THE POLITICS OF BAIT AND CAMERA ANGLES: How Click-Chasing Content Creators Mistook Governance for a Photo Contest
It takes a special kind of unseriousness to reduce governance to a scavenger hunt. The now-circulating poster daring the public to “name five standard projects completed by Governor Otti” — with a cash prize dangling like influencer bait — is not accountability. It is content creation masquerading as civic engagement.
This is not a policy audit. It is not investigative journalism. It is the politics of thumbnails, hashtags, and monetised outrage — designed to rubbish governance by converting serious public discourse into a street game for likes and reposts.
Governance is not a TikTok challenge. And Abia is not governed by camera angles.
WHEN CONTENT CREATION PRETENDS TO BE ACCOUNTABILITY
Real accountability asks hard questions, studies budgets, tracks procurement, follows timelines, and evaluates systems. What this poster does instead is demand instant visual gratification, as if the only projects that count are those that fit neatly into a smartphone frame.
By that logic, salary regularity is invisible.
Digital land reforms are “audio.”
Institutional clean-up is irrelevant.
Systems are useless unless they trend.
That is not how modern governance works anywhere in the world.
PROJECTS VS. SYSTEMS: THE DELIBERATE CONFUSION
The poster’s challenge rests on a false premise: that governance is measured only by ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Serious governments, however, invest first in systems, because systems outlive ceremonies.
Under Governor Alex Otti, Abia has focused on:
Ending salary and pension arrears
Rebuilding fiscal discipline
Digitising land and health records
Reforming procurement and treasury processes
Sequencing infrastructure, not improvising it
These are not “photo projects.” They are state-building actions — boring to content creators, but essential to citizens.
THE IRONY OF THE CHALLENGE
Those shouting the loudest today were silent when Abia had:
Roads that collapsed after every rainfall
Workers owed for months
Pensioners abandoned
Budgets treated as rituals
Back then, there were no posters offering money for photos. No viral outrage. No sudden love for “standard projects.”
Now that governance has shifted from drama to discipline, the noise has returned — armed with graphics and cash prizes.
WHY THIS TACTIC ALWAYS FAILS
History is clear: reform governments are always accused of “doing nothing” in their early years — because systems take time to show physical scale. Singapore, Rwanda, even Lagos in its reform years faced the same mockery.
But systems compound. And when they do, the same content creators quietly move on.
CONCLUSION: GOVERNANCE IS NOT A GAME SHOW
Abia’s future will not be decided by posters, prizes, or performative cynicism. It will be decided by whether institutions work, salaries are paid, records are clean, and infrastructure lasts.
Those demanding instant optics are free to create content.
Government, however, must create capacity.
And that difference — between content and competence — is exactly what this moment is exposing.
AProf Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke
