How Abia’s “Smart Schools” Are Collapsing Under Alex Otti’s Watch | #NwokeukwuMascot

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Osisioma Ngwa, Abia State — The only “smart school” project undertaken by the Alex Otti administration in Osisioma Ngwa Local Government Area has, according to widely shared social media reports, collapsed reigniting a controversy that has dogged the governor’s flagship education programme since its own government first published the figures behind it.

News that the Aro Amano Community Primary School structure had failed spread quickly online, drawing sharp reactions from residents and commentators. 

Jerry Uzoma Onyenso, reacting on Facebook, mocked the project as nothing more than a basic renovation dressed up in the “smart school” label, joking that the building itself seemed to be rejecting the classification: “This building said, unless you change me from Smart to renovated building I can’t stand, Ndi New Abia, hewuuu.”

Chiemela Chimenka Nwamuo drew a direct parallel to another local government area, noting that a gatehouse under construction at Ukpakiri Primary School in Obingwa had also collapsed before completion, suggesting the Aro Amano failure was not an isolated incident but part of a wider pattern of substandard work on the state’s school projects.

Perhaps the most pointed reaction came from Mrs Joy Maduka, the first Head of Service appointed under the Otti administration itself, who responded with biting sarcasm: “Chaii this one refused to smart.” Coming from a former insider of the administration, her comment carried particular weight online, feeding perceptions that even those who once served in government view the smart school claims with skepticism.

The anger directed at Aro Amano did not emerge in a vacuum. It sits on top of a much larger, officially documented controversy over the same programme, one rooted not in opposition rhetoric but in the state government’s own fiscal disclosures.

Under the World Bank-backed States Fiscal Transparency, Accountability and Sustainability (SEFTAS) programme, Abia State is required to publish regular budget performance reports on its own website. It was precisely this self-published SEFTAS data not any outside allegation that first put the ₦54 billion figure into public circulation. 

According to the state’s own budget performance disclosures, ₦54.066 billion was recorded as spent on the “rehabilitation and repairs of public schools” between October and December 2024 alone, with the full-year 2024 figure for school rehabilitation reaching ₦58.323 billion. 

A financial report issued by the state’s Accountant General and published on the government’s own website in January 2025 separately listed ₦54.07 billion allocated to school rehabilitation as part of the state’s ₦320 billion 2024 revenue profile. The approved 2024 budget, meanwhile, earmarked ₦64.7 billion for the renovation and remodelling of 51 schools at three per local government area, averaging roughly ₦1.26 billion per school.

When Governor Otti was confronted with these figures during a monthly media chat, he dismissed the ₦54 billion figure as a mistake, insisting that the real spending verifiable, he said, on the SEFTAS platform itself was closer to ₦2.1 billion. That defence has done little to settle the matter: the ₦54 billion and ₦58 billion figures being disputed are themselves drawn directly from the same SEFTAS transparency reports the governor pointed to, leaving Abians to reconcile two different numbers from the same official source.

It can be recalled that the SEFTAS reports generated friction beyond the general public. In 2024, two commissioners in Otti’s cabinet reportedly resigned after being unable to explain, to journalists and constituents, large expenditure headings recorded against their own ministries in the SEFTAS quarterly reports including sums tied to ICT centres, hospital equipment, agricultural facilities, and public school renovation. 

According to accounts of the resignations, the affected commissioners had approached the governor for answers and, receiving none, chose to leave the cabinet rather than continue defending figures they said they could not verify.

The Abia Best Interest Association (ABIA), led by a former commissioner for information in Abia state and a public affairs analyst Eze Chikamnayo, has cited the same SEFTAS-linked figures in physical inspections across several local government areas, including Ugwunagbo and Isiala Ngwa South Governor Otti’s acclaimed  local government. The group reported finding schools such as Ihie Community Primary School, Asa Umunka Primary School, Nneise Primary School and Obuba Primary School in states of visible decay, with over 95 percent of the schools it visited showing dilapidated buildings, unfenced compounds, and no teaching equipment conditions the group said were impossible to square with the billions recorded as spent in the state’s own transparency filings.

The Aro Amano school collapse and the SEFTAS figures tell a consistent story between what Abia State’s own books say has been spent on school infrastructure and what residents can actually see standing or, in this case, not standing on the ground. A single collapsed building might be dismissed as a construction mishap. A cabinet-level dispute over the same category of spending, verified against the government’s own published transparency reports, is harder to wave away.

For an administration whose central campaign promise was competence and accountability, the unresolved contradiction inside its own SEFTAS disclosures between ₦2.1 billion, ₦54 billion, and ₦58 billion, all describing the same line item remains the question Abians are still waiting to see answered.