“Had Gov Otti inherited a structured and functional state, Abia would, by now, be competing at enviable heights. What you are witnessing is not hype—it is a state clawing its way back to life and recovery,”
A member of Abia State indigenes in the Diaspora, a certain Dr. Sam Ude has come in hard on his social media handle against a popular critic of the Otti’s Labour party led government, fondly referred to as ‘the New Abia”
Responding to an oppositional figure, a former commissioner of Finance and vicious critic of the Otti’s led administration, Dr. Sam Ude calls on Obinna Oriaku and others like him to look at themselves in the mirror before they come on social media platform to speak against a leader whose administration has outperformed all 3 past governors of Abia State put together in the past 24 years before the emergence of the Otti’s government under the platform of Labour Party.
“In a short but tensed worded response, Dr. Sam wrote;
Thank you for attempting to anchor this discourse in “facts”—though, if we are to be honest, what we see here is less a balanced analysis and more a selective outrage elegantly dressed in rhetoric.
Let me begin by unearthing the inconvenient truth you continue to sidestep: comparing Governor Alex Otti’s Abia with Enugu or Imo—without interrogating the point of departure—is not just flawed; it is intellectually reckless. Even the proverbial blind can testify that Otti inherited not a state, but a carcass of governance.
Under administrations such as Okezie Ikpeazu, Abia—particularly Aba—degenerated into a symbol of urban decay: a landscape of collapsed infrastructure, impassable roads, suffocated drainage, and institutional paralysis. Governance did not merely fail—it vanished.
And so one must ask, with deliberate emphasis: where was this analytical energy when Abia was in free fall? Why were there no comparative charts, no moral outrage, no intellectual gymnastics placing Ikpeazu side-by-side with his contemporaries in Enugu or Imo? Why did the chorus of critics suddenly discover its voice only when a painstaking recovery began? The answer is as stark as it is uncomfortable—there was nothing to defend then, and now that there is something to rebuild, criticism has found new oxygen.
This fixation on “600 meters” of resurfaced roads betrays a shallow understanding of governance. You know—as one seasoned in public administration—that leadership is not measured by the theatrics of commissioning ceremonies but by the discipline of reconstruction.
In all ramifications, what Gov Otti is undertaking is not cosmetic governance; it is structural resuscitation—cleansing Aba, restoring mobility, reopening economic arteries, and, most critically, rebuilding public trust. Those very roads you trivialize were once monuments to neglect under regimes like TA Orji and Ikpeazu. Progress, no matter how modest in appearance, is still progress when it emerges from ruin.
As for the celebratory comparisons—Enugu’s aviation strides, Imo’s road networks—commendable, no doubt. But governance is not a beauty pageant; it is a context-driven enterprise. Abia’s urgency is not optics—it is rehabilitation and stabilization. You do not adorn a collapsing structure; you first salvage its foundation before dreaming of skyscrapers.
Now, regarding Omoyele Sowore—let consistency guide us. If his voice is now the benchmark of credibility, then his home base, Ondo State, ought to exemplify the standards he so vigorously prescribes. Can it? Does Ondo today stand as a paragon of transformational governance eclipsing Abia’s current trajectory? If not, then perhaps the critique is less about substance and more about spectacle.
Let me simply conclude with clarity, not sentiment: had Gov Otti inherited a structured and functional state, Abia would, by now, be competing at enviable heights. What you are witnessing is not hype—it is a state clawing its way back to life. And recovery, unlike grandstanding, is neither glamorous nor instantaneous—it is painstaking, deliberate, and profoundly consequential.
So I leave you—and indeed every fair-minded observer—with this piercing question:
Is it nobler to quietly rebuild a shattered state brick by brick, or to conveniently erase its history of collapse and demand results as though all began on equal footing?
Ndewo Sir,
Dr. Sam Ude
