Achievements as Governor of Anambra State
How the outcomes in Anambra State were achieved
Introduction
So far this year, this author has engaged in economic discussions, primarily around the issue of unemployment in Kenya, and how it can be alleviated using small-scale, labour-intensive agriculture, as well as tourism. This website, however, as well as being dedicated to the discussion and dissection of what constitutes just economics, is also dedicated to discussion of what constitutes good governance. In this piece, therefore, the author will explore an outstanding example of good governance, in order to stay true to both aspects of the site’s ethos.
The nation of Nigeria goes to the polls tomorrow to elect a new President; it is to that nation that we must turn for today’s example of good governance.
The nation of Nigeria
Nigeria today is a land of 923,000 square kilometres, about 225 million people, and, sadly, as many or more missed opportunities. For Nigeria is a land blessed with fabulous wealth, including over 3 billion tonnes of iron ore, 42 billion tons of bitumen reserves, and 10 million tonnes of lead and zinc reserves, to make no mention of gold, talc, gypsum and gemstone deposits. The country has about 70 – 80 million hectares of arable land, more than half of which is not in use. (Kenya, by way of comparison, has about 5.5 million hectares of arable land). Of course, no list of Nigeria’s resources can omit mention of Nigeria’s oil. Nigeria is the world’s 6th-largest oil producer, and earned more than USD 1.1 trillion from oil exports between 1960 and 2022. She has additional oil reserves of more than 37 billion barrels, and natural gas reserves of 202 trillion cubic feet as at 2019, the 10th largest in the world.
At the same time, however, Nigeria has 70.6 million people living in poverty – a figure that compares poorly with India (83 million), a nation of more than 6 times Nigeria’s population. Insecurity is rife as well, and there are myriad other challenges.
This, then, is the Nigeria that goes to the polls this Saturday; a nation that in the depths of its psyche is at war with itself. A titanic battle is taking place deep within Nigeria’s soul; a confrontation in which the glorious possibilities afforded by Nigeria’s immense potential are pitted against the sad realities of life in Nigeria at present. The good news, however, is that for the first time in decades, the nation has a candidate running for the Presidency who on the basis of track record (what other measure is there?) appears to have the character and the capacity to steer this great nation in the direction of attaining its massive potential. That man is Peter Gregory Obi.
Peter Gregory Obi
Peter Gregory Obi is a wealthy businessman who made his money through the franchise of choice wines and spirits, among other businesses. He was also, at one point, the youngest chairman of a listed bank (Fidelity Bank) in Nigeria’s history. He has a Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy) from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and has also studied various courses at Lagos Business School, Harvard Business School, London School of Economics, Columbia Business School, Kellogg School of Management, the Institute for Management Development, Oxford University and Cambridge University. But it is as an effective public servant, administrator and steward of public resources that Peter Obi’s story stands out.
Mr Obi became the governor of Anambra State on March 17 2006. The election itself was actually held on 19 April 2003 but was so marred with irregularities that Mr Obi was able to successfully contest the declared result. (The reason it took nearly three years to arrive at a court decision was that the ruling People’s Democratic Party lined up 425 witnesses in the case as a delaying tactic, so that by the time the court arrived at a decision most of the winning governor’s 4-year mandate had elapsed.)
When Mr Obi became governor, he inherited an administration that was in ruins. On 10 November 2004, for example, hundreds of young men had burned, bombed and looted Government House, the Governor’s Lodge, the state judiciary building, the state house of assembly, the state radio service, and public buildings.[1] Mr Obi therefore set about repairing the damage and governing a state that was in mayhem.
One of his early tasks was to set about repairing the damage to Government House and the Governor’s Lodge. Mr Obi quickly discovered that grossly inflated appropriations for the repair work were already in place: NGN 298 million had been set aside for the repair of Government House and NGN 486 million had been set aside for the repair of the destroyed Governor’s Lodge. Mr Obi set about spending a relatively paltry NGN 43.2 million repairing Government House and NGN 81 million repairing the Governor’s Lodge. He was promptly impeached for his troubles on November 2 2006, less than 8 months into his tenure, “for failing to follow due process.” He contested his impeachment and it was overturned by the court on 9 February 2007. These were the kind of headwinds into which Mr Obi was sailing.
Achievements as Governor of Anambra State
Once the courts overturned Mr Obi’s impeachment, he set about advancing and developing in Anambra State. Having taken over a state wracked by violence, improving security in the state was high on his priority list. He equipped the police with armoured vehicles, money to fuel them, allowances, and weapons, and proceeded to oversee the provision of improved security services by means of a now well-equipped, well-motivated police force working in synergy with the state’s administration and the people (including through intelligence provided by informers, as well as community security organisations, each of which was provided with a pickup). After a period of concerted effort, including a series of police operations, insecurity was arrested to the extent that violent crime did not occur for the last 5 years of his tenure.
In a state with an area of 4,844 km2, his administration completed over 800 kilometres of roads, causing the state to be judged the state with the best road network in Nigeria by the Federal Ministry of Works.
At the time Mr Obi took over the reins, Anambra State was ranked 26th out of the 36 Nigerian states in the West African Senior School Certificate Examination administered by the West African Examinations Council. For the final three years of his eight-year tenure, the state was ranked 1st in the same exam.
Mr Obi’s administration also invested heavily in primary health care. His administration’s investments in the state’s health infrastructure were calculated at improving maternity and infant health, among other health indices. One of the outcomes this work was that Mr Obi received an award from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for being the best-performing governor in Nigeria on polio eradication.
Anambra State also became host to a number of new businesses, as a result of the establishment of industrial parks and business parks. Two stand out: SABMiller opened a USD 100M brewery in Onitsha, while Innoson Motors, Nigeria’s first vehicle manufacturing plant, was also established during his tenure.
We may conclude all these observations by noting that according to The Economist, “Anambra State’s score on the Human Development Index, a measure of income, education and life expectancy… bottomed out by 2008, with Anambra ranked eighth among Nigeria’s states. By the time he left office in 2014, Anambra had leapt to third place, trailing only Abuja and Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial capital. Between 2006 and 2012, Onitsha, the biggest city in the state, was in the top 50 of 750 cities worldwide for the rate of private-sector job growth, according to the World Bank.”
This brief and inadequate listing of Mr Obi’s achievements is perhaps dwarfed by the fact that by the time he left office his administration had no unpaid pensions, no unpaid gratuities, no salary arrears, no pending bills from any contractors; and that the state of Anambra had accumulated savings of over USD 150 million as at the end of his tenure (there were, of course, no savings to speak of when he assumed office).
How the outcomes in Anambra State were achieved
Planning – based on the Millennium Development Goals
As earlier stated, Peter Obi took over a dysfunctional situation; he is on record as saying that when he called his predecessor, Dr Chris Ngige to ask him where the governor’s office was so that he could assume his duties, Dr Ngige replied, “Peter, you are the governor! You are the office! You are everything!” In very short order, Mr Obi found out that even a plan for the state’s development did not exist. He oversaw the development of a plan based on the Millennium Development Goals, tailored to Anambra State’s needs, called the Anambra Integrated Development Strategy (ANIDS).
Zero-based budgeting
Having developed ANIDS, budgetary allocations were required to actualize it. Zero-based budgeting (a form of budgeting in which all expenditure must be rationalised whenever fresh budgets are developed) is a buzzword in governance parlance. In Anambra State, scarce funds meant that zero-based budgeting had to become reality. The budget-making process under Governor Obi ignored previous budgets, which included allocations of over 30% simply for the use of the Office of the Governor. Under Governor Obi, budget allocations were instead based on the needs of the people. For example, Mr Obi’s administration carried out poverty mapping funded by the Department for International Development (DfID), determining that Anambra’s poor were in the rural part of the state, and that they lacked access to other areas of the state. This assessment was one of the key drivers behind the improvement of the road network across the state.
A firm control over expenditures coupled with judicious management of state resources
Governor Obi then took a ruthless approach to cutting expenditure. As has been mentioned, he cancelled plans to spend NGN 784 million repairing burnt out government buildings, spending NGN 124.2 million instead. He at first refused to purchase a bulletproof vehicle for his own use, choosing to be driven around in a Peugeot 406 during his first term – a courageous decision given the violence and insecurity that characterised Anambra State at the time he took over. The money that would have bought him an armoured vehicle was instead spent buying vehicles for other office-holders (including permanent secretaries and judges) – 406s like his own. When pressured to build a Presidential Lodge in Anambra State (at an estimated NGN 500 million) to host then-President Obasanjo for a week, he resisted it, then negotiated an agreement to vacate the Governor’s lodge for a week instead, allowing the President to stay there. Governor Obi moved into a hotel with his wife, spending about NGN 200,000. During his tenure, education funding was sent directly to schools, without passing through State’s Ministry of Education, where “gatekeepers” would extract unhelpful tolls. It was also during his term that road contractors had to sign maintenance bonds that committed them to maintain the roads they had built for 5-7 years, which incentivised them to do a thorough job the first time round. Since there was a will, a way was found. Which leads us to the following philosophical conclusions about how he achieved these goals.
Peter Obi’s ethos
Every leader is driven, animated and energized by certain motivations, whether narrow self-ambition, the desire to be famous / honoured / feted, the desire for personal wealth at whatever cost, or by a coherent and actionable vision for a greater good and better outcomes for the people that leader is responsible for out of a deep care and concern for those people. A leader’s motivations are made apparent not by their speech(es), but by their deeds.
On the basis of his track record, Peter Obi appears animated by a radically different set of motivations to those that animate most of the leaders Africans are used to. He fought his way through a stolen electoral victory and an unjust impeachment – in the Nigerian court system – evidence of a belief that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice,” even in Nigeria. He bought the same type of car for himself as for the permanent secretaries and state justices he worked with – evidence that he does not believe that the purpose of power is self-aggrandizement. He refuses to draw a pension and rejected allocation of land to himself – evidence of a further belief that the purpose of power is not for the mere and narrow goal of self-enrichment. His reallocation of expenditure away from the governor’s office in the direction of other far more meaningful expenditures is evidence of a belief that easing the myriad discomforts of the impoverished many is of far greater priority than increasing the lavish comforts of the self, or the self-related few. He saved over USD 150 million while running the second-smallest state in Nigeria out of a belief that a nation whose primary revenue source is a diminishing asset cannot fail to save the revenues from that asset for future generations. Every newborn Anambran baby born around the end of Mr Obi’s tenure was born – at a state level – not into crippling debt, but into a stake in that state’s accumulated wealth. If leader is as leader does, then Peter Obi is a great leader.
Current candidature
Peter Obi has summarised the manifesto under which he is running for President using the phrase “From consumption to production.” He means by it that Nigeria in its current state is a nation of ostentatious consumption – a consumption unbacked by any serious productive capacity beyond oil, which is an extractive industry anyway (oil, as earlier mentioned, is a diminishing asset). According to his manifesto Peter Obi is running to increase non-oil production through an “agrarian revolution,” (which this author has written about in the past) “export-oriented industrialization,” and by “moving Nigeria into the 4th industrial revolution.” To this end, he aims to improve security (no investment takes place in a climate of insecurity), effect legal and institutional reforms, build world-class infrastructure, enhance Nigeria’s abundant human capital, and conduct the kind of diplomacy that can change the perceptions of Nigeria and Nigerians abroad.
It helps that he is on the ticket with Mr Yusuf Datti Baba-Ahmed, which, while it ticks the box of presenting a Christian-Muslim ticket to the electorate, also creates the aura of being “the clean ticket,” since Baba-Ahmed is a Senator who opposed an attempt by then-President Olusegun Obasanjo to seek a third term contrary to the Constitution of Nigeria, and is on record as being the only member of the Nigerian national assembly who refused to buy government property that was offered to all members of the national assembly.
How has Peter Obi’s campaign message resonated? Deteriorating socioeconomic circumstances in Nigeria, which is wracked by insecurity (Boko Haram killed 2,700 people there in the last quarter of 2022), unemployment (projected to reach 37% in 2023), fuel shortages, a depreciating naira, and, more recently, currency shortages, have created the conditions for an audience that is not only receptive but is also actually enthused and energized by Peter Obi’s message. In other words, Peter Obi has succeeded in creating a movement, an army of adherents who call themselves “Obidients.” While the movement is characterised by a significant online presence, attendance at rallies and poll results appear to demonstrate that the movement’s presence is not restricted solely to the ether.
Can Peter Obi win?
The Independent National Electoral Commission of Nigeria (INEC) has registered 9.5 million new voters (out of a total of 93.4 million registered voters), many of them young. Polls have shown Peter Obi to be in the lead, but there are caveats. A Kwakol survey that was released on 13th February 2023 showed Peter Obi to be the preferred candidate with 53% of participants, while mainstream candidates Bola Ahmed Tinubu and Atiku Abubakar both tallied less than 20%. In a more detailed ANAP Foundation poll whose results were released on Wednesday 15th February 2023, Peter Obi scored 21%, while mainstream candidates Tinubu and Abubakar trailed with 13% and 10% respectively. A total of 53% of respondents in the ANAP poll were either undecided or refused to answer. Past experience suggests that people who choose not to reveal their preferences ahead of the elections do not tend to be in favour of the more compelling candidatures. In other words, and as always, we shall have to wait and see.
Conclusion
The first purpose of this article was to give an example of good governance, in line with the second segment of this website’s raison d’etre. In this the author hopes to have succeeded. As a secondary point, I hope it is clear that an opportunity at once immense and exceedingly rare is Nigeria’s for the taking, if only the nation will grasp it.
We in Kenya wish Nigeria peaceful elections and a future befitting of the nation’s enormous potential.
[1] Smith, D. J. (2007). A Culture of Corruption: Everyday Deception and Popular Discontent in Nigeria. Princeton University Press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7sdkn
The article has succeeded in painting a good picture of what constitutes good governance