Special to USAfrica magazine (Houston) and USAfricaonline.com, the first African-owned, US-based newspaper published on the Internet.
Dr. Chidi Amuta is Executive Editor of USAfrica, since 1993
(Text of a Keynote Address Delivered at the Abia Think Tank Annual Lecture, Ikeja Country Club, Lagos on 1st March, 2025)
Protocols
- Preliminaries:
I thank the Abia Think Tank for the magnanimity of their invitation. Having delivered a keynote address previously at the instance of the organization a couple of years ago, I thought the organizers were either in love with an old model or had run out of supply of more trendy speakers in this era of digital impressarios.
Yet, I could not turn down this invitation for one simple reason. In spite of living outside the state, I am still from Abia. I belong to the generation of Nigerians who feel at home everywhere we find ourselves in the federation. In my life time, I have been a citizen of at least four different countries. I was born a coonial subject of the British Empire. Our flag then was the Union Jack. Then from 1960, I became a citizen of the Federation of Nigeria. By 1963, we were adjusted to citizens of Federal Republic of Nigeria following the adoption of a republican constitution. By 1967, all hell was let loose and I became a citizen of the Republic of Biafra. That did not quite last long. By 1970, I reverted to citizen of Federal Republic of Nigeria. The entire historical bumpy ride has a way of making you dizzy. Since then, I decided to just pitch my tent in any place I find myself. This is why I have never been tempted to seek American citizenship in spite of pressure from some of my children who are mostly American citizens.
In fact, whenever I have to fill one of these routine forms, I instinctively indicate that I am from Lagos state. But soon afterwards when I step forward to claim the rights of a Lagos indigene, I am rudely reminded that I do not belong here!
I have had to fall back to finding Isiala Ngwa South Local Government on the map. Worse still, I have to undertake the unhelpful task of showing my place of origin to my children none of whom was born in Abia. They were born in Oyo, Rivers and Lagos states. I used to think that they could each claim indigeneship of whatever state they were born in. I have since become wiser.
So, I have no choice than to return to my Abia origins. I was born at the General Hospital in Aba. I can still recognize the place by the railway crossing across the central police station. Not much has changed since the early 1950s.
- Emergence of the Feudal State:
Abia has had an interesting encounter with democracy and statehood. In the period between 1999 and 2023, Abia state was an unusual political experience among the states of the federation. While it was guided and governed by the general rules of the Nigerian constitution, it operated more like an enclave with peculiar characteristics.
- It was synonymous with the name of whatever governor was in power as if it was a private estate
- Its most illustrious citizens were alienated from its governance and mostly lived and earned their living outside the state. It is not just that they were deliberately excluded from the running of the state but could not find meaningful independent livelihood in the “privatized” economy of the state
- Over the 24 year period, the quantum of resources that accrued to the state could not be matched in any way by the volume or tempo of development in the state.
- Even in the small area of the South East, Abia developed more negatively than all the other states in the region.
- An annual Google search of the economy of the state indicated that in each of the 24 years, the three richest people in Abia State on a year-on-year basis also coincided with the top political figures in the state.
The central argument of this presentation therefore is that Abia was essentially a feudal enclave from 1999 to 2023 and has only been struggling to free itself from feudal captivity in the last two years mostly.
In the period under observation, the major outlines of the state administration indicated a drastic deviation from the requirements of a sub sovereign component of the Nigerian constitutional sovereignty. The rights of the citizens to fair treatment were grossly violated. The entitlement of the people to good government in terms of healthcare, education, infrastructure and emoluments by way of salaries, wages, pensions and gratuities could not be guaranteed.
In general, I am prepared to argue that in Abia State between 1999 and May 2023, the state does not qualify as part of a democratic polity properly defined. Politics and the democratic process were only deployed as instruments for state capture by different factions of the Abia home based political elite. Once captured, the state in each of these years was run more like either a private feudal enclave or an extractive colony.
The governor was more of an emperor ruling above criticism and reproach. In 24 years, no Abia governor was taken to court by a citizen on account of rights infringement or acts of misgovernance. Like feudal emperors, our successive governors were more of imperial feudal overlords.
The machinery of state was ‘privatized’ as the separation of powers was observed mostly in default. The legislature ran the errands of the executive governor and seemed to have a duty to pass legislations ‘for’ the governor routinely. The judiciary had no independent voice as judges owed their appointments, promotions and general welfare to the benevolence of the almighty governor.
Officials of the state judiciary were selected and hired on the basis of loyalty to the governor and the party cabal in power. Corrupt officials kept their jobs for as long as they knew on whose behalf they were pilfering in the name of the state. Another way of putting this is to state that state officials were licensed to commit acts of criminal malfeasance on behalf of the pressing emperor.
It was fashionable for the governor to set up and empower an assortment of task forces and mobile courts to collect sundry revenues and levies in the name of the state but account to no institution of public accountability. Public accountability was mistaken for public creative accountancy.
If you check the records, between 1999 and the following 8 years, the Governor’s Office took out newspaper full page spaces to issue public a statement of the state’s accounts as issued and “audited” by the same governor’s office. In other words, the governor authoried spending, spent the money, accounted for it, audited the expenses and informed the public accordingly!
Yet the government had an Accountant General, an Auditor General and could easily have hired an external audit firm to look through its accounts. The regimes that followed were not so gracious. They rendered no accounts, had no public procurement routines that I am aware of nor bothered with the finer points of public accountability.
What is sad in these instances of Abia in the years of political captivity is that the state had deviated from being a democratic polity with a government that was responsible to a public in a supposed democracy. It could not be described as a feudal enclave, even one in desperate disrepair let alone an extractive colony. In a democratic political space, government is about the welfare of the people. Not in the Abia of the 24 years under review.
Even in a feudal estate, the manorial overlord cares about the state of the agricultural land, about the welfare of the farm hands and the productivity of the land and the feudal enterprise. Similarly, in an extractive colony, the extracting authority may have the minerals and produce as his primary target. But he also realizes that the magnitude of his loot is related to the state of the colony. A colony in disrepair or turmoil cannot yield the maximum returns required to sustain and justify the colonial extractive enterprise.
It is instructive that in the colonial experience in Nigeria, for instance, it was in the best interest of the colonial enterprise to run an efficient railway system to evacuate the produce, maintain schools for the colonized to get educated, keep them healthy through health centres and generally maintain law and order through courts that dispensed justice according to colonial law.
In the Abia state in the years under review, the governments failed as both a badly run feudal government and as a dysfunctional extractive authority. This is the effective backdrop to the state of affairs in the state by the eve of the 2023 elections when it became imperative to elect a new government in the state. The question was therefore whether to continue as a feudal dynasty or revert to a democratic sub sovereign state.
- Landscape of the Feudal State
The picture of the state on the eve of the governorship election in 2023 was sad and almost tragic. Abia was easily the most indebted state in the federation with a debt portfolio of over N189.9 billion. The then government that ratcheted up most of this debts inherited only a debt of about N35 billion from its predecessor. On the eve of the election, Abia was the state with the longest period of default in the payment of the salaries of staff in the public sector especially education and health.
Doctors in the state’s service are owed upwards of 30 months in salary arrears. No one knew when they were on duty or on strike. Teachers in government primary, secondary and tertiary institutions were in the same boat or slightly worse.
The state university ran consistently on upwards of an average of six months in arrears of salaries and allowances of staff. The state polytechnic at Aba was in default of salaries and allowances to the tune of over 30 months and still counting. The institution had virtually lost its accreditation while its academic and administrative staff supplemented their livelihood as keke and Okada riders or petty traders in inconsequential merchandise.
Doctors in government health institutions went without salaries for upwards of 30 months. Most state pensioners forgot when last they received their pensions let alone gratuities. The sick no longer bothered to go to any of the state’s general hospitals or health centres knowing well that they were likely to come out feet first because doctors and nurses were either perennially on strike or had no motivation or facilities to provide care or cure.
Drug prescriptions are worthless since most pharmacies in state hospitals had a permanent sign on display: “OUT OF STOCK” to announce a perennial absence of essential and basic drugs and medicaments.
The city of Aba was in decline and abysmal abandonment for the 24 years. Drainage was absent. Sewage system was unheard of. Open drains filled to the brim with unprintable effluents emptied onto the surface of the few ill maintained roads available.
Aba was literally an inhabited refuse dump. Mounds of refuse greeted the eyes at nearly every inch of the city which had a permanent stench of something dead. Most roads in the town were in desperate disrepair. Some people had forgotten when some of these were roads as many have become deep gullies and waterways that are hardly passable when it rains. Adjoining the many dilapidated roads were one or two uncompleted flyovers that the state government had been building and commissioning in bits for the better part of the last couple of years.
The sorry state of Abia state then was inscribed boldly on the faces of every citizen except the few who were responsible for this scandalous absence of responsibility in government. People were hungry, poor, unkempt, aggressive and viciously frustrated.
This was the effective backdrop to the election that took place in 2023 to choose a new governor for the state. What was needed was the emergence of a transformative leadership, to alter the state from a manorial feudal estate to a genuine constitutional sub sovereign democracy. The task was simple: To make political power translate into the welfare of the people. The choice before the people was therefore a clear one. The crisis of governance in the state defined the type of governor that Abia people needed and looked forward to. The ideal next governor of Abia state needed to come to the table with a mix of qualities dictated by the crushing urgency of the desperate needs of the state.
- Revamping the Social Contract
In the post 2023 period, the task and business of government in Abia state has been largely that of revamping the social contract that binds the people with the government. It has not just been a matter of building roads and bridges or running a bureaucracy as usual.
It has been one of reestablishing trust, inspiring confidence and renewing the reputation of government. People have been a bit hesitant to own the government that they voted into power. Two and half decades of serial betrayal and habitual disappointment has frightened people from something called government. Worse still, the long period of bad experienced has deepened the distrust to the degree that when people began receiving their emoluments as and when due, they did not quite believe it. When street lights came back on in Aba, people were frightened of the dream experience.
The restoration of the bond and social contract between the government and the people would take a long time. That bond was broken in the preceding 24 years through a reckless disregard for civilized leadership and democratic conduct.
Alongside the confidence building process, the government has proceeded with modest efforts to managing the state’s economy better and to address the scandalous infrastructure decay. From the reports since the last year and half, the current administration has proceeded with the task of reversing the state of feudal alienation of the state and its peoples since after being inaugurated.
We have read the pleasant stories about the inauguration of the Aba power project by Geometrics Ltd. The city of Aba now enjoys a commendable level of power supply, a plus for a place that depends on constant power to operate its small to medium manufacturing establishments. Courageous urban renewal effort has proceeded with the clearing of refuse, reconstruction of dilapidated roads and provision of street lighting in the places that before now were ruled by darkness.
Short distances hitherto breached for decades by bad roads are now being reconnected by new roads. In tandem, I understand that a series of micro credit and small business support programmes are being instituted to empower the people and fuel the latent entrepreneueral power of the state. Liberating the Abia people from the pangs of poverty is the same as reminding and reawakening the people in their inbuilt entrepreneurial powers.
I also understand that public sector workers like teachers and civil servants have begun receiving their emoluments regularly. So also have retirees and pensioners. The cries of anguish that used to emanate every month have subsided. The phone calls that come from the Abia villages are no longer cries of anguish and wails of those about to die. They are now good wishes and prayers that the good days should persist and better things come about.
The progress that has so far been recorded by the Alex Otti government is to my mind beyond the common run of ensuring good government. What has been happening in Abia since May 2023 is an attempt to re -establish the social contract between government and the people. It is above that the dismantling of the feudal state and its replacement with a peoples republic as enshrined in the constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
- Future Politics and Protection of the Abia Social Contract
That reversal of direction and rescue is what needs to be sustained as the most urgent political fight of the leadership struggle in the state in coming political seasons. The struggle ahead in Abia state is not just the retention of power by one clique or faction of the Abia political eiite. It is not about which party retains the key of the uncompleted government house in Umuahia. It may be convenient to couch the battle for political supremacy and succession in Abia in 2027 as a struggle for the survival of a Labour Party state government. It is at the primary level a struggle to sustain the present reversal of a feudal order in Abia state.
The current administration will be missing the point if it limits its battle for political survival to the survival of the party in power. It is more. It is a protection of the fundamental rights of the people to own the government of their state. It is the protection of the rights of people to receive regular salaries, to demand and get good healthcare, sensible education, reasonable infrastructure that works and the freedom to challenge the government if the affairs of the state are not going well.
Let there be no mistake about it. The feudal state in Abia served certain interests. It was about growing and sustaining an unproductive financial oligarchy even as the state became poorer. It was about keeping power within the control of certain interest groups. It was about continuing to grow a criminal tradition in government. That gang is intent on returning to power.
They will invoke all manner of primordial interests- zone, micro ethnicity etc. The new political opposition will deploy all manner of strategies to return to the feudal state. Violence, blackmail, thuggery, judicial antagonism, weaponization of insecurity in order to upturn the new order- all these negative forces wlll be activated in the run up to the 2027 succession elections.
Make no mistake about it. The current opposition that is building up in the state is an attempt to recapture the state and re-entrench the feudal order. At the partisan level, it is a battle for familiar partisan supremacy through alignments and alliances for electoral prevalence. But the battle for power and supremacy in Abia in the years ahead is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people of Abia.
The present gains need to be sustained for long enough to be owned by the people. People are not yet so sure that what has happened to them will not be reversed so soon. They are not even sure of what has happened to them. The rescue from feudal captivity has perhaps been too quick. People are just getting used to a governor that feels and talks like one of them, one who feels their pains and seeks to restore their rights.
- Prospects and Directions for the New Abia State
Beyond rescuing Abia state from feudal captivity, the state needs to claim a position of primacy in the Nigerian federation. We have an unusual endowment as a people whose entire populace is intrinsically entrepreneurial. You do not need to train the Abia man or woman to become a trader, a provider of goods and services. You do not need to train the Abia person to save for the rainy day, to create and store wealth or grow his little cottage business into something to be proud of and bequeath to the future.
The challenge of the moment is to harness the natural potential of Aba into a regional trade and manufacturing potential. Abia needs to become a hub for made in Nigeria small to medium scale manufacturing. The position of the state on the north-south rail link and the intersections of federal highways from the South West to the Eastern heartland and the South South needs to become a logistical asset linking the state from the sea in Port Harcourt to the vast demand fields of the northern hinterland.
Education remains a high priority in the state. But in today’s world, the emphasis must go beyond conventional classroom chalk board teaching and learning. Abia must aspire to lead the nation in digital learning. We must invest in manpower and leapfrog our education from the present level to prepare citizens for the new world of information technology and high technology. The pathway to this goal is to free education from unnecessary costs as has recently happened. The other strategy is to embark on continuous teacher education through in- service training every summer vacation. Ultimately, the average Abia school teacher at every level must hold a minimum of a first degree. Illiterates cannot be entrusted with the training of the work force for the future. Those who from other states who want to teach in the Abia schools system must meet a high certification requirement.
- Conclusion
The foundations of a new Abia should be laid now. It is a land of possibility. But its requires a delicate combination of political sagacity, clarity of vision and unusual courage. To the present leadership of the state, bear in mind that the greatest of leaders are those who take their people to that place where they dream to be but have never dared to venture towards.
