By ’Bike Igbuokiri
For a man whose political brand is built on the promise of performance, Governor Alex Otti of Abia State has achieved a remarkable feat: making an entire community feel invisible while standing at the centre of its tragedy. The Abia State governor is routinely celebrated in some quarters as a reformer, a technocrat, a leader who pays salaries and rebuilds roads. But in the agrarian communities of Nsulu, the praise music sounds hollow.
There, the proposed Nsulu airport — the governor’s flagship infrastructural ambition — is described not as development but as dispossession. The communities of Umuomainta, Okpuloukwu-Umuosu and Umuosuga-Umuezeukwu say they have been stripped of the very soil on which their survival depends. Their question to the governor is simple and devastating: what, exactly, will he campaign on when he returns to these villages to ask for their votes?
The formal complaint issued by the people of these communities is careful to begin with concession rather than confrontation. ‘Our appeal is not against development,’ the community insists. ‘We support projects that promote economic growth and public interest.’ That is a sentence of painful generosity, coming from a people whose farms have disappeared beneath a planned runway.
Yet the document proceeds to catalogue a litany of grievances: land acquired on a scale the community regards as disproportionate; compensation that has not relieved hardship; a list of compensated persons that allegedly includes names with no legitimate claim to the land; and an access road that remains stubbornly incomplete. ‘Our community believes that a substantial portion of our ancestral land has been acquired for the project without what we consider to be adequate compensation,’ the complaint states. It is a model of measured understatement — and all the more damning for it.
The stakes are not abstract. Nsulu is not a landscape of speculative real estate; it is a place where people live by subsistence agriculture. When the land goes, so does the meal. Residents report that hunger and poverty are now setting in across the affected communities, because farming is no longer possible on the scale that their forebears knew. The families who worked these plots are not being resettled into a brighter economic future; they are being pushed into a precarious present. Young people who have saved for years to build homes discover there is nowhere to build.
As the community puts it: ‘Their children who can afford to build don’t have land to build on any more.’ Ancestral land in Igbo society is more than a commodity — it is identity, lineage, heritage and security. To take it is not merely to reduce a family’s acreage; it is to sever the cords that bind the living to the dead and to the unborn. The communities have pleaded with the government to reduce the size of the acquisition and leave sufficient land for their sustenance. Those pleas, they say, have been ignored.
It is the compensation process, however, that has become the sharpest point of controversy. Community leaders accuse the Otti administration of ‘weaponising poverty’ — paying whatever the Ministry of Lands chooses to offer, in the knowledge that destitute families are in no position to refuse. The accusation is precise: by controlling the timing and amount of payment, the state can turn need into acquiescence.
Worse, the petitioners allege that money intended as ‘adequate compensation’ has been ‘confiscated and appropriated by officials of the ministry and their consultants and others who have no business in the Nsulu airport land’. The language of the aggrieved is unsparing. ‘The ministry supervised by Chaka Chukwumerije,’ they allege, ‘has become a cesspit of corruption and fraud where money for lands owned by widows and other poor people is paid to people who have no business in Nsulu land.’
The formal complaint itself is more circumspect, noting that ‘members of the community have raised allegations that the list of persons compensated may include individuals who are not the legitimate owners of land within the designated airport corridor’. Either way, the charge sheet is grave enough to demand an answer.
There is, apparently, an investigation. The Umuomainta complaint records that the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) is conducting inquiries into aspects of the land acquisition and compensation exercise, and that the community has been invited to provide information.
That is welcome — but it also exposes a deeper anxiety: that justice, if it arrives at all, will come long after the land has been cleared and the airport built. The community has also asked the government ‘to publicly clarify the basis for the land requirements’, noting that many residents believe the acquisition is significantly larger than what comparable airport projects would require.
Transparency, in other words, has been in short supply from the beginning. It is difficult to overstate the significance of this for a governor whose entire political persona rests on technocratic competence and clean governance. The airport was supposed to be Otti’s monument. It risks becoming his millstone.
Equally striking is the silence of those who might be expected to speak. ‘Many people who supposedly should speak against this atrocious action of the Otti government are keeping quiet, even as part of the Nsulu kingdom is gradually dragged into poverty,’ the petitioners observe. Some may calculate that opposition to the governor is politically costly. Others may have benefited, directly or indirectly, from the airport’s promise.
But silence has consequences. In Nsulu, the state has reportedly failed to provide passable roads, decent schools or functioning health facilities — the very amenities a ‘performing governor’ is supposed to deliver. The affected communities say these necessities are either absent or decrepit. ‘All these don’t bother the so-called performing governor.’ The phrase carries the bitterest of ironies: while Otti’s achievements are celebrated in press releases and on social media, the communities being asked to sacrifice their ancestral land for his signature project cannot point to a single new classroom or clinic to show for it.
The governor’s personal absence has made matters worse. ‘Otti has arrogantly never visited these communities to see or hear their complaints,’ say those affected. Whether the adverb is fair is for the governor to contest; the underlying fact of non-visitation is not contested in the material put before him. A leader who will not look an aggrieved, displaced community in the eye forfeits the moral authority to lecture it about progress.
Compulsory acquisition for public projects is a legitimate instrument of government; it is exercised across Nigeria every day. But its legitimacy rests on three pillars: fair compensation, genuine consultation and visible accountability. In Nsulu, according to the residents, all three have collapsed. A government cannot credibly claim to be acting in the public interest while refusing to show the public the ledger.
And so we return to the question that Otti’s campaign team must dread. When the governor arrives in Umuomainta, Umuezeukwu or Okpuloukwu-Umuosu to ask for votes, what will he say? Will he promise an airport that no longer belongs to the people who lost their land to build it? Will he promise jobs, when the same families cannot farm enough to feed themselves? Will he invoke roads built elsewhere, while the roads in Nsulu remain impassable? The arithmetic is unforgiving: a community that has lost its land, its livelihood and its trust does not owe any politician its vote.
None of this means the airport must be abandoned. The communities have been explicit that development is welcome. But genuine development must be negotiated, not imposed. The size of the acquisition should be publicly justified, and reduced where possible; compensation should be independently audited, paid promptly to legitimate owners and set at a level that restores livelihoods rather than merely acknowledging loss; the findings of the ICPC investigation should be published; and the governor himself should visit the affected villages — not as a photo opportunity, but as a listener.
If Alex Otti is truly the reformer his admirers claim, he will understand that the land question is not a public relations inconvenience. It is the moral centre of his governance. In Nsulu, the runway to the future has already been laid over the ruins of the present. The question now is whether the governor is willing to stop, look down at the earth he has taken, and ask the people standing on what remains: how do we build this together?
