Dr. Orji Uzor Kalu presents its own challenges. Challenges that can only be compared with shooting a dart at a moving object. With Kalu,
events do not just take shape, they run, at times, leaving your assumptions in a state of constant flux. In the last twelve months for instance, Kalu
has compressed enough activities to last many ordinary mortals more than a lifetime.
His hyper activism has only been matched by his omnimedia
presence. It used to be taken as a given that whoever governed
Lagos State commanded more media attention than all the other
governors put together. But Kalu, from far away Abia State, has
smashed that tradition. His media coverage since coming to power
nearly two years ago—as at the time of writing—has been more than
the coverage of any governor in Lagos or any part of the country.
Is it all mere grandstanding or is there some substance behind all
the hoopla? Why is everybody—for good or ill—talking about Kalu? Why is
Kalu the issue? Is there a background to all these or just a mere flashin-the
pan? Who the hell is this Kalu that is setting the nation on fire, as
it were? If as Odumegwu Ojukwu says, Kalu has "a mandate"; political
maverick, Arthur Nzeribe states, he can't be ignored and the former
Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Mr. Clement Akpamgbo
declares, he is "the idol of the Igbos", what qualities elevated him to
such pedestal? It was our attempt to find answers to these posers that gave birth
we used to spend hours on end in his Apapa offices—from 42, Calcutta
Crescent to the new corporate headquarters of his Slok Group at 10,
Randle Close—to share reminiscences off-the-cuff. Kalu in those days
was a great raconteur, as long as you had no tape. Like some other
great Nigerians— Professor J. P. Clark and Ernest Shonekan, for
instance—who are allergic to tape recorders, tape tends to put Kalu on guard, removing the juicy details from his responses. But that was then; today, Kalu has acquired so much media savvy that he is constantly
granting recorded interviews and making headlines. So the early part of the book were pieced together largely from those uninhibited encounters as well as other researches.
As editors of Weekend Concord in those days, Kalu even accepted
at a point—perhaps, simply to indulge us—to be our "Celebrity
Reporter". His beat then was to report his encounters with great men.
And to our great astonishment, he did come up with great scoops—
mostly interviews with world leaders including the then President F.
W. de Klerk and former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros
Ghali,etc. If nothing else, those encounters proved beyond reasonable doubt
to us that Kalu was a man to watch. The trajectory of his personal
dynamics was set for the top. Anybody keen on the alchemy of
leadership will see it in Kalu's body chemistry. His quietly assertive
personality; his wide network of connections nationally and
internationally; his sharp business acumen; his ambition and grand vision
for greatness, his putative ideas on politics, business and economy; his
irreverent drive for the top often, his critics argue, bordering on
ruthlessness, among others. Yet, underscoring these attributes is what has been frequently
described as his disarming humility, down-to-earth realism and
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