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.
In the current class of Nigeria’s State Governors, Alex Otti of Abia stands conspicuous over most of his contemporaries. He is showcasing good governance and enlightened politics. This remarkable progress has got him into “good trouble”. He has become a favourite of both good media and toxic voices from our political Babylon. Those who appreciate the progress in Abia are praising the governors. The most remarkable thing about this category is that they are mostly common people for whom Mr. Otti has brought the government to mean something positive to them. For this group, democracy and good governance mean the same thing: meeting the people halfway on the road to progress.
On the contrary, Otti is getting undue negative attention from partisan media and commentators from the other side of the partisan divide. It does not matter how many roads he builds, how many new schools he rehabilitates, how many pensioners he pays arrears or how promptly he now pays salaries. Those politically opposed to his political position and very incumbency cannot see them. These voices of incurable negativity are dripping from the bile tanks of Abia’s political Babylon, a place of incurable “bad belle”.
The well-meaning social and traditional media have their job mostly done by Mr. Otti’s sterling performance. Even among the ordinary people in the villages and the urban centres of Aba and Umuahia, the publicity is self-defining. Even then, the Otti phenomenon is beginning to suffer a typically Nigerian handicap in terms of discourse and public opinion. The political opposition is digging up and padding up a mixture of falsehood and mangled narratives to score points preparatory to the 2027 campaigns. That of course, is in the nature of political exchanges. More dangerously, the favourite Nigerian game of unbridled sycophancy has encroached into the Otti narrative. Professional partisan sycophants and hirelings have been joined by new recruits in the form of “town criers” in the social media. While most are showcasing Governor Otti’s more obvious infrastructure achievements and magnifying them for obvious partisan reasons, the voices of Babylon are singing old tunes of finding faults in every place. Between pro-government sycophants and their equally feverish opponents, the road ahead is littered with media landmines.
But so far, Mr.Otti is one clear step ahead of his traducers and opponents. He has raised the stakes of his incumbency beyond the Government House in Umuahia. He has raised the meaning of government above the blaring of sirens to disturb the peace of the poor and innocent. He has also gone beyond the usual landscape decoration of roads, bridges, and empty buildings.. The dividend of democracy is not a decorated landscape. It is the transfer of political power back to the people to whom it rightfully belongs. For the first time since its creation, Otti has bridged the tragic divide between government and the people. He has given back government to the Abia people by making it accessible and meaningful to their daily lives. He explains to them the policies of the government. He accounts periodically to them for his actions and the expenditure of government money. Those who used to vote and go home to be forgotten for another four years are now recalled from their villages and their accrued and arrears of salaries and pensions paid as and when due. The people now have a stake and a say in how they are governed.
The basic principle for the existence of the state is the social contract which binds the government to the people. A state that conducts its affairs indifferent to the desires and aspirations of the people is not a democratic state. It is at best a feudal fiefdom or autocracy. Abia, along with most Nigerian states came into existence as pseudo-feudal enclaves created by military fiat with a democratic nomenclature but in essence autocratic.
Unfortunately, It took 24 years and three consecutive two term governorships for Abia to struggle free from this feudal origin and authoritarian orientation. In essence, the real history of a democratic Abia State began in May 2023. Only since then was the Abia Leviathan born and the social contract of an enlightened state inaugurated. It is perhaps since then that we can accept valid criticisms of government action in an atmosphere of free expression.
The basic outlines of feudal rule in Abia can be briefly outlined to understand what happened over the past 24 years.
The long-standing bad reputation of Abia was not just because the roads were bad, Aba was rotten and neglected and the government was populated by too many small and big thieves. It was rather in the more imperceptible fact that the government in Umuahia and the majority of Abia people travelled separate ways for a whole 24 years.
What obtained in Abia for the first 24 years was a feudal Babylonian captivity of the state and its people and resources.
The government was indifferent to the plight of the people. Those in authority collected votes at election time and turned the other way for years on end. The light of the people meant nothing to the successive governments. Politicians were in government for and because of themselves. Workers were unpaid for months on end. Teachers, doctors, university lecturers, and pensioners shared a common plight of collective condemnation to a lifetime of penury. What has changed in Abia since the onset of the 2023 Otti administration is a decisive reversal of the focus of government from a conclave for itself to a service assembly for the people.
Perhaps the successive administrations may be termed Babylonian overlords. This is unlike other democratic federations that came into being as a result of popular will and mandate from below to the top, the Nigerian federal structure was created by an all conquering federal might from above. This is unlike the United States in which it was the states that voluntarily joined the federation for collective security and grandeur. In Nigeria, it was the central military of Nigeria that created the states and imposed an administrative structure on the entire nation.
Abia State has had a tortuous encounter with formal democracy. On the contrary, Abia people have for over 24 years tumbled from one season of state capture to another. Democratic transitions have been for these people more of ritual migrations from one imperial rule to a feudal oligarchy, from one depressing season of exploitation to a more humiliating fanfare of deception in the name of governance.
All manner of miscreants have come and gone, claiming electoral mandates that remain unverified. Extremely poor people have been frightened off the bad roads by authorized hooligans blaring sirens with accompanying goons with horsewhips and assault riffles.
We need to put in context what the state witnessed for a whole two and half decades prior to 2023. 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 the Nigerian constitution, Abia operated more like a feudal enclave and unregulated extractive colony with peculiar characteristics.
- Its most enlightened and illustrious citizens were consciously excluded from its governance and mostly lived and earned their living outside the state. The state economy was so privatized that the commanding heights were controlled by the imperial governor, his family and cult of friends.
- Over the 24-year period under reference, the quantum of resources that accrued to the state from both the Federation Account and Internally Generated Revenue was not matched in any way by the volume or tempo of development in the state.
- In the same period, an annual Google search of the economy of the state indicated that in each of those years, of the five richest people in Abia State on a year-on-year basis, three at the top of the list coincided with the most prominent political figures.
The inevitable conclusion, therefore, is that for whatever reason, Abia was essentially a feudal enclave for 24 years (1999 to 2023) and has only been struggling to free itself from feudal captivity since after the 2023 governorship election. Between 1999 and May 2023, the state does not qualify as a democratic sub-sovereign part of the Nigerian federation. Politics and the democratic process were only deployed as instruments for state capture by different factions of the Abia political elite. Once captured, the state in each of these years was run more like either a private feudal enclave or an unregulated extractive colony.
The rights of the citizens to fair treatment were grossly violated. The entitlement of the people to good government in terms of healthcare, education, security , infrastructure and emoluments could not be guaranteed.
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 legislations that rolled out of the State House of Assembly were more of feudal decrees and imperial edicts than debated laws of a democratic assembly.
The judiciary had no independent voice as judges owed their appointments, promotions and general welfare to the benevolence of the imperial governor. Officials of the state judiciary were selected and hired on the basis of loyalty to the governor and the party cabal in power.
Quite routinely, the imperial governor set up and empowered 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 creative accountancy.
From available records, between 1999 and 2007, the Governor’s Office issued and signed off on full-page newspaper advertisements of the State’s financial statement compiled and “audited” by the same Governor’s Office. In other words, the governor authorized expenditure, spent the money, ‘accounted’ for it, audited the expenses and informed the public accordingly that the audit had been certified!
It failed as an organized criminal cartel. It failed its people, failed itself as an organized syndicate of enlightened thieves (“there is honour even among thieves”, it failed the nation and failed the concept of democratic sovereignty.
Tn terms of tenure and power the thieves of Abia had no honour. Some of them toyed with self-succession, that is succession from within the family of the incumbent. One governor so empowered his mother that a new terminology was coined for the system of government that gave the mother of the governor virtual executive authority over some government decisions. It was called – “Mamacracy”. Another governor attempted to be succeeded by his son whom he had manipulated into the position of Assembly Speaker. It was an attempted hereditary monarchy.
Therefore, the question that Abia needed to answer with the outcome of the 2023 governorship election was simple: would the state correct course and return to the path of responsible democratic governance or continue as a feudal enclave under the captivity of a political oligarchy and Babylonian overlords?
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.
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 and teachers were owed anywhere between 24 to 30 months in salary arrears. 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.
The media rhetoric about Abia today is merely an exchange between spokespersons of a dying feudal political culture and a nascent democratic and republican order. Those in the vanguard of defending and protecting what Governor Otti is doing must understand what they are up against. Of course, the defenders of the feudal order have a right in a democratic space to do what they have always done- spew lies and spatter blackmail. Gladly, the Abia people have left the Babylonian captivity of feudalism behind, for all time. There is no going back.
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