Columns/Opinions/Letters

OTTI, CORRUPTION AND THE DANGEROUS POLITICS OF INVENTED CERTAINTY I have read Moses A. Orji’s latest piece, “Otti’s Government and the Whispers of Corruption (III).” What strikes me is not the strength of the evidence presented, but the extraordinary distance between the evidence actually established and the conclusions so confidently pronounced. There is a fundamental difference between asking questions about public expenditure and declaring expenditure to be theft. The first is legitimate democratic scrutiny. The second requires evidence. You cannot simply locate an expenditure entry in a Budget Performance Report, announce that you personally have not seen the corresponding project,…

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY OF OPPOSITION IN TODAY’S ABIA Opposition is indispensable to democracy because government becomes less careful when it is never questioned and less accountable when it is never challenged. Every serious democratic society needs people who interrogate budgets, test official claims, examine the cost and quality of projects, scrutinise procurement, expose waste and insist that public office remains answerable to the public. Abia is no exception. Governor Alex Otti’s administration should be scrutinised, challenged and criticised where necessary, not because criticism is an act of hostility, but because criticism is one of the disciplines that keeps democratic government from…

ABIA’S OPPOSITION UNDER THE MICROSCOPE: BETWEEN PRINCIPLED CRITICISM, POLITICAL AMNESIA AND THE STRUGGLE FOR RELEVANCE Every serious democracy needs an opposition, but not every opposition automatically earns credibility. Credibility is accumulated slowly: through consistency, intellectual honesty, institutional memory, willingness to acknowledge progress and the courage to subject friends and foes to the same standards. Abia State today presents an interesting political laboratory because its opposition is neither completely frivolous nor completely coherent. It contains principled critics, experienced former public officers, partisan combatants, former defenders of governments now reinvented as accountability advocates, and politicians struggling to redefine their relevance in a…