---

Immediately after the 2003 elections, President Obasanjo in his second term of office announced ambitious reforms aimed at laying the foundations for economic growth, employment generation, poverty reduction and more transparency and accountability in government. In July 2003, he appointed a stro...Read the full article.

---

The assessment and rating is a welcome development. I am all for holding our elected leaders to high standards of transparency and accountability. I am all the more elated that my state Enugu has come tops! This is a sturdy vindication for Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani and for all of us Enuguites in Diaspora. He is not a fluke as touted. When the EU ambasadors said the future of Nigeria starts in Enugu they probabaly knew something we didn't know. I expect the result to be contested especially by the oil producing states who are particularly hard pressed to justify all their huge earnings from the Federation Account. Unfortunately for them, the credibitly of the present assessors is unassailable. BTW this result merits a comparison with the charade organized by Mr. Jerry Gana some years ago.
Martin

---

At last, a credible survey of the performance of the governors of Nigerian states and the Federal Capital Territory has taken place. It was a partnership project undertaken by the National Planning Commission (NPC) and international donor and development agencies, such as the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP), the World Bank, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and a couple of others. They had embarked on a programme of assessing, in a layman’s language, how the various state governors had spent the federal allocation they had received.
A number of internationally compliant technical criteria were drawn up. These included policy formulation, budget and fiscal management, service delivery, communication and transparency. At the end of the survey, the result was surprising in some cases, startling in others and expected in yet other categories. The Government of Enugu State, led by the ever dynamic Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani, scored number one, with 57.22 cumulative points and far ahead of the second- and third-placers - the Federal Capital Territory and Osun State respectively.

Dr. Nnamani stands congratulated for making the people of the South East proud. He has thusly added to the lengthening roll of first class-performances, which young czars and czarinas from that part have chalked up with the chance given them under this administration. He joins the likes of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Professor Charles Soludo; the Director General of NAFDAC, Professor Dora Akunyili; the Minister of Finance, Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala; Madam “Due Process” Dr. Oby Ezekwesili and a host of others who have helped give the Olusegun Obasanjo administration a modicum of credibility, direction and hope; a total departure from the disaster of the first term in office.

I make this point against the background of recent past campaigns of calumny against the Igbo and their capacity to provide leadership. They have answered the questions openly posed by Doubting Thomases, motivated only by a need to intimidate people out of their legitimate aspiration to the highest office in the land. But we saw through all those amateurish shenanigans by those who would rather want to see the Igbo through the prism of their own hand-made products, the Eselu Aguata type.
We also congratulate other governors for their achievements and urge the backbenchers to sit up, if it is not already too late. Many Nigerians found it instructive also that many governors from the North out-performed their Southern counterparts, thus also dousing a growing image of northern leaders as offshoots of General Babangida, Abacha and Abdulsalami regimes in terms of “squandermania/looting”.

Obviously, this survey is difficult to fault. You cannot compare it to the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) Smart Adeyemi and Professor Jerry Gana media tour, described in some quarters as “cash-and-carry” assessment. These agencies are donors and spenders, with tentacles spread worldwide. Only the heavenly authorities can give a more credible scorecard.
However, let us hasten to stress the point that these agencies only assessed service delivery and governance, and these are just aspects (crucial though) of leadership, not the whole of it. We need service delivery for rapid development, just as we need to obey the rules of democracy for the growth of the polity. The two must go together. We must grow our democracy, because that is the only means of sustaining physical development and growth. You cannot build tons of ambitious physical structures in a war front.

Only an atmosphere of fair democratic competition, respect for the rule of law, tolerance of alternative viewpoints, accommodation of opposite political platforms and respect for all the stakeholders in a system, can guarantee the long-terms survival of physical structures. This is the point we tried to make in an earlier write up on Governor Nnamani, which did not seem to go down well with him and his officers and they started playing to the gallery.
Another lesson from Nnamani’s experience, which his colleagues will do well to emulate, is the importance of communication. Let the people and the world know what you are doing. Don’t wall yourself away into Utopia. You will rejoin the populace before long, remember. Nnamani engaged in effective internal and external communication. This is not to be mistaken for the Orji Uzor Kalu type of cheap and noisy propaganda (about non-existent landmarks), a venture that is soon proved for the fraud that it is.

We are looking up to the present crop of leaders, especially those who have been tested at the state levels, for credible successors to President Obasanjo who must leave office in 2007. We are looking for men and women of vision and action who will help develop our country rapidly. The high scoring governors have met this requirement. However, we urge them to work harder on the humanising side of leadership - the democracy and civility-building aspects. We pardon Obasanjo for his serial abuses of the laws of the land because he was of the military, and was saddled with the task of taking the polity out of the hands of the military.

Future Nigerian presidents must not only be proven and experienced in service delivery, they must also be democrats, in preaching and practice. We must not be led, by the prevalence of controversial governors in the top four, to the mistaken conclusion that to be a good performer in Nigeria, you have to be a bloodthirsty roughneck!

---

Congratulations!! You or we Nigerians are some times just a laugh. Can we stop ridicling ourselves to the entire world and just get serious for once? Who cares for a dead policy that will never be implimented? Are we even remotely aware of the total absense of a civil service sector in every damn state of our country? Come on get a life! To start with, if Rivers State did anything near as its said to have done (regardless of its failure in transparency) I think you will agree with me that coupled with the presence of the oil industries there it would be an obvious paradise of its own.

---

Ajuri, I don't quite seem to understand your point. Are you questioning the very essence of rating the performance of states, the criteria used or the results? I think assessing the performance of states under a democracy is in order; those who performed abysmally will come under pressue from citizens to buckle up, while those with average or above-average performance will seek to excel more. In this case, the highest aggregate score is about 56 percent - definitely not something much to cheer about, yet indicative of the credibility of the whole exercise. The report never said any of the states had reached the eldorado. Rivers's aggregate score which is somewhere below 40 percent should indeed be enough evidence that it has not justified its prodigious oil receipts like you said. And if the report exposes the shenanigans of River state government's continual noisy celebration of some cosmetic projects even on CNN, then it should be taken more seriously. Incidentally I am from Rivers State! I've always been appalled at the waywardness and extravagance of Gov. Perter Odili and his peacock of a wife (who is supposed to be an appeal court judge but is always hanging around the governor making one wonder how she finds time to research and write her judgments). Of all the governors in Nigeria it was only Odili and wife that named schools and estates after Stella OBJ. He brags about building a multi-million dollar government house, a new house of assembly complex, and a new governor's residence all of which he says will be the most magnificient edifices in the whole of Rivers. How do these connect with the oil producing communities? How do they address urban and rural poverty, youth restiveness, unemployment, and environmental degradation in Ogoniland? Next, he purchased a multi-million dollar executive jet under dubious circumstances, reportedly to further service his vice presidential ambition. It is said he is running for vice president of Nigeria. For the past six years he has been running for vice president at aq great toll on the common till. Well, I endorse and acclaim the rating which I think is almost perfectly reflective of the reality on the ground despite the protestations of the poorly rated states.