Alex Otti Is Governing Abia State Like It Belongs to the People. Nigeria Should Take Notes.

He paid N40 billion in salary arrears. He put pensioners before politicians. He declined a chieftaincy title mid-tenure. He personally showed up for road project inspection at construction sites. Governor Alex Otti is not a superhero. He is just a man with his head in the right place. Which, in Nigeria, apparently qualifies as extraordinary.

There is a temptation, when writing about a Nigerian leader who is actually doing his job, to lower your expectations so much that you end up celebrating things that should simply be normal. Free education? Normal. Paying salaries on time? Normal. Not stealing the pension fund? Absolutely, genuinely, completely normal. The fact that these things feel remarkable in Nigeria is itself a commentary on how far we have fallen. But remarkable they are, because in a country where dozens of states have made a sustained art form of misgovernance, Governor Alex Otti is doing something that feels almost radical: he is governing for the people. And we should talk about that, loudly, and without apology.

His Excellency Dr Alex C. Otti: The Governor Who Was Stolen an Election Before He Won One

He inherited Abia State in a condition that can only be described as financially traumatized. The state owed salary arrears to workers at the university, polytechnic, college of education, teaching hospital, and health management board. Some institutions were owed over 30 months of back pay. Pensioners had not received their entitlements in years. Some retirees died waiting. When Alex Otti walked into Government House, Umuahia, in May 2023, he did not arrange a grand welcoming ceremony. He started paying people.

From Salary Arrears to Smart Schools: A Governor Who Shows Up

Alex C. Otti set the tone on day one with a declaration that became policy: civil servants and pensioners would be paid by or before the 28th of every month, and political officeholders would only receive their salaries after workers had been paid in full. In a country where governors routinely owe their own staff while living in luxury, this single announcement was a reorientation of priority so dramatic it felt like a different country.

By May 2025, at his two-year anniversary address, Governor Alex Otti announced that his administration had paid a total of N40 billion in accumulated salary and pension arrears left by previous administrations. He told workers: “Abia is no longer owing workers or pensioners.” Workers reportedly jubilated. Which, again, should be embarrassing to note as unusual. But here we are. Before his arrival, the Abia State Polytechnic was owed 33 months of staff salaries. The College of Education Arochukwu was owed 22 months. The Abia State University was owed 11 months. The hospital management board had accumulated a debt the administration’s spokesperson described as “humongous.” The Punch confirmed the first tranche of N17.6 billion paid out to institution workers.

On infrastructure, His Excellency Dr Alex Otti did something that is almost a foreign concept among Nigerian governors: he showed up to look at the roads himself. A video on YouTube shows the governor personally conducting road project inspection tours across Aba, walking construction sites, asking questions, and holding contractors accountable in real time. Not in a motorcade. Not at a commissioning ceremony with a ribbon-cutting party. At the actual construction site, in working conditions. In year one, he commissioned the Ossah six-lane road, now renamed Aguiyi Ironsi Boulevard in Umuahia, and several roads in Osisioma. In 2025, Vanguard reported that the administration commissioned 14 roads and four primary healthcare centres in just two days during the first phase of a major rollout. The 8.3km Isi Eketa-Obikabia Road, the 30km Arochukwu Road, the Omenuko Bridge, the Port Harcourt Road being rebuilt by Julius Berger: these are not announcements. They are completed and commissioned projects.

In education, Governor Alex Otti abolished school fees and made education free and compulsory in Abia. He recruited over 2,000 new teachers, raised the retirement age for teachers, and launched a reconstruction programme for 170 primary schools and 51 secondary schools. In healthcare, his administration restored accreditation for the Abia State University Teaching Hospital, cleared health workers’ salaries, and commissioned the Nchedo Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) for gender-based violence support. He launched Operation Crush, a multi-agency security outfit, established the Abia Security Trust Fund, and inaugurated a Security Advisory Council. He granted automatic employment to 50 TechRise graduates. He signed the 2025-2050 Abia Development Plan. He launched the Abia Leadership Academy for young people. He approved electric buses, with WTO Director-General Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala personally commissioning the green shuttle service for Abia.

He also did something that the average Nigerian politician would consider medically insane: he declined a chieftaincy title. When the traditional rulers of Ukwa East Local Government Area offered Alex Otti a chieftaincy title, he politely asked them to hold it until after his tenure ends in 2031. His reason: public officials should avoid receiving honours while in office so they can stay fully focused on governance. That explanation, reported widely, triggered a reaction from many Nigerians who genuinely could not believe they were reading it.

What 24 Years of the Alternative Looked Like

To fully appreciate what Governor Alex Otti is doing in Abia State, you have to understand what came before him. Abia State was under the control of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for 24 consecutive years before his election in 2023. During those two and a half decades, the state accumulated pension and salary arrears that workers describe as “humongous.” Workers at the Abia State Polytechnic were owed 33 months of salaries. Teachers went unpaid. Retirees waited for years. Civil servants reported that motivation had collapsed entirely because people who worked hard simply were not being paid. A detailed analysis by The News Chronicle found that in his first year alone, Otti increased state revenue by 15%, a sharp contrast with the financial stagnation of the PDP years.

The 24-year PDP record in Abia is not a matter of debate or accusation. It is documented in the arrears Otti spent his first two years clearing. It is visible in the schools that had not been renovated in decades. It is measurable in the investors who had quietly stopped considering the state for business. In neighbouring states, and across Nigeria, this pattern has reproduced itself reliably: leaders arrive at Government House, discover that a state’s resources are functional, and quietly redirect those resources away from the people toward private purposes. The result is a constituency that receives just enough basic services to maintain minimal social peace, and not enough to actually develop. It is a strategy as old as Nigerian politics itself.

On the other end of the governance spectrum, Nigeria has produced a specific kind of leader who has confused power with personal authority. This is the kind of official who addresses grieving citizens from inside an armoured vehicle, demolishes homes and businesses with soldiers as escorts, and responds to questions from junior public servants by calling them fools in public. The documented case of the FCT Minister’s encounter with a naval officer, explored in detail in our earlier piece on empathy and leadership, is simply one of the more photogenic examples of what happens when a person in public office forgets that power is a service, not a throne.

What is instructive about the contrast between leaders like Alex C. Otti and the ones who govern by extraction and intimidation is not their character alone. It is their relationship to the people they lead. Governor Alex Otti governs Abia as if Abians are the point of the exercise. He attends workers’ day celebrations and talks about their welfare like a man who has thought about it. He walks construction sites like a man who understands that roads are not photo opportunities. He pays pensioners first and politicians last, not because it is popular, but because it is right. The leaders who choose extraction instead are not necessarily more talented or more intelligent. They are simply making a different choice. And that choice, repeated across 36 states and a federal government, produces the Nigeria we currently have.

Nigeria’s Problem Has Never Been Money. It Has Always Been Intent.

Here is the argument that Governor Alex Otti makes simply by existing and governing as he does: the resources are there. They have always been there. Nigeria is not a poor country. It is a country with a poverty of leadership intent. The states that have remained underdeveloped across decades of democratic governance were not underdeveloped because the money did not come. The federation account allocations arrived. The oil revenues arrived. The international grants arrived. What did not arrive was a governor who had decided, firmly and finally, that those resources belong to the people and not to the office.

Abia State, under 24 years of PDP control, received federation account allocations every single month. The money came. The teachers went unpaid. The pensioners went without. The roads crumbled. The money did not disappear by magic. It was directed, by the people in power, away from the people who needed it. And when Alex Otti came in and began paying people what they were owed, the money for it was not beamed down from outer space. It came from better management of what was already there. He increased state revenue by 15% in year one, not by discovering new oil wells, but by reducing the leakages that his predecessors had apparently found convenient to ignore.

This is the point that needs to sit with every Nigerian voter, every community leader, every young person trying to decide whether to stay or go. The salvation of Nigeria is not a structural impossibility. It is not waiting for a messianic political figure to descend from the clouds with a 10-point policy document. It is available right now, in every state, at every local government, at every council ward level, the moment enough citizens decide to elect leaders whose primary motivation is the people they govern rather than themselves. As we noted in our Love Letter to the Nigerian People, the country does not need everyone to become an activist. It needs enough people paying attention to make corruption inconvenient.

Alex Otti Is Not the Destination. He Is the Direction.

Nigeria is a country where it is easy to be cynical, and where cynicism is frequently rewarded by events. The Lekki Toll Gate massacre that went without prosecution. The 744 ex-terrorists who graduated with certificates while communities buried their dead. The government officials who respond to mass killings with soft language and prodigal son analogies. The police officers who shoot bound men in public and whose superiors suggest the answer might be spiritual. It is a lot. It is enough to make a person decide that nothing can change and everyone who says otherwise is selling something.

And then there is Alex Otti in Abia State, personally walking construction sites at road project inspection tours, clearing 33 months of unpaid polytechnic salaries, declining a chieftaincy title because he wants his work to speak for him, paying pensioners before politicians, and announcing plans for the state’s future all the way to 2050. He is not perfect. No government is. There are critics who point to unfinished projects, outstanding pension arrears from previous administrations not yet fully cleared, and promises still in progress. Those critiques are fair and should be tracked. But the direction is unmistakable. Abia under Governor Alex Otti is pointed toward its people. And in Nigeria, that is not just good news for Abia. It is a template.

The Nigeria of our dreams, safe, functional, dignified, where teachers get paid and roads get built and pensioners do not die waiting for what they earned, is not a fantasy. It has an address. Right now, that address is Government House, Umuahia, Abia State. His Excellency Dr Alex Otti did not build it overnight and he will not finish it alone. But he is building it. And the significance of that, in a country that has been told repeatedly by its own leadership that it cannot be done, is enormous.

Every Nigerian community deserves its own Alex C. Otti. Not the same man, but the same standard. The standard that says public money belongs to the public. The standard that says a governor’s job is to go and look at the roads, not just attend the commissioning. The standard that says you do not take a chieftaincy title mid-tenure because titles are for after the work is done, not before. That standard is achievable. It has been achieved. And the people of Abia did not achieve it by hoping. They achieved it by voting, and by staying awake long enough to elect a person whose head was correctly positioned.

At Narrivon, we document what is broken in Nigeria because we believe the truth is the prerequisite for any change. But we also believe in documenting what is working, because working things are proof that working is possible. As we have written before, the Nigeria we want is a project, not a prayer. And projects require evidence that the foundation can hold. Governor Alex Otti and what he is building in Abia State is that evidence. One good leader at a time, one fully paid salary at a time, one completed road at a time, the country we deserve gets closer. Do not let anyone convince you otherwise.

Sources and Further Reading:
Otti pays Abia institutions N17.6 billion salary arrears (The Punch, September 2024) • Abia workers jubilate after Otti pays N40 billion salary arrears (The Guild, May 2025) • No political appointee will take salary before pensioners, Otti vows (Daily Post, March 2024) • Alex Otti: The governor who took governance to the people (Vanguard, October 2025) • Abia governor highlights achievements and addresses challenges (The Punch, January 2025) • Abia Governor Alex Otti declines chieftaincy title (Onion Farms, March 2026) • Abia workers celebrate Otti over payment of leave allowance (The Punch, February 2026) • Abia to compensate arbitrarily dismissed civil servants (BusinessDay, May 2025) • Alex Otti’s first year vs 24 years of PDP rule in Abia (The News Chronicle, May 2024) • Gov. Otti inspects major road projects underway in Aba (YouTube, May 2026) • Alex Otti (Wikipedia)