Founder and Chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership and former Minister of Aviation, Osita Chidoka, OFR, NPoM, will on Thursday, 27 August 2026, deliver the keynote lecture commemorating the 35th anniversary of the creation of Abia State.
The lecture, titled “Abia at 35: The Rise of a New Abia,” forms part of activities marking 35 years since Abia State was created on 27 August 1991. It follows an inaugural lecture Chidoka delivered on Tuesday for the Abia State Leadership Academy Executive Education Series, where he argued that building physical assets must go hand in hand with building the institutional capacity required to make them work.
Speaking on “The State and Those Who Make It Work: Public Service, State Capacity and the Abia Opportunity,” Chidoka challenged political appointees and senior public servants to move beyond individual performance and focus on building institutions capable of sustaining good governance beyond the tenure of any governor or appointee.
The lecture was attended by the Governor of Abia State, Dr Alex Otti, OFR; the Deputy Governor; the Speaker of the Abia State House of Assembly; members of the State Executive Council; political appointees; and senior public servants.
Chidoka argued that state capacity is ultimately “the ability of a government to convert intention into execution,” stressing that there can be no high-capacity state without high-capacity people. Drawing lessons from China, Britain, Singapore and Rwanda, he identified merit and competence, administrative capability, disciplined execution and accountable performance as essential ingredients of effective government.
He challenged the conventional Nigerian debate around recurrent expenditure, arguing that governments often invest heavily in visible physical assets while neglecting the less visible operating infrastructure required to make those assets work.
“A government may build a police station without the basic materials required to serve citizens, a school without giving inspectors the mobility to supervise it, or a diagnostic laboratory without reliable power. In each case, we have acquired an asset, but not necessarily the capability it was built to provide,” Chidoka said.
He described political appointees and career public servants as operating on “two calendars of government.” Political appointees work within a short political cycle and must bring urgency, while career public servants provide the continuity required for institutions to endure. “The task is not to choose one calendar. It is to align them,” he said.
Drawing on his experience as former Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps, Chidoka outlined lessons from the institutional reforms undertaken at the Corps: measuring performance, establishing a management rhythm, making results visible, connecting performance to consequences, building capability and embedding successful reforms in institutional rules and systems.
“Reform changes what government does. Institutionalisation changes how government behaves after the reformer has gone. State capacity is what remains when individual heroism is no longer required,” he said.
Chidoka situated the Abia State Leadership Academy within the longer task of building leadership capital, arguing that states must invest simultaneously in physical infrastructure, strong institutions and people equipped with character, competence and civic commitment. “An academy is an intention. Its graduates will be the evidence,” he said.
In his remarks, Governor Otti described the lecture as important and germane, and said the emerging Abia model is built on merit, relentless focus on execution and a profound emphasis on the welfare of the people. He said his administration had abolished state-of-origin considerations in appointments, citing the appointment of a Head of Service from Edo State, following a mandatory examination process, as an example of the administration’s commitment to merit.
Earlier, President of the Abia State Leadership Academy, Prof. Kenneth Kalu, FCA, recalled Chidoka’s commitment to public service from their university days, noting that he chose the civil service at a time when banking and the private sector were the more glamorous choices for graduates. Prof. Kalu said the Academy was established to help reclaim the next generation and place Abia on an irreversible trajectory of good governance.
Chidoka closed the lecture by challenging Abia to build roads, schools and hospitals alongside the systems, standards, people and institutional memory required to sustain them. “Build infrastructure. Build systems. Build standards. Build people. Build memory. Build the state,” he said.
He returned to the story with which he had opened the lecture: a government commissioning ceremony where everything had been prepared for the cutting of the ribbon, except the scissors. For Chidoka, the missing scissors illustrated the difference between intention and execution. The goal of institutional reform, he argued, is to build a government in which somebody remembers the scissors, not because the Governor asked, not because the Commissioner shouted, but because that is simply how government does its work.
Chidoka will deliver the Abia at 35 keynote lecture, “The Rise of a New Abia,” in Umuahia on Thursday, 27 August.
The Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership is an independent, non-partisan think tank focused on addressing Nigeria’s governance challenges through research, policy innovation and leadership development.
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