News
I predict vendetta! *Otti’s gvt may try to demolish my legacies in Abia – Ikpeazu
Okezie Ikpeazu, Governor of Abia State, says he is already preparing his mind to a massive onslaught from the incoming government of Alex Otti, which he claimed could launch an attack to destroy the good deeds he left in Abia State in his eight years in office.
Ikpeazu, who spoke in an interview, listing some of them as leaving Abia as the safest state in Nigeria, said however no matter the line the government toed, he would remain quite proud of all those achievements, including the fact of also leaving the state as the third best in foreign direct investment.
“Let me say this and I’m going to be very predictive. There’s going to be a very massive attack to demolish my legacies and monuments in Abia. It’s going to be a lot of falsehood. There’s going to be a lot of petty vendetta and all those sorts of things, but I’ll be proud to say that, I’m handing over the safest and most stable state in the South East despite the fact that this election didn’t go my way, I’m proud to say that no life was lost and I’m proud to say that the government of the day was rather a victim.
“In some places, people from other political parties were unleashing mayhem on our supporters and dealing with them the way they love, but in all of these, like Jonathan would say, this election, victory or loss, is not worth the life of any Abian.
“Going forward, people will know that it’s when you have a secured state that you can become the third best in foreign direct investment. It’s also when you’ve created a better life for your people that you can become number three best when it comes to the poverty index in this country. These are world Bank parameters. In this place as I speak, the governors’ forum is doing a very serious review of our tele-health initiative. Abia State is the only state in Nigeria that has connected over 400 primary health care centres to a team of doctors in our call room online in real-time.
“The level of service we render in our primary health care centres today is comparable to the level of service some people render in general hospitals if not specialist hospitals. Today, in Abia State we’ve started the gradual establishment of laboratories in primary health care centres where a diagnosis can be done. Abia State runs a geriatric outreach for old people. We’ve built a specialist pediatric hospital and by the special Grace of God, we’ll deliver one of the biggest hospitals in the South-East before the 29th of May with a CT Scan that can do 265 slides.
“I think the best I’ve seen around us recently is 32 or 64 slides. There’s no other machine that’s better or that can do better in this environment. 71 per cent reduction in infant and maternal mortality is not easy. I was asked by some journalists about some months ago to tell them how I’ve been battered and kidnapped by some internet warriors and terrorists? When I tell them that the World Bank has published that we’ve reduced infant and maternal mortality by 71 per cent they wanted to know how did you do it? And I told them that the strategy is to bring everybody to loop in our primary health care centre and do whatever you can to stop people from running to quarks for delivery.
“So, how do you do that? We keyed into the Basic Health Care Provision Fund. We offered free delivery which is costing more than N120,000 in some private clinics. We give you free delivery pack needed to take care of the child. In addition to that, we also give you a token of N500 to go home with. The one that made news was that Ikpeazu is giving women that got delivered N500.
“When people ask me, how have you felt with the economy and how’s business in your state? I say to them, well before the statistics of being number three in foreign direct investment came, I told them, in 2015 when I became the Governor that fast food joints were closing because people were not investing in Aba.
“But today when you come, investment is growing , industries abound here, the Enyimba Economic City is almost taking off and people are building lubricant plants everywhere. But in addition, you have new Cinema, Chicken Republic (Fast Food that was nowhere in Abia before) and all these things for leisure and nightlife. The one that they picked is that I said that the achievement of my government is Chicken Republic. But I was very happy when the World Bank published that we were number three in foreign direct investment. If you look at the turnover of Kentucky Fried Chickens (KFC) there’s no company that does better except the oil companies and Dangote. They employ over 6500 people in a city. People don’t understand. I have added 700 brand new classrooms to our credit and four new model schools.
“We’ve migrated into digital learning. We have continuing teachers training institute that continually trains our teachers and interfaces them with the best from the rest of the world like Australia, India and Bangladesh. That’s why today, out of eight years we maintained first in four years in the West African Examination Council (WAEC) conducted West African Senior School Certificate Examination (WASSCE). And we’ve not gone below fourth. We moved Abia State University from number 97th to number 26th in Nigeria and the number too best state university in Nigeria. These things are not easy feats.
“We reversed enrollment back into public schools from 150,000 pupils to about 650,000 and above pupils on the account of our free meal programme started before that of the federal government and we employed about 5300 women to handle it, collaborating with Federal Government, as food vendors. I don’t want to talk about four Bridges and the first flyover in Abia. I don’t want to talk about connecting the major markets in Aba with good roads for the first time in 30 years.
“There are so many things I can beat my chest and say I’ve achieved. We have two industries for shoes and the other one for garments. By the special grace of God, I’ll be the Governor that’ll hand over a brand new government house. I don’t also want to talk about the completion of the International Conference Centre, the ASUBEB building and the JAAC Building started by my predecessor. Or the Abia Investment House, New ABSIEC and ASOPADEC headquarters. We’ve done a lot and there’s one that is very dear to my heart.
“People did everything to stop the intervention of the African Development Bank in supporting us to do 500 kilometres of rural roads. They wrote petitions against the project. But despite all these, I was able to get the project on course and I’ll do the ground breaking before I leave. Somebody else may take the credit, but put it on record that this government paid the counterpart funding, defended that project before the Senate, the ministry of finance, attracted it and we’re doing the groundbreaking.
“Before the end of this year, that project would have touched the lives of our people. So, as I leave on the 29th of May, I’ll leave a very proud man. There may be things I didn’t do well. I still have 3000 workers which I wasn’t able to attend to their needs as I would have loved to. I still owe pensioners and of course, I inherited most of it. Some doctors as well.
“I still have about three or four months of their money in their own account but I’m asking them that if they don’t resume from strike, I’ll not pay because, if they claim they are being owed 29 months, in all honesty, they’ve not worked for 15 months within this period. My Bible says that a worker deserves his pay but they’ve not worked. Each time I bargain with them, I remember one particular occasion they caused me to go and borrow N400 million on a Thursday and I paid them that Thursday, the next Tuesday, they embarked on a strike. So, I urge them to search their conscience and I pray that they get a better deal in the years ahead. In my first three months as governor, I paid them 11 months’ salary arrears. Those who were earning N500,000 went home with N5.5 million.
“So, I wanted to prove to them that I was a humane forthcoming leader but my relationship with them did not go, regrettably, as I would have loved it to. But I take solace in the fact that 29,000 of the rest of my workers and all the ministries were paid. As I said, there are a few things which I can say I didn’t do well, but I’m in a place where I can say I’ve given my best.”
Columns
The Three-Month Sprint (1): Philosophical Architecture of an Intellectual Trilogy of State Decay
Last week on The Sunday Stew, we unveiled the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI), a quantitative metric I developed as an extension of the Trinity of State Decay. It is meant to be a mathematical instrument for measuring the degree of separation between a state’s juridical sovereignty and its lived reality. I had planned to follow up today with the first instalment of a three-part series on the methodology and indicators of the DSI.
Then, from the middle of last week, there was a development that sent me into a sustained period of reflection.
On Wednesday, Zenodo — the open-access repository developed by CERN, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, and the European Commission — published my 16,315-word theoretical treatise, ‘The Trinity of State Decay (Part 1): Sovereign Decoupling and Rival Sovereignty — A Theoretical Statement.’ On Thursday, Harvard Dataverse, owned and operated by Harvard University, published the same work. On Friday morning, an email arrived from the Social Science Open Access Repository (SSOAR), operated by GESIS — the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Germany — confirming that they too had accepted, published, and archived the paper.
Late Prof. Edward Said
I sat with that for a while. It is exactly three months since The Sunday Stew made its debut. In those three short months, we have produced an original analytical framework (The Insecurity Triad), a comprehensive theoretical formulation (the Trinity of State Decay), and a quantitative index (DSI). Within the same period, the framework entered global scholarly circulation, and now the theoretical paper has been published by three of the world’s most respected scholarly repositories within seventy-two hours of each other. I found myself thinking about the symmetry of it: three months. A trilogy of original contributions. A triple publication in a single week.
Numbers sometimes carry meaning far beyond arithmetic. This one felt like it was trying to tell me something.
I. The Seed Planted in a Library
When The Sunday Stew was conceived, I did not set out to become a framework architect, a theorist, or an index creator. But looking back, I think the seed was planted much earlier — by accident, in the history section of the University of Calabar library.
I was preparing a term paper on Nigerian history. Our lecturer was the late Dr. Erim O. Erim — a man you had to do your absolute best to satisfy. I was moving along the shelves when I stopped. What arrested me was a name on a spine: Sigmund Freud. His biography. I could not understand what such a book was doing in the history section. I took it anyway, borrowed it, and in one week read it cover to cover.
Of everything I read about Freud’s life, one idea lodged itself in my subconscious and has never left: Freud’s concept of immortality. He defined it simply but profoundly: immortality is being known by many anonymous people. Not a mystical phenomenon, but a psychological and systemic one. It is the act of leaving behind an intellectual footprint so distinct that your ideas are absorbed by millions of people who may never meet you, but who must use your language to understand their own reality.
Freud did not merely write a theory. He changed the global vocabulary. Because of Freud, anonymous people who have never read a page of psychoanalysis use the words ego, subconscious, projection, and defence mechanism every single day. They are operating within his architecture without ever knowing it. That, he argued, was immortality.
I was a young man in a university library who had come looking for Nigerian history and stumbled into a philosophy of intellectual legacy. I did not know, at the time, that I had been given a compass.
•Late Antonio Gramsci
II. The Book C.Don Handed Me
Several years later, when I lived in Lagos, I had someone who was (and still is) a friend, a big brother, and a mentor. The home of C.Don Adinuba — then at Ilupeju — was like my second home. I could walk in at any time. C.Don was the perfect host, and his wife a hostess of uncommon warmth. There was never a dull moment in that house. He knew I loved books, and he is himself one of the most intellectually deep people I have ever encountered.
On one of those days, he pulled a book from his shelf, handed it to me, and said: “Go and read this.” I looked at it. The author was unfamiliar. I asked: “Who is Edward Said?” He replied: “Just go and read the book.”
Representations of the Intellectual — which grew out of Said’s 1993 Reith Lectures for the BBC — turned out to be, apart from the Bible, one of the most impactful books I have ever read. In its pages I first encountered Antonio Gramsci, whose Prison Notebooks has made an enduring impression on my intellectual formation and theoretical development. Said’s argument — that the intellectual’s vocation is to speak truth to power, to represent the unrepresented, and to refuse the comfort of specialisation in favour of the discomfort of genuine engagement — became a way of understanding what journalism, practised seriously, is actually for.
And from Antonio Gramsci, particularly his broad conception of the intellectual, I came to understand that intellectuals are not confined to universities, research institutes, or academic titles. Gramsci argued that intellectual activity exists wherever people help shape ideas, interpret reality, organise knowledge, and influence how society understands itself. Through that lens, I realised that journalism is not merely a profession of reporting events; it is an inherently intellectual vocation.
As a journalist, I do more than gather facts and relay information. I help frame public conversations, interrogate power, highlight social challenges, preserve collective memory, and contribute to the global marketplace of ideas. This understanding deepened my sense of responsibility to society. It reinforced the belief that journalism carries a duty not only to inform but also to enlighten, challenge assumptions, encourage critical thinking, and provide citizens with the knowledge necessary to make informed decisions.
Gramsci’s perspective helped me see that the journalist occupies a vital bridge in the relationship between structured knowledge and public life. The responsibility is therefore not simply to report what happens, but to pursue truth rigorously, interpret developments thoughtfully, and contribute constructively to the intellectual and moral development of society. In that sense, journalism became for me not just a career, but a pure form of public intellectual engagement.
These two books — one stumbled upon by accident, one pressed into my hands by C.Don — formed the philosophical foundation on which everything that follows in this column rests. I did not know that at the time. I know it now.
Late Sigmund Freud
III. The Question That Started Everything
When The Sunday Stew made its debut on March 8th, I initially envisioned a column anchored broadly on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria and Africa in a global context. But the second edition on March 15 inspired our current trajectory. Entitled ‘A Country Without Earthquakes — Yet Shaken by Itself’, it explored the tragic reality of Nigeria manufacturing catastrophic man-made disasters while other nations contend merely with natural ones. The insights that came from writing that piece—drawing heavily from an expansive interview a former colleague and I conducted with the late Professor Jubril Aminu in 2012—inspired the rigorous analytical direction this column ultimately took, beginning with the development of The Insecurity Triad.
At the outset, I only set out to understand why Nigeria keeps bleeding. I wanted to discover why the same communities bury the same dead in the same circumstances decade after decade, while the state issues the same predictable condemnations, commissions the same redundant reports, and recommends the same superficial reforms that are never implemented. I set out, in other words, to do journalism.
What I did not anticipate was that the honest, uncompromising pursuit of that question would eventually produce what the academy calls a macro-theoretical framework—and that this framework would, in time, find its home at Harvard and other top-tier scientific repositories.
The Trinity of State Decay did not arrive fully formed. It emerged from a profound frustration—the frustration of a scholar-journalist who has spent years watching analytical frameworks imported wholesale from external academic traditions fail to explain the immediate reality happening in front of his eyes.
Failed state theory, useful as far as it goes, describes a static outcome. It names the corpse but completely fails to trace the actual cause of death. The Fragile States Index produces superficial comparative rankings but isolates no mechanisms. What was missing was an indigenous framework that could explain the operational process—the structural logic by which sovereign authority fractures and is progressively displaced by rival formations.
The insight, when it came, was disarmingly simple: states do not lose control randomly. They lose it systematically along three specific axes—Money, Land, and Mind. When the state loses its command of fiscal and economic legitimacy, when it loses territorial authority over its physical space, and when it loses ideological and psychological hold over the behavioural psyche of the population, something else moves in. Not chaos. Something far worse than chaos: a disciplined, purposeful Shadow Order, which is often more efficient at its enforcement functions than the formal state it is displacing.
This is what the Trinity of State Decay theorises. Not the mere failure of the state—but the active production of an alternative to it.
The geography of legitimate knowledge production has long maintained a centre and a periphery. The global centre produces the theoretical frameworks; the periphery receives them, submissively applies them, and occasionally pushes back against them in minor footnotes. What is happening right now with the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU)—with The Insecurity Triad already circulating in global academic repositories and the Trinity of State Decay now anchored across multiple institutions—is a clear demonstration that intellectual rigour does not possess a postal address.
The publication of the Trinity of State Decay on global scholarly platforms is not an end point. It is the formal opening of a conversation three decades in the making. If in the months, years, and decades to come, a professor at Harvard, a post-doctoral fellow in Legon, a PhD candidate in Oxford, or an undergraduate in Makerere writing a term paper finds it useful and engages with it, our purpose will have been fulfilled. None of them may ever know me personally, just as I never knew Freud, Gramsci, or Said.
Coda: The Symmetry Completes Itself
I began this reflection thinking about the symmetry of three: three months, a trilogy of contributions, a triple publication. But symmetry, I have come to understand, is not always visible at the beginning of a journey. It reveals itself exclusively in retrospect—which is, incidentally, also how Sovereignty Decoupling becomes visible to those who are living through it.
A young man borrowing a biography of Freud by accident in a university library. A mentor handing him Edward Said across a table in Ilupeju. Several years of frontline journalism asking the same stubborn questions about why our nation bleeds. A column that began as political commentary and rapidly transformed, by structural necessity, into a site of deep theoretical production. And now: Harvard, Zenodo, GESIS-SSOAR, all in a single week.
Three months. A trilogy. A triple publication. And with SSOAR’s confirmation arriving on Friday morning, our overall global archival footprint expands to seven critical institutional repositories when we include the foundational papers of The Insecurity Triad: SSRN, Harvard Dataverse, Zenodo, SocArXiv, SSOAR, ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. The symmetry, it appears, was not done with me yet.
The Trinity of State Decay is now available on Harvard Dataverse (doi:10.7910/DVN/ZQWEM7), Zenodo (doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20580627), SSOAR (nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-110533-8), ResearchGate, and Academia.edu. Read it. Push back against it. Apply it. Find its limits. That is exactly what it is there for.
Trust is sacred. Stay seasoned.
•Dr. Max Amuchie is a Scholar-Journalist, Media CEO, and Lead Researcher at the Sundiata Post Intelligence Unit (SPIU). He is the architect of The Insecurity Triad framework for African security analysis, the Trinity of State Decay theory, and the Decoupling Sovereignty Index (DSI)—original, indigenous analytical frameworks for understanding, categorising, and measuring conflict, state decay, and sovereignty in the Global South. He writes The Sunday Stew, a weekly syndicated column on faith, character, and the structural forces that shape society, with a focus on Nigeria, Africa, and the Global South in a changing world.
X (formerly Twitter): @MaxAmuchie | Email: max.a@sundiatapost.com | Tel: +234(0)8053069436
Abubakar Rabe, retired Major General former spokesman of the Nigerian Army who was abducted by bandits in Katsina State exactly two weeks ago, has died in captivity, reports coming from the state, one of the hotbeds of terrorist activities in Nigeria, confirmed on Saturday.
The retired senior military officer was kidnapped alongside his wife around the Matazu area of Katsina State while traveling to attend a wedding ceremony, was said to have died of complications from diabetes and high blood pressure in the camp of his abductors.
Nasiru Mu’azu, Commissioner for Internal Security and Home Affairs, in the state, who confirmed the incident, in a statement, said the government received the news with heavy heart and deep sense of loss.
He wrote: “It is with profound sadness that we confirm the General’s death while in bandits captivity. Despite the relentless and concerted efforts of the State Government and various Security Agencies to secure his safe release, the situation ended in this tragedy.
“The deceased Retired General died a natural death from complications of diabetes and hypertension. His abduction and subsequent death are not only a loss to his family and Katsina State but a monumental loss to the entire country.
“His Excellency, the Executive Governor of Katsina State Malam Dikko Umaru Radda, PhD, CON, extends his deepest condolences to the family of the late General and the country at-large.
“The Governor has described this incident as a “dark moment” and a reminder of the urgent need for a collective and intensified front against the criminal elements threatening the peace of our communities.
“The Katsina State Government remains committed to working with the Federal Government and security forces to ensure that those responsible for this heinous act are brought to justice. We assure the citizens of Katsina State that our resolve to eliminate banditry and ensure the safety of all residents remains unshaken.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with the bereaved family during this difficult time. May the soul of the departed Retired Major General Rabe Abdulakdir rest in eternal peace.”
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