Achebe’s Mirror and Abia’s Moment: Reading Governor Alex Otti Through The Trouble with Nigeria
When The Trouble with Nigeria was published in 1983, Chinua Achebe did not intend to flatter power. He intended to diagnose it. His conclusion was as brief as it was brutal: Nigeria’s problem was not geography, intelligence, or resources, but leadership—specifically the absence of moral seriousness, institutional discipline, and restraint among those entrusted with authority.
Four decades later, Achebe’s work remains relevant because Nigeria keeps repeating the same mistake: judging leaders by rhetoric instead of systems, by alliances instead of outcomes, and by noise instead of structure.
This is the context in which Abia State—and the administration of Alex Otti—must be understood. Not as a personality contest. Not as a party war. But as a live test of whether Achebe’s warning can finally be taken seriously at subnational level.
Achebe argued that leadership failure begins not with incompetence but with moral laxity. Nations fail when leaders see power as entitlement rather than responsibility. In this light, the most important question about Otti is not whether he is better than his predecessors, but whether he is building institutions strong enough to outlive him.
On this score, Otti’s insistence on documentation, audits, and procedural order marks a departure from Abia’s long history of improvisation. Achebe warned that countries decay when governance is personalised—when leaders substitute personal charisma for systems. Otti’s approach, for all its imperfections, attempts the opposite: to de-centre personality and re-centre process.
Yet Achebe also warned that reformers often stumble when applause replaces discipline. A government can begin well and still fail if supporters stop asking hard questions. Achebe would insist that transparency is not proven by announcements, but by traceable records; that accountability is not emotional defence, but verifiable evidence; and that dissent is not treason, but oxygen for reform.
This is where Abia’s current debate often derails. Critics mistake restraint for weakness; supporters mistake silence for perfection. Achebe rejected both extremes. He believed leadership must be confident enough to endure scrutiny and disciplined enough to resist theatrics.
Otti’s challenge, therefore, is not opposition rhetoric. It is Achebe’s old question: can reform survive Nigeria’s political culture? Can systems resist sabotage? Can institutions hold when the noise rises toward 2027?
Achebe never promised that good leadership would be popular. He promised only that it was necessary. Abia’s experiment is still unfolding, but the test Achebe set remains unchanged: leadership that builds records, not legends; institutions, not cults; and continuity, not dependency.
History will not ask whether Alex Otti spoke loudly enough. It will ask whether he governed with restraint, built verifiable systems, and left Abia stronger than he found it.
That is Achebe’s mirror. Abia is now standing before it.
AProf Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke
