Abia ThinkTank

Policy, Not Propaganda: The Senior Citizens Act and the New Welfare Direction In an era where governance is too often measured by slogans, soundbites, and staged optics, the real test of reform is whether compassion is codified into law. That is why the Senior Citizens framework recently signed in Abia represents more than a welfare gesture — it is a structural policy signal. It moves social protection from discretion to statute, from promise to enforceable obligation.Public debate has recently been saturated with claims, counter-claims, livestream arithmetic, and political theatre. Yet serious governance is not built on viral clips. It is…

FACT CHECK RESPONSE USING ABIA Q4 BUDGET PERFORMANCE FIGURES (OFFICIAL REPORT EXTRACTS) By AProf. Chukwuemeka Ifegwu Eke Let us move from emotion to evidence.The Abia Q4 Budget Performance Report (Oct–Dec 2025) — as shown in the official performance tables and infographics — already answers the repeated claim that “nobody knows where the money went.” The figures are not hidden. They are itemized. According to the published Q4 performance sheet:TOTAL FUNDS AVAILABLE:₦149.2 BillionTOTAL SPENT:₦144.6 BillionBALANCE:₦4.6 Billion That is not opacity — that is disclosure with closing balance. Now let us look at sectoral deployment — again from the same published report…

Elite Pension Reform and Fiscal Justice: A Public Sector Economics Defense of Governance Restructuring A Pro-Reform Governance Paper Anchored in Stiglitz & Rosengard Modern public finance does not evaluate government spending by tradition, political sentiment, or elite expectation. It evaluates spending by social value, equity impact, and efficiency outcome. In Economics of the Public Sector, Joseph Stiglitz and Jay Rosengard repeatedly emphasize that the central purpose of public expenditure is to advance “social welfare” and correct distributional imbalance. That framework provides a rigorous lens for evaluating reforms that repeal extraordinary pension privileges for former political office holders and redirect those…