The good people of Abia State would be forgiven for not seeing the giant strides recorded by Governor Alex Otti coming. After all, in 2023, as a titanic tussle for the soul of “God’s own State” went the distance, it appeared for a long time that the captors of the state and their vicious politics under the auspices of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP would have their way again.
Thanks to the fortitude of the long-suffering people of the state and an unflappable returning officer, the PDP’s fabled rigging machine flopped spectacularly in the state. The product of that failure of state capture was Dr. Alex Otti. He has more than kept his word to his people.
For a people whose former governors first ruin the state before going to the National Assembly to continue embarrassing them, Otti has shown that decades of underdevelopment can be arrested and even reversed.
Since he came on board, he has approached the daunting challenges in the state with a
Defiant single-mindedness and even fury. Aba, the beating heart of the state’s economy and one of the great hopes of Nigeria’s industrialization, has been transformed by constant electricity and a new network of roads and bridges. Many other roads and bridges have woven through the state, awakening in the process the great economic potentials of the state.
Unlike his counterpart in Anambra, Otti has gone about his work with the quiet dignity and diligence befitting a first-rate economist and banker. He has largely refrained from the nauseating gymnastics of the avaricious career politicians from his state, choosing instead to quietly invest in the future of his state. But like the golden fish knows only too well, there is no hiding place.
Nigeria has a problem with taking care of its senior citizens. All over the country, those who defy Nigeria’s grim life expectancy to make it to old age have to put up with a whole battery of brutal challenges. From elder abuse to neglect to poor healthcare, poverty, and insecurity, senior Nigerians face some of their hardest days when they are way past their best and strongest years. As a result of this, getting old, which is often referred to as a blessing in Nigeria, has sometimes come to resemble a desperate situation. Slug.
In recognition of this, the Abia State Government recently passed the Abia State Senior Citizens Law, which is poised to prove life-changing for older people in the state. Under the new law, citizens over sixty would enjoy free medical services and would receive a stipend monthly until death.
In many ways, this law is profoundly humanitarian, showing the heart at the center of the good governance revolution happening in Abia State and serving as a wake-up call to other state governments. For many years, the good people of Abia State were stymied in darkness, shunted from one tragically incompetent PDP government to another. In 2023, after more than two decades of crippling neglect, the long-suffering people of the state took the unprecedented step of rejecting the PDP and its politics of retrogression.
The reward for their bold choice has come in the form of roads, bridges, electricity, security, and social protection for their most vulnerable. At the heart of the new dawn is Dr. Alex Otti, a man whose diminutive stature belies a deft mix of empathy and excellence.
Other states in Nigeria, many of which have remained mired in years of darkness and listlessness, have a lot to learn from Abia State, whose greedy former governors, who are now legislators at the National Assembly can only look with shame and envy from Abuja while unprecedented transformation back home reverses years of neglect and necrosis.
Kene Obiezu,
