Soludo’s Civic Engagements And His Critics’ Rants Of Mischief 

CHRISTIAN ABURIME

There is a peculiar irony in watching a supposedly learned activist who parades a platform called ‘Hungry and Angry Analytical’ and then proceeds to act tactless and offer analyses that are neither enlightening nor accurate, but only hungry and angry ranting.

Just like other disgruntled elements who take sadistic delight in campaign of calumny, Dr. Chido A. A., the self-styled social media critic and convener of the aforementioned platform, has made a cottage industry out of confrontational attacks on Governor Chukwuma Charles Soludo’s administration in Anambra State. His latest salvo, targeting the Governor’s recent visit to London for a diaspora civic town hall meeting, is perhaps his most hollow and irresponsible yet. It is not an innocuous critique. It is political mischief dressed up as civic concern.

Let us be clear about what actually happened. Governor Soludo travelled to London to render an account of his first term in office to Ndi Anambra in the diaspora. This is not a jamboree; it is governance. The Governor did not abandon his job at home. He went to meet his state stakeholders who live and work abroad, who care deeply about the state of their homeland, and who deserve the same access to their elected leader as those at home.

What the Hungry and Angry rabble-rouser and his co-travellers miss, whether by ignorance or by design, is that citizens’ engagement is not a luxury Governor Soludo occasionally indulges. It is his governing philosophy. Long before the ballot box gave him the mandate, and consistently since, Governor Soludo has treated dialogue with the people as crucial to leadership.

His town hall meetings have spanned the United Kingdom, the United States, Abuja, and Lagos. Closer to home in Anambra, he has sat with traders, transporters, community leaders, and ordinary stakeholders, not for a show-off, but because he understands that responsive government requires that the governed be heard. These interactions, however quiet and unglamorous, are among the surest foundations of transparent governance.

Our Hungry and Angry analyst is of course free to criticise. Vigorous debate about governance is healthy, even necessary. But criticism that misrepresents the facts, that frames accountability as indulgence and civic duty as dereliction, does not serve Anambra people. It serves only the critic’s profile. When a platform built on anger mistakes disruption for analysis and provocation for insight, it forfeits the moral authority to hold anyone else to account. Ultimately, Ndi Anambra, at home and abroad, know the difference between a leader who shows up and a commentator who always rants.