When Rt. Hon. Benjamin Okezie Kalu, PhD, CFR, took his oath as a first-time lawmaker in June 2019, he did something no debutant legislator in that Assembly had done before him: he moved the very first motion of the 9th National Assembly. It was a small gesture, easy to miss in the ceremony of the day, but it set a tone. Six years and two Assemblies later, that same instinct for moving first and moving early has come to define a legislative career built less on rhetoric and more on volume of work, consistency of presence, and a steady insistence that Bende Federal Constituency be treated as a national priority rather than a footnote.
Today, as Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Rt. Hon. Kalu occupies a position no one from Abia State, and no one from the South East, has held before him. It is a role that carries both symbolic weight and practical demands, and by most measures, he has leaned into both.
His first term, from 2019 to 2023, was defined by early and unusual visibility for a newcomer. Within months of his election, his eloquence and legal precision earned him appointment as Spokesperson and Chairman of the House Committee on Media and Public Affairs, a role in which he championed transparency and launched The Green Chamber, a House publication designed to close the information gap between Parliament and the public. He also introduced Ben Kalu's Mandate, a weekly radio and television programme that gave his constituents in Bende a direct line to his legislative activity an early sign of a governing style that treated communication as part of representation, not an afterthought to it.
By the time his first term closed, Rt. Hon. Kalu had sponsored or co-sponsored bills spanning public finance transparency, university innovation commercialisation, special economic zones, and a foreign service commission, among others. He had also, according to his office, secured a run of constituency interventions, road construction, rural electrification, boreholes, mobility aids for persons with disabilities, and support for artisans and traders, that reportedly earned him recognition including the Democracy Heroes Award Africa for Most Outstanding Representative Member of the Year and inclusion in the OrderPaper MVP Hall of Fame for bill sponsorship.
His re-election in 2023 carried him further, to the office of Deputy Speaker of the 10th House of Representatives. His office describes the moment as one of deep symbolic significance for a region that had, in the words of supporters who marched to the National Assembly at the time, waited long for this kind of bridge between the centre and the East.
Whatever the symbolism, the output has been substantial. Across two and a half years in the role, Rt. Hon. Kalu has sponsored or co-sponsored 127 bills touching fourteen sectors, constitutional reform, justice, security, education, agriculture, health, infrastructure, and fiscal governance among them. Four have already become law, including the South East Development Commission Act, a legislative vehicle decades in the making for a region long seeking a dedicated federal instrument for reconstruction and reintegration, alongside Acts establishing the Federal University of Medical and Health Sciences in Bende, the Federal College of Education in Bende, and the National Anthem Act.
His committee assignments place him at the centre of two of the House's most consequential functions. As Chairman of the House Committee on Constitution Review, he has overseen what his office describes as the most consultative constitutional review process in recent memory, inaugurating a nine-member technical advisory team, securing the backing of all 36 state governors, and taking public hearings to twelve centres nationwide rather than confining deliberation to Abuja. Under his chairmanship, more than 86 constitutional amendment bills have advanced to second reading, touching contentious and long-debated questions: state policing, the devolution of power generation from the Exclusive to the Concurrent Legislative List, and the Special Seats Bill, which would create reserved legislative seats for women at national and state level. "The exclusion of women from political leadership is not only unjust but unwise," he told a gathering of advocates in 2024, pledging that his committee would revive gender-inclusion bills previously dropped by the 9th Assembly.
As Chairman of the Committee of the Whole, he presides over the clause-by-clause scrutiny every bill in the House must pass through before it can proceed , a role that demands both legal precision and the temperament to referee 360 members with competing interests. Colleagues across party lines, his office notes, have described his chairmanship as firm, fair, and unusually patient with first-time legislators still learning the chamber's procedures.
For all the national and continental responsibility that comes with the Deputy Speakership, his office is emphatic that Bende has not receded from view. The constituency's roll of projects, as documented by his office, spans road and bridge construction across wards including Nkpa, Item, Igbere, Uzuakoli, and Ozuitem; rural electrification and solar mini-grid installations; borehole and water schemes; the renovation and equipping of primary healthcare centres; and the reconstruction of dozens of classroom blocks alongside new ICT and e-learning facilities. Targeted empowerment grants and vocational tools, his office says, have gone to hundreds of named beneficiaries across Bende's local government wards ,an attempt, in his framing, to build self-reliance rather than dependency.
Beyond Nigeria's borders, Rt. Hon. Kalu has taken on a run of continental and multilateral roles: Chairman of the Finance and Administration Committee of the ECOWAS Parliament, a seat on the Monetary and Financial Affairs Committee of the African Union Pan-African Parliament, and membership of the Inter-Parliamentary Union's WTO Parliamentary Conference Steering Committee. His office frames these engagements as extending Nigeria's voice on democracy, women's political participation, and post-conflict governance onto platforms where the country's perspective is not always centred.
Seven and a half years into a demanding national office, the record he presents is one of volume matched, they argue, by intent: bills sponsored across nearly every sector of governance, a constitutional review process opened to public hearing rather than confined to committee rooms, and a constituency that, by his office's account, has moved from being peripheral to national planning to being visibly present in it.
Whether that record ultimately reshapes Bende and the South East in the way his office describes is a judgment that will be made over time, by constituents, by the Assembly's own institutional memory, and by the communities who will use the roads, schools, and clinics long after the speeches end. For now, this account is one of a legislator who has chosen to be measured by output, by bills moved, projects commissioned, committees chaired rather than by title alone.
Igboeli Arinzechukwu Napoleon writes from Umuahia
