Abia Is In A Mess

*By Ndubisi Francis*

If we allow the same crop of leaders who have held Abia State by the jugular in the past 22 years to have their way in 2023, I am afraid we may not have a state to call our own any more. We have had successive administrations that are everything but purposeful, visionary and forthright.

They appropriate our commonwealth to interests that are selfish at the expense and eternal agony of the long-suffering masses. What’s so difficult about running a small state like Abia with a surfeit human and material endowment?

About 11 years ago, a popular editor from the South-west confessed openly during our editorial meeting that if he was the governor of Abia State, he would only need the IGR from Aba to successfully run the state without recourse to federal allocations. During the misgovernance that characterised the Orji Kanu era, Aba was a reproach to Abia State.

The Abia axis of the Aba-Port Harcourt Expressway was swallowed by refuse for almost the entire duration of his administration. It was that bad that vehicles could not access the road.

Fast forward to the Theodore Orji drudgery, it was another case of arrested development in the state. While hired sycophants and praise singers were beside themselves on how to fashion out appropriate eulogies, outsiders (including journalists) who had one reason or the other to visit the state made snide remarks on the level of under-development and decay.

As the 2015 general elections drew close, and faced with the stark reality that the opposition might take over the state due to poor performance, President Goodluck Jonathan prevailed on the then Finance Minister, Dr. Okonjo-Iweala to leverage her connections with development partners for a kind of Marshall plan on Abia. Consequently, in September 2014, the African Development Bank, UNDP and a few others were mobilised to Abia.

I was on the entourage as a journalist. The teams toured Umuahia and Aba. Many roads in the Umuahia metropolis were in serious state of disrepair. By the time they concluded their visit and came to brief Ochendo with Okonjo-Iweala, the usually vocal Abia governor was lost for words, especially on the level of water pollution and erosion in Aba. All he could mutter was that it was the Ndi Egoro erosion problem in Aba that earned the late Sam Mbakwe the moniker “The Weeping Governor”.

I was sitting beside Paul Nwabuikwu and we exchanged a glance at each other and asked ourselves if that was an admittance of hopelessness. This episode happened in the conference room of the Abia State Government House, Umuahia, where a good number of seats in the room were dilapidated, and not even worthy to grace the living room of a respectable poor man. I recall Paul Nwabuikwu painfully telling me that from what he had seen in the room (and heard), he felt ashamed as an Abian.
Under the T.A. Orji administration, many World Bank-assisted projects attracted by Okonjo-Iweala, which only required counterpart funding were spurned.

Peter Obi leveraged on a number of such projects for Anambra. I never expected Okezie Ikpeazu, PhD, being a product on an uninspiring past to perform wonders, but I couldn’t imagine the level of abysmal performance with all the Paris Club refunds, bailouts and sundry funds at his administration’s disposal.

Six years and still counting, he couldn’t deliver a single flyover in Osisioma, and people are justifying such brazen maladroitness. There’s nothing in the state capital to depict that it’s the seat of government. As of August this year, the state was owing resident doctors and polytechnic workers 20 months apiece, in addition to several other unmet obligations in several quarters. Rightly or wrongly, Ebonyi State used to be seen as the epithet for poverty and underdevelopment in the South-east.
But today, a visionary, people-centred governance has transformed the state capital and many rural communities. I do not think the verdict of history will be fair to the successive administrations in Abia, including Ikpeazu’s irrespective of the deluge of obfuscation by pro-establishment and favour-seeking individuals.
Abia is in a sorry state, irrespective of a sprinkle of positive steps in Aba and elsewhere.