-Tightens His Grip Of Party Structure

Dr. Chima Matthew Amadi, popularly known as Mazi Gburugburu, returned to Imo State on Saturday, and the timing tells its own story. The Action People’s Party (APP) holds its primaries in the days ahead, and the Apex Leader of the party has chosen this precise moment to walk back into Ozuzu, into Ngor-Okpala, and into the rooms where the next phase of opposition politics in Imo will be decided. In Nigerian politics, returns are rarely accidental. They are positioned. What unfolded in Ozuzu on Saturday made clear that this one was engineered to reset the conversation before the party formally selects the men and women who will carry its colours into 2027.

The first signal came from the elders. The Ndi Nze, the Ichie, and the Obilobi of Ozuzu autonomous community received Dr. Amadi and conferred their blessing on him. In Igbo traditional governance, such an act is not decorative. It is a measured judgement issued by men who hold the moral authority of the land. Their endorsement is read in the community as a confirmation that the person before them has been weighed and found worthy of continued public trust. Coming days before APP’s internal contests, the blessing functions as more than ancestral approval. It is a signal to party men, to undecided aspirants, and to rival camps that the leader of the party walks into the primaries with the soil itself behind him. That is a difficult posture to compete against, and an even harder one to delegitimise.

The day also carried a tangible dimension that ran beneath the ceremony. In the presence of the Orisheze of Ozuzu autonomous community, Dr. Amadi committed fifteen million naira to two pressing community priorities: direct support for the market women of Ozuzu and the construction of a borehole to address persistent water access needs in the community. The donation was not packaged as a campaign offering, and it did not need to be. It fits a longer pattern in which Dr. Amadi has channelled personal and organisational resources into the immediate concerns of the people he comes from. Water and markets are not abstract issues. They are the daily infrastructure on which Ozuzu lives. A politics that funds them is a politics measured by what is built, not only by what is said.

The second formal development of the day carried equal weight. Hon. Chief Dr. Casmir Nneji Okereafor, known by the Ohanaze title Oputa, publicly defected to APP and The Mazi Organisation (TMO). His arrival was received by a full slate of leadership: Hon. Michael Ndidi Amadi, Chairman of APP in Ozuzu Ward 3; Hon. Okey Nkwocha, Chairman of Ngor-Okpala Local Government Area; Hon. Matthew Nwogu, Member representing Aboh Mbaise and Ngor-Okpala Federal Constituency; Hon. Chief Henry Onwukwe, known as Apiti Uzo-Ubi, Director General of TMO; and Dr. Amadi himself. Chief Nneji’s pledge was unambiguous. He committed his loyalty to the party and his organisational weight to delivering Dr. Amadi and other APP candidates in the 2027 general elections.

Defections in the week of a primary are not coincidences. They are messages. To other politicians sitting on the fence in Ngor-Okpala, Aboh Mbaise, and the wider Imo opposition map, Chief Nneji’s move communicates a clear assessment. APP is consolidating, not fragmenting, and the cost of joining later will be higher than the cost of joining now. For Dr. Amadi, it confirms that his project is attracting figures with cultural standing, not only political ambition.

Long before the formal events of the day began, Dr. Amadi landed at Sam Mbakwe Airport and rode home on the back of a bike, in convoy with the local riders who came to receive him. It is a habit he has kept for years, and it tracks with a broader pattern. He is a politician who does not arrive in his community as a stranger. He arrives as one of them, then conducts his politics from that footing. That posture is doing real work. It is the reason the elders bless him without hesitation. It is the reason a fifteen million naira intervention for market women and water access lands as continuation rather than gesture. It is the reason figures like Chief Nneji feel comfortable crossing the floor publicly rather than through a press statement. In a state where political relationships are often transactional and short-lived, Dr. Amadi has built something that behaves more like a movement than a campaign.

APP enters its primaries this week with the kind of foundation other parties spend full cycles trying to manufacture. The blessing of Ozuzu’s traditional council, the visible investment in the community’s daily life, the defection of a leader of Chief Nneji’s standing, and the loyalty of party structures across Ngor-Okpala and the Aboh Mbaise federal constituency are not isolated wins. They are the visible surface of a party that has been built deliberately, with discipline, and from the ground. That discipline is the difference. Other parties in Imo arrive at primary season scrambling for legitimacy and improvising alliances. APP arrives with its leadership intact, its grassroots intact, its traditional consents intact, and its message coherent. Under the leadership of Dr. Chima Matthew Amadi, the party has refused the shortcuts that have hollowed out Nigerian opposition politics for two decades. It has chosen, instead, to build a structure that can carry weight when it matters.

Imo State does not need another party that performs opposition between elections. It needs a party that organises, contests, governs, and delivers. APP is that party. The events of this past Saturday in Ozuzu were not a celebration of personalities. They were a confirmation that the political vehicle being assembled under Mazi Gburugburu’s leadership is the most serious and credible alternative to the status quo in Imo State today. The primaries this week will produce APP’s candidates for 2027. Those candidates will inherit a party that has done its work in advance. They will not need to introduce themselves to the elders. They will not need to negotiate their legitimacy in the wards. They will not need to convince figures of standing to take them seriously. That groundwork has already been laid, and it is being laid in the right way. In the open, in the community, and with the consent of those who matter.

The people of Imo are watching. APP is ready.

Anyanwu Glory Ammarachi 

Director, Public Relations and new Media for TMO.