By James Udemba

On Tuesday, 21 July, Remi Tinubu visited 

Abia State and Governor Alex Otti rose 

to welcome the First Lady, Senator Remi Tinubu, with a tribute to her husband that no card-carrying APC chieftain could have bettered. He asked the gathering to thank the President for his sacrifices. According to Governor Otti, it took a man of courage to remove the petrol subsidy in 2023 and to float the naira. He went further to explain and enumerate what those decisions had done. They had freed up money hitherto burned on subsidising petrol consumption. And the result, in his own words, was that “a lot of states are not owing salaries. A lot of states are able to build infrastructure.” He did not stop at praise. He defended the hardship too, telling the crowd that what people now read as suffering was really “the fallouts of previous bad behaviour,” and urging them to be patient while the market corrected itself. This was not some polite nod to a visitor’s husband. It was a full defence of the most contested decisions of Tinubu’s presidency, delivered by a governor who does not belong to Tinubu’s political party.

The following day, Wednesday, Governor Hope Uzodimma of Imo State informed stakeholders in Owerri that the five governors of the South-East had resolved to work with the President to enable him secure a second term in office.

By Thursday, the very next day, at his own media chat, Alex Otti seemed to have forgotten it all.

Asked straight out whether he would stand with his fellow governors and back Tinubu, he opened up by claiming he was not sure he had heard of Uzodimma’s announcement. The reporter had just repeated it to him and It had been on every front page. He heard it well enough. What he did next was refuse to answer: Uzodimma had a right to his view but could not speak for everybody; it was early days, the ballot box would decide. Every word of that is true and none of it was the question. He was asked where Alex Otti stood. Two days after praising Tinubu’s courage in Aba, he sat in Umuahia and could not say whether he wanted the man re-elected or not. 

Call it what it is. A governor who can deliver a spirited defence of subsidy removal and other bold reforms of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on Tuesday, and cannot admit on Thursday if he supports his re-election  was not just being careful. He was evasive if not cowardly. He assumed that nobody will lay the two opinions side-by-side. Well, he was wrong. 

The reason for the cowardice is not hard to find. Otti reached the Government House in Umuahia on the back of the wave Peter Obi built, and a share of his support still belongs to the Obidients who see Tinubu as the enemy. He may attract the wrath of that base if he openly backs the President. If he attacks the President, he may forfeit the federal goodwill that every governor needs for roads, rail and cooperation. So he has chosen to eat from both tables. He flatters Tinubu where the Obidients are not watching, at a reception for the First Lady, and turns vague the moment a camera asks him to commit. He wants the credit for admiring the President and the cover of never having said so.

There is an insult buried in the Thursday performance that Ndigbo should not let pass. When Uzodimma spoke on Wednesday, he was not speaking as a private enthusiast. He is the Chairman of the South-East Governors’ Forum, and he was announcing  an understanding that the five governors of the South -East had reached . For Otti to wave that away in public, to profess that he was “not sure” he had heard his own chairman and that the man could not speak for him, was to leave a colleague dangling so that he could keep his own escape routes open. He was free to dissent. He could have said, plainly, that he was not part of the resolution and did not share it, and no honest person would have faulted him. Instead, he chose  the version that made Uzodimma look presumptuous and left himself uncommitted.

And notice how little was actually at stake when he buckled. He was in his own state, at his own event, taking a soft question from a friendly audience. Nobody threatened him. Nobody stood to punish an honest answer. If that is the pressure it takes to make Alex Otti lose his nerve and his memory, one shudders to imagine him in a fight that costs something real.

The strangest part of it is that the case he ran from is the case he had already made himself. The South-East governors did not resolve to support Tinubu on a whim. They looked at what has come to the region under his watch. The zone now has its own development commission, the first in its history. The Port Harcourt to Aba railway has been rebuilt and already carries passengers. The President has committed to reconstructing the whole Eastern Corridor to Maiduguri. Access roads to the Second Niger Bridge are under construction, and this month two more highways were approved, the Otuocha-Anam-Abaji Road and the Oba-Nnewi-Uga-Ihube/Okigwe Junction Road, which Governor Soludo of Anambra, an APGA man with no reason to flatter Tinubu, called it a turning point for Igboland. Anyone can argue that  what Tinubu  has done is not enough. But  no one can argue that what he has done is not visible.

There is the money boom, and Otti has already told us he understands that well. When the subsidy went and the naira was floated, allocations to the states jumped. The three tiers shared about N10 trillion in 2023. In 2024 it was N15.26 trillion, and this year it is set to pass N20 trillion. Not long before that, states were trooping to Abuja for bailouts and Paris Club refunds just to pay salaries. That era ended, and it ended because a President took decisions that cost him politically. Otti said as much in Aba, in his own voice, to the President’s own wife. The governors who have lined up behind Tinubu, including every northern governor who did so without Otti’s stagecraft, are reading the same ledger he read aloud on Tuesday.

None of this is a quarrel with how he runs Abia. Otti has governed relatively well. At least, Aba has come back to life under him. That is exactly why the hiding is so poor a spectacle. A governor with some work behind him does not need to shelter behind “I’m not sure I heard.” He can afford to speak like a man. If he believes the federal record earns his support, and on Tuesday he clearly did, let him also say so on Thursday and defend it. If he has changed his mind in forty-eight hours, let him explain what changed. What he cannot decently keep doing is praising the President in Aba and misplacing his name in Umuahia.

The election is about six months away. The fog will lift whether Otti wants it to or not, and he will have to tell the people of Abia, and of the South-East, whether he is with this President or against him. He enjoys reminding everyone that voters, not governors, decide elections. He is right about that. But those voters deserve a governor with the spine to tell them where he stands while the telling still matters, and not once the coast is clear. Right now, Alex Otti is saving that answer for himself. His silence is speaking for him, and it is saying he is afraid.

Udemba is a public affairs analyst based in Owerri