Unambitious, Unclear and Unfocused— A review of the first year of the Akwa Ibom State administration
Author’s note — I’ve had this unreleased article in my drafts for months. To improve my publishing, I’ve recently opted to share early drafts and edit in public. I’m thus releasing this edited draft and will continue to edit it post publishing. Share your thoughts on this approach as my drafts are becoming unmanageable and the content needs to see the light of day.
Introduction
The current Akwa Ibom state administration recently released its scorecard for its first year in office. In this piece I will review that scorecard and give an assessment of how I think the government has done so far. To support my assessment, I’ll refer to the state’s 2024 budget and its Q1 performance and other financial and related documents published by the state.
The first thing that stood out in the nearly 100 page scorecard was the inclusion of the payment of salaries and gratuities as an achievement:
This basic responsibility of government being listed as an achievement gives a sense of where the bar is in the administration’s eyes. Their defence is that preceding administrations had left behind billions in unpaid gratuities and other states often owe salaries. Akwa Ibom has however received N2.58 trillion from the federal purse since 2011, the second highest in the federation. This makes any excuses for owed salaries and gratuities untenable. It is not and never will be an achievement for the Akwa Ibom state government to pay salaries.
The background
Governor Eno rose to power while touting his Arise agenda, which was frankly light on details. This Arise agenda now adorns all official government documents and has even made an appearance as ‘aso ebi’. A fact I found out on an Uyo bound Ibom air flight I was on a few months ago. What is this Arise agenda? It’s meant to be the focus area for the governor’s tenure.
The scorecard follows this agenda and provides achievement in the listed sectors. Before digging into the sectors, there are a few things worthy of note. The state’s 2024 budget was nearly evenly split between capital and recurrent expenditure and key sectoral allocations in the budget were as follows.
The works ministry took the lion share of budget while pivotal ministries such as agriculture, health and education garnered a lot less. We seem to be a state that exists to build roads and not to educate people, feed them or preserve their health.
The sectors
Agriculture
The achievements here are essentially a list of activities with no clear strategy or joined up thinking. There is seeming evidence of distribution of inputs but it’s unclear what criteria was used to select recipients, how monitoring and evaluation will be carried out and what the expected returns are.
Historically, siloed and non-strategic distribution of inputs to farmers often doesn’t move the needle in food production and security. We need to see a formal agriculture and economic policy that’s well thought out and evidence based. I thought this would be the case when Prof Uduakobong Inam was appointed as Economic adviser alongside a commissioner of agriculture who has a doctorate in agricultural economics. The former has written a number of research papers on the effective FADAMA program and should be able to bring that to bear in a formal Agric policy document. I hope this is in the works to help articulate a workable and evidence based agric policy rather than haphazardly sharing inputs to farmers.
Rural development
The anchor of the administration’s rural development effort is the “one project per LGA” plan. Within it, the governor has promised that every LGA will have at least one project within it as a way to show gratitude to the voters who opted for him at the polls. The listed projects in the score card are mostly primary health care centres, primary schools or road construction efforts. Presumably after the former 2 are built, they’ll be handed off to LGAs, which begs the question of how much of a needs assessment was done and what fiscal space exists within LGA budgets to run and maintain these facilities when handed to them.
The nature of our politics makes rewarding groups and communities for their support an imperative. However, if we are to achieve the development we crave, we need to move away from settlement politics to more lofty ideals around how projects are ideated, selected and implemented. PHCs and primary schools are good, but better are LGAs that carry out a needs assessment and have plans to manage resources and facilities to provide good outcomes in health and education. This LGA leadership will increasingly become important as they own their recently affirmed Supreme Court autonomy.
In this section, the 400 free homes in 4 years for poor people is also highlighted. Similar to agriculture, I’m yet to come across a well articulated social housing policy. Building 400 homes for poor people while seemingly laudable is a drop in the ocean of the deficit in housing deficit. A deficit that nationally stands at over 23 million houses. Our social housing policy needs to articulate how we provide access to affordable and dignified housing for every Akwa Ibomite.
Infrastructure
In road construction, there seems to be clear progress, building on the achievement of previous administration(s). The governor has committed to completing existing projects and starting new ones. Over 335km of roads are listed as under construction. Akwa Ibom arguably has the best road network in the federation after the FCT. Opportunities for improvement here are around seeking the best value in terms of Naira per Km of road constructed. Transparent procurement processes and publicly available records on awarded contracts are key to ensuring value. There is significant risk of graft when billions are opaquely spent.
In airport development lots of construction activity going on with a new terminal, Apron, taxiways at different stages of completion. The investment in Ibom air and airport facilities has been in my opinion a net positive that’s opened up the state. Initially opposed to it at the start, I now see the effect it has on making the state more connected. I’ve personally as a result moved some support roles in my company to Uyo and attracted other companies to do the same. Despite this positive, I don’t believe that any further investment in aviation should not be scrutinized. I think there’s a limit on the value of the ‘loss leader’ role aviation investment can play. The idea of positioning Uyo as a regional hub and hub for MRO is a bit far-fetched and may turn out to be an expensive wild goose chase. Continued debate on the limits of investment into aviation should be had and the primacy of profit should dominate the more the government spends on aviation. This may mean reducing the govt’s stake in Ibom air to a minority and allowing commercially minded owners to take up majority stake. Reason being, we all know how state owned airlines generally end up in Africa, dead!
Similarly with the sea port , we seem to think that pouring a lot of concrete and building ports will automatically stimulate development when the reverse is usually the case. Development stimulates the need for a port, ports don’t generally stimulate development by just being built. I firmly believe that the seaport should not be built and that money spent instead on human capital development.
Health and education
Here, the report presents a list of PHCs akin to the list in rural development. There’s also a list of showing construction of primary schools with no clarity on strategy, no KPIs, no clear objectives or key results. Taking a step back to look at budgetary allocation to these key sectors, the state’s strategy is apparent. It’s allocated 7% and 4% to education and health respectively in 2023. This is nowhere near sufficient.
Other areas
Sectors such as tourism, enterprise development and more are listed. They consist of photo ops and a long list of the government essentially doling out cash to citizens or one off projects. In some ways this is positive as there are a number of laudable social interventions that are aimed at supporting the poor and vulnerable, the bulk purchase agency being one of them. The administration is however light on details regarding the effect of these interventions and how monitoring and evaluation will be carried out. Granted this may not be in a scorecard but the absence of statistics in the scorecard calls into question the validity of these interventions. The governor in his campaign promised to invest in a well functioning statistics to guide and monitor policy, I’m yet to see this materialize.
In Tourism, the governor’s much vaunted happy hour that captured the nation’s attention during the gubernatorial campaigns is yet to be acted upon. This seems to be a low lying fruit to position Uyo as a weekend getaway destination powered by Ibom air and Ibom Icon as well as a tourism corridor all the way to Ibeno and Ikot Abasi.
The real issues
The scorecard paints the governor as performing but glosses over the major problems facing Akwa Ibom! A useful metric for capturing these problems is the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI).
“Multidimensional poverty measures the share of possible deprivations that poor people experience. Value ranges from 0 to 1 with 1 showing higher poverty”
The dimensions it measures are health, education, living standards, work and shocks. This measure more closely aligns with progress on human capital development compared to crude metrics such as GDP per capita or KM of roads constructed. How does Akwa Ibom do on this index?
Very poorly! 71% of the state’s population are poor in at least one dimension. A level that’s worse than the national average. The biggest contributors to this damning level of poverty are threefold
- Food insecurity,
- Time to healthcare and
- Unemployment.
Based on the foregoing, you would think these would be focus areas. No! Instead the capital budget is filled with frivolities for the enjoyment of politicians while people starve.
Even with meagre allocation to human capital, the budget consistently underperforms. Meaning funds are not always released as planned and ministries cannot implement the plans they have.
This underperformance has led to an increasing budget surplus in practice with ballooning closing balances annually.
The state of Akwa Ibom had N218 billion in its coffers at the end of 2023 yet people are dying of hunger, children are not being taught properly in schools and preventable illnesses are killing our people. This cannot be the state of governance in 2024.
Conclusion
This scorecard feels like a long list of phot ops positioned for politicking rather than real development. It’s shown up the administration as one without real strategy or clearly articulated joined up thinking of how to propel the state and its people forward. Methinks that the first year for an administration should be to articulate policy positions and select key focus areas and create processes and activities to deliver development within four years. Where are the strategic plans, the delivery units, the executive dashboards, the strategic appointments and the performance management. They are virtually non-existent. What we’re getting instead are a retinue of unskilled special assistants to oil the political base.
Government’s role is one of leverage yet our leaders seem to have a model of directly sharing the ‘dividends of democracy’. In this model, there’s never enough to go round. If you divide the allocation from the 12 months to May 2024 of 284 billion, by the estimated population of 5.4 million people in the state, this will give a per capita annual FAAC of N52,677. A meagre amount that isn’t enough to buy a 50Kg bag of rice. Our leaders need to use their leverage better and spend state funds wisely to stimulate growth and development I’ve suggested how they might go about this in my other articles. We need to feed people, educate them and preserve their health so they can grow our economy and live happy and fulfilling lives.
If you’d wish to similarly monitor progress for your state, and you should! Go to openstates.ng. Nigeria needs you and I to be active citizens that are knowledgeable and demand accountability.