Good Governance

SOUTH-EAST FISCAL REALITY REVISITED: WHY ALEX OTTI’S ABIA LOOKS LESS LIKE INERTIA AND MORE LIKE DISCIPLINED REPOSITIONING Thank you for this piece. It is thoughtful, but a fuller economic reading leads to a different conclusion. The South-East debt table is not just a story of who borrowed more or less between June and December 2025. It is a story of how states are choosing to absorb macroeconomic shock. Under conditions of naira volatility, inflation, high domestic borrowing costs, and tightening liquidity, the most sophisticated fiscal behavior is not always the most dramatic. Sometimes, the strongest signal is controlled movement. On…

JUSUN vs Abia Government: Strip Away the Politics — The Record Shows Otti Is Acting by Process, Not Bad Faith Let us remove the political spin and stay with the documented facts. Under Governor Alex Otti, the Abia State Government has not shown hostility to judiciary workers as a matter of policy. In January 2025, the government and JUSUN reached an agreement through negotiation, signed an MoU, and the strike was suspended after arrears tied to delayed minimum-wage implementation were addressed. That is an important fact because it shows that this government has previously engaged JUSUN, negotiated with them, and…

Dear Reader and Fan, let us deal with this carefully, because what is being attempted here is not correction but historical laundering. Now to the Geometric Power issue. The claim being pushed is that Alex Otti “never sourced or approved any loan” for Geometric Power and that the $85 million story was mere “paperwork.” That is not what the public record says. Liars everywhere! Hell is real! …and readied… Governor Otti’s own 2024 public speech, The Power to Dream, states that he secured approval for an $85 million facility from First Bank, that Geometric could not draw on it because…

CONSULTANCY, REFORM, AND REALITY: A BALANCED (BUT CLEAR-EYED) VIEW OF ABIA’S GOVERNANCE UNDER OTTI The debate over “consultants versus internal capacity” in Abia State must be elevated beyond nostalgia and accusation into the domain of modern governance, institutional economics, and global best practice. What is being presented as a scandal—use of consultants, R&D expenditure, and external technical support—is, in fact, a standard feature of contemporary public administration worldwide. The real question is not whether consultants are used, but how, why, and with what outcomes.CONSULTANTS ARE NOT CORRUPTION — THEY ARE GLOBAL PRACTICEAcross the world, governments—from the United States to the…

FAAC Is Not Charity: Why the Cubana Chief Priest Narrative Fails History, Law, Economics, Politics, and Common Sense Let us begin where serious thinking begins: with first principles. In a federation, a state does not survive on presidential pocket money. It survives on law. Abia’s monthly share from the Federation Account is not a favor from President Tinubu to Governor Alex Otti. It is a constitutional and statutory entitlement distributed through the Federation Account Allocation Committee under Nigeria’s revenue-sharing framework. RMAFC describes this as a constitution-based allocation system, and Nigeria’s revenue allocation law establishes FAAC for that purpose. So the…

Reframing the Salary Narrative: A Government Perspective Rooted in Political Economy The argument that salary payments in Abia State are being exaggerated as an achievement rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of governance, public finance, and institutional economics. It reduces a complex fiscal and administrative reform process into a simplistic arithmetic exercise—revenue minus salaries equals surplus. This is not only intellectually inadequate; it is philosophically flawed. Governance is not bookkeeping. It is the management of competing obligations under conditions of scarcity, institutional weakness, and inherited distortions.From the standpoint of political economy, salary payment is not merely a line item—it is the…