credited him with attracting road projects and development interventions that, in their words, “nobody has ever done” in the constituency before.
In May, constituents from all thirteen wards of Bende community leaders, youths, political stakeholders and grassroots supporters gathered in Bende and unanimously passed a vote of confidence in Kalu, endorsing his bid for a third term ahead of 2027, citing his legislative contributions, empowerment programmes, and infrastructural interventions. This is not the profile of a politician running from his record. It is the profile of one running on it.
Nationally, the recognition has followed the results. He has picked up the Zik’s Award for Civic Engagement, the South East and Abia State Federal Lawmaker of the Year award, an award for his contribution to Tuberculosis policy and funding, and recognition as the Most Outstanding Federal Legislator in Abia State, among others. These are not awards handed out by his own office they are external validations of a legislative career built on substance.
The education gap that matters
Legislative work, especially at the level of alteration of the Nigerian Constitution, is a technical undertaking. It requires an understanding of law, policy, and the machinery of governance that cannot be improvised on the floor of the House. This is where the contrast between the two men becomes difficult to ignore.
Kalu holds a Bachelor of Law from the University of Calabar, a Master of Law in terrorism and international humanitarian law obtained with distinction, and a Master of Business Administration from Oxford Brookes University in the United Kingdom. In 2025, he added a Doctor of Philosophy in public policy and strategic studies from the University of Abuja, with a thesis on government capacity to integrate international climate adaptation strategies into Nigerian policy. He is, by any honest measure, one of the more academically accomplished members of the current National Assembly, a credential that shows up directly in the sophistication of the bills he has been able to draft, defend and pass.
Chima Anyaso, for his part, is a respected businessman and philanthropist, the Chief Executive Officer of Caades Group, known in Bende for consistent humanitarian giving including educational support through the Ahuoma Anyaso Educational Foundation. That is admirable, and it counts for something in a constituency where goodwill and grassroots visibility matter. But running a business and running the affairs of a legislative committee tasked with amending the Nigerian Constitution are two very different disciplines. Legislative work, as a seasoned observers of the National Assembly, I like to say, is not an Instagram Live activity. It requires the training, temperament and technical grounding to sit through committee hearings, negotiate with 359 other lawmakers, and get complex bills through three readings and presidential assent. Kalu spent years and a doctorate preparing for exactly that kind of work. It shows in the outcomes.
A distant third, and what it says about structure
Nigerian politics rewards those who understand the difference between goodwill and structure. Anyaso’s own political history offers a useful case study.
In 2023, he ran as running mate to Enyinnaya Nwafor, the YPP’s governorship candidate and son of a former Abia deputy governor, in the race to succeed Okezie Ikpeazu as governor of Abia State. Despite an energetic campaign that engaged key stakeholders across the state, the Nwafor–Anyaso ticket finished third, well behind the Labour Party’s Alex Otti and the PDP’s Okey Ahiwe a result that even sympathetic commentary at the time chose to frame as a moral victory rather than dispute as an electoral one. In his own concession message, Anyaso himself congratulated the governor-elect and conceded that the contest had essentially been “a battle between the people and the PDP,” a framing that, notably, made no claim to the YPP having built a winning coalition of its own.
That third-place finish and loosing his own local government is instructive, not as a personal indictment, but as a structural one. The YPP, for all the energy Anyaso and Nwafor brought to the 2023 governorship race, did not translate that energy into a machine capable of contesting and winning power in Abia. Political parties in Nigeria live and die by structure ward organisation, polling unit agents, a track record with the electoral umpire, and a coalition that survives beyond a single news cycle. A distant third-place finish on a statewide ticket says a great deal about where that structure stood as of 2023, in Bende and across Abia’s local governments generally.
The Labour Party gamble and the APC headwind
Fast-forward to 2026, and Anyaso has since moved from the YPP to the Labour Party now Abia’s ruling party and has emerged as the LP’s candidate for the Bende Federal Constituency seat, having secured adoption as consensus candidate alongside Governor Alex Otti and Senator Enyinnaya Abaribe. On paper, riding the coattails of a sitting governor’s party is a reasonable strategy. In practice, 2027 poses a very different arithmetic than the state-only contest of 2023.
The Bende Federal Constituency election in 2027 will not be fought in isolation. It runs concurrently with the presidential election, a race that, going into the cycle, finds the All Progressives Congress at the centre of federal power, with all the institutional advantages, patronage networks and campaign infrastructure that incumbency at the national level confers. Kalu himself has already pointed to the growing acceptance of the APC in Abia State, noting the party’s stability and the increasing number of aspirants drawn to contest under its banner, while publicly aligning his re-election bid with continuity for President Bola Tinubu’s national reform agenda. Whatever one’s partisan leaning, it is difficult to dispute that the APC enters 2027 more revitalised in Abia and the South East than it has been in years a headwind any opposition candidate, however well-funded or well-meaning, must reckon with.
Nigeria’s electoral history offers a caution here. Presidential-year National Assembly races tend to be swept along by the coattails of whichever party controls the centre and demonstrates the strongest ground game a pattern Abia itself has seen repeatedly, where federal might, incumbency advantage and party structure have often outweighed local sentiment on election day. A newcomer riding a state government’s momentum, without his own independently tested federal structure, is taking a considerably steeper path than the “ruling party” label alone suggests.
The honest calculation for Bende
None of this is to say Anyaso lacks sincerity, community standing, or a genuine desire to serve, the endorsements from former councillors and elders in his native Igbere, along with his long record of philanthropy, are real and deserve acknowledgement. But sincerity is not the same as readiness, and goodwill is not the same as structure.
Bende Federal Constituency currently holds a seat of extraordinary strategic value, the Deputy Speakership of the House of Representatives a position that has already delivered the South East Development Commission and the historic state police reform, and one that continues to open doors in Abuja that an untested first-timer simply cannot access on day one. Trading that seniority for a first attempt at federal legislative office, at the very moment the constituency’s representative sits two steps from the Speaker’s chair, would not be a leap of faith. It would be a step backward precisely when Bende, Abia and the South East can least afford one.
The choice before Bende in 2027, stripped of campaign noise, is between proven capacity and untested promise. History, structure, and the record all point in the same direction.
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*TITLE: “Bende 2027: Why Renewal, Not Retention, Will Secure Our Future”*
_By Arc. John McCoy MNIA, PhD.
Distinguished elders of Bende, leaders of thought, gentlemen of the press, and my fellow constituents,
The decision before us in 2027 is not a personality contest. It is a governance decision. It is about what Bende needs _for the next 10 years_, not what has been done in the last 8.
With all due respect to the office of the Deputy Speaker and to my brother, Rt. Hon. Benjamin Kalu, we must ask ourselves one honest question: *Has incumbency at the center translated to transformation at the base?*
I concede the academic credentials of the Deputy Speaker. Law degrees, an MBA, and a PhD are impressive on paper. But governance is not graded on transcripts. It is graded on outcomes in our communities.
Bende remains one of the largest federal constituencies in Nigeria, stretching from Akwa Ibom to Ebonyi. Yet our core challenges persist: youth unemployment, poor rural roads linking Igbere to Alayi, weak SME financing, and the collapse of our local markets.
Dr Chima Anyaso brings a different kind of doctorate: a doctorate in job creation. As CEO of Caades Group, he has built enterprises that employ hundreds of Abians directly. Through the Ahuoma Anyaso Educational Foundation, he has put thousands of Bende children through school without waiting for a budgetary allocation. That is applied policy. That is development economics in practice. The House does not only need more bills. It needs more members who understand how policy affects payrolls.
The article argues that the APC holds the center and therefore Bende must “retain” to remain relevant. With respect, that is a politics of fear, not of leverage.
History teaches us that constituencies do not grow by pledging permanent allegiance to power. They grow by bargaining. By 2023, Abia rejected the old order and elected a Labour Party government under Dr. Alex Otti because the people demanded accountability and performance. That same wave is why Chief Anyaso, alongside Governor Otti and Senator Abaribe, now represents the dominant political structure in Abia.
Yes, Dr Anyaso’s 2023 ticket finished third. But politics is about learning. That campaign built a statewide network, introduced new voter mobilization models, and proved that young people will turn out when they believe in a message. To dismiss that as “failure” is to misunderstand how political movements are built. The PDP was once third in many states too.
In 2027, the election will be concurrent. This means Bende voters will vote for President, Governor, and House member on the same day. To send a member of a minority party at the state level into Abuja is to send Bende into opposition twice. To send a Labour Party member while LP controls Abia Government House is to align Bende with the government that is actually paving our roads and paying our teachers today.
The Deputy Speaker’s office is undoubtedly senior. It produced the South East Development Commission Act and the State Police Bill. Those are federal achievements, and they deserve acknowledgment.
But let us be mature and ask: What is the _Bende delivery architecture_?
A Deputy Speaker cannot be in Bende every week. A first-term member who lives in the constituency, whose businesses pay taxes here, and whose foundation runs programs here, can. Dr Anyaso has shown he can mobilize private capital without federal budget. Imagine what he can do with federal appropriation, constituency projects, and direct access to ministries under a Labour-led state government.
The SEDC is law. Now it needs competent representatives at state and federal levels to ensure Bende gets its fair share of projects, not just press releases. The State Police Bill is law. Now we need a representative who can work with Governor Otti to operationalize community policing in Uzuakoli, Item, and Bende town without bureaucratic delays.
Experience matters. But experience without renewal becomes stagnation. Enthusiasm without structure fails. What Bende needs in 2027 is the _marriage of both_: a candidate with private-sector structure, grassroots goodwill, and alignment with the government in power in Abia.
Dr. Chima Anyaso is not a “newcomer” to service. He has been serving Bende for 15 years through jobs, scholarships, and philanthropy. What he has not done is sit in Abuja. Perhaps that is precisely what we need — someone who has not been absorbed by the system, and can therefore reform it.
The Deputy Speakership is important. But no single office is bigger than Bende. If we trade 8 years of Abuja seniority for 4 years of alignment with Abia’s government, grassroots delivery, and a new generation of leadership, that is not a step backward. That is strategic repositioning.
*Conclusion*
Bende people are wise. We do not vote out of sentiment. We vote out of strategy.
In 2027, let us vote for a representative who understands business, who answers to our governor, who can walk into any ministry with the backing of Abia State, and who will be physically present to account to us.
Let us vote for *Dr. Chima Anyaso*.
Not because we are against anyone, but because we are _for_ Bende.
Thank you, and God bless Bende Federal Constituency.
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