There's a story making the rounds in Bende Federal Constituency about a supposed agreement, a gentleman's handshake, sealed somewhere in 2019, that hands the seat back to the Umunna bloc in 2027. It's repeated with enough confidence that some have started treating it as settled history. It isn't. No signed document has been produced. No INEC filing references it. No court has been asked to enforce it, because there is nothing to enforce. What exists is an oral claim, made after the fact, by people who benefit from it being believed. That's not a zoning agreement. That's a talking point dressed up as tradition.
Compare that to the facts on ground. Nnenna Ukeje, from the Umunna bloc, held the Bende seat for twelve years, three full terms, from 2007 to 2019. Before her, the late Mba Aja represented the same bloc. Add it up and Umunna's hold on this seat runs to roughly sixteen consecutive years. Nobody disputes that math, because it's a matter of public record, not kitchen gossip. If equity is really the standard being invoked, then equity cuts both ways: if sixteen years earned Umunna a strong claim in its time, the Ikwuishi bloc, which has now held the seat since 2019 has an equally legitimate claim to reach a comparable span before the conversation about rotation even begins. You cannot build a moral argument for zoning on a foundation of selective memory.
Again, we are not bedraggled with selective amnesia, otherwise we cannot forget that the same Anyaso, a native of Umunna sought to replace Ukeje in 2019, before he was shellacked by Kalu in that election. Now, had Anyaso won, he would have added to Umunna’s tally of 16 years by another four years, making it twenty, didn't he realize that it was immoral for a zone to chop alone? He sadly had realised such! Talk of bespoke hypocrisy.
But the deeper problem with the zoning argument isn't just that it's unproven. It's that it asks Bende to trade away something rare for something symbolic. Benjamin Kalu is not simply "the member for Bende." He is the Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, the second-ranking principal officer in Nigeria's federal legislature, and the highest position anyone from this constituency has ever held in Abuja. That is not a title communities get to reclaim on a rotation schedule. It is earned through years of coalition-building, institutional trust, and legislative standing that a freshman lawmaker simply does not walk in with. Constituencies that understand power don't discard it to satisfy an internal grievance. They protect it, because losing it doesn't just cost Kalu a title, it costs Bende its seat at the table where budgets, committee assignments, and national priorities are actually decided.
Leaving the argument about position, let's talk about performance. Even the blind can see that within eight years of his emergence as a rep member, Kalu has redefined the legislative business, in terms of projects attracted and bills pushed plus a number of interventions, it will be unfair to deny Kalu another term, for even the stones will cry out.
That leverage has already shown up in concrete terms: federal institutions attracted to the constituency, road projects spread across its wards, electrification and empowerment schemes that a backbencher, however sincere, would need years to even begin negotiating. This is what proximity to power delivers, and it's precisely what a first-term replacement would forfeit while they spent their own initial years learning the chamber's rules, building relationships, and figuring out which committee chairs return phone calls.
And there is a real possibility, if Kalu returns, that Bende's influence grows rather than merely holds, a second term as Deputy Speaker, or elevation further still, is not fantasy; it is the natural trajectory of an incumbent who has already shown he can win re-election to leadership once. No newcomer arrives at that ceiling. They arrive at the floor.
This is the honest choice in front of Bende: sacrifice a demonstrated legislative asset to satisfy an unwritten, unverified claim of entitlement , or back the man who has already converted experience into results, and give him room to convert a second mandate into more of the same. A novice in that seat will spend a term finding the light switches. Kalu already knows where every one of them is, and whose hand is on the switch that matters most for Bende. Continuity is not an act of unfairness to Umunna. It is Bende choosing power over promises, realism rather than fantasy.
Ejezie writes from Umuahia
