Alex Otti’s Filth & Thirst Breakthrough In Aba

Alex Otti.

I live in Abuja now. Every morning, I wake to the quiet hum of infrastructure, the FCT Water Board doing its work, taps running, systems functioning. It is the rhythm of a capital city, the background music of modern life that most residents take for granted. Even when the Minister announces a disruption for repairs, there is always a promise of restoration. The system will hold. The water will return. This is what a 21st-century city sounds like. But my heart lives in two places.

Aba, Enyi Aba of our collective memory, has known a different music entirely. For nearly thirty years, the silence of dry taps became the soundtrack of abandoned promises. For three decades, the people of Aba woke not to the hum of water treatment plants but to the scrape of brooms over mountains of rubbish that never disappeared. The smell of rotting waste mixed with the dust of broken pipes. Children played beside dump sites as if it was normal. Mothers bargained for food stuffs while holding their noses. We all learned to breathe through our mouths and accept that this was simply how Abia was.

Everyone complained. No one acted. Until someone did.

I will never forget that afternoon in 2022 at Crystal Park junction along Port Harcourt Road in Aba. My cousin brother and I had gone to buy motor spare parts. As I stepped out of the vehicle, the smell hit me like a wall. Not just the smell of rotting waste, it was the smell of a government that had given up. The dump site had swallowed the entire roadside. Women sold food metres away from mountains of rubbish. Children stepped over plastic bottles and rotting food as if playing in filth was normal childhood. I watched a young mother hold her baby with one hand and cover her nose with the other while she bargained with a vendor.

That image stayed with me. Not because it was unusual, but because it was normal. We had all learned to accept that this was simply how Abia was. Then came Governor Alex C. Otti. In May 2023, he declared a state of emergency on waste and refuse disposal in Aba and Umuahia. Every Nigerian has heard such phrases before, they are the empty drums politicians beat when they want to sound serious without doing anything serious. We expected nothing. But this time, the declaration came with brooms. It came with bulldozers. It came with a quiet determination that shocked even the sceptics.

Within days, roads that had been lined with waste for years were cleaned. Gutters that had not seen daylight in decades were flowing again. The smell, that persistent, unwelcome companion that had made itself at home in every nostril, simply disappeared.

Today, the Abia State Environmental Protection Agency handles about 216,000 tons of waste every year. They have introduced door-to-door waste collection across the state. That dump site at Crystal Park junction? Gone. In its place now stands a cleaner environment where people can conduct business without holding their noses. But here is what struck me most. In November 2025, I visited Aba and spoke with some of the women who clean the CKC church premises every week. Mama Grace has lived in Aba for over forty years. She told me something that stayed with me even more than that image from 2022,

“My son, we used to sweep the church compound and the dirt would just pile up because there was nowhere to put it. The government trucks never came. Now, ASEPA collectors comes every day to pack the dirt up. They take everything.” That is what change looks like. Not in government reports, not in glossy brochures, but in the everyday laughter of women who no longer fight a losing battle against dirt. But cleaning the visible dirt was only half the battle. The deeper wound ran underground, through pipes that had been dry for nearly thirty years.

Come with me.

To understand what water means in Aba, you must understand its history, a history that stretches back to the late Dr. Sam Mbakwe, governor of the old Imo State between 1979 and 1983. Mbakwe was called the “crying governor” because he felt the suffering of his people so deeply. In 1981, he openly wept before President Shehu Shagari while showing him the Ndiegoro flood disaster that had devastated parts of Aba. His tears were not just for the flood, but for the people. And his tears meant something, under his administration, public water ran from taps across the commercial city.

For residents of Aba today, that era is a distant, almost mythical memory. People born after that period have never witnessed public tap water in Aba. They only see the abandoned sites as colonial-era relics, rusting monuments to what governance once meant and what it stopped meaning. For nearly three decades, the silence of the taps became a metaphor for the failure of government.

Years later, the federal government initiated the Aba Regional Water Scheme, a grand vision to revive potable water supply to Aba. But like many lofty national projects, it fell victim to bureaucratic disagreements. A dispute between the Federal Ministry of Water Resources and the contractor brought the entire scheme to a grinding halt over two decades ago. Successive administrations in Abia made futile efforts to get Abuja to resolve the dispute, but the people waited in vain. The massive infrastructure, the intake structures, the treatment plants, the pipes, stood rusting, slowly being consumed by tropical vegetation.

The people of Aba were left to the mercy of commercial borehole operators and polluted streams. A 2020 study in the Indian Journal of Child Health revealed the human cost, among 360 participants in Aba, a staggering 74.1% reported experiencing 1–5 episodes of diarrhea annually, with the majority relying on borehole water that often goes untreated. Only 56.7% of participants had reliable water supply, and a concerning 70.8% admitted to not boiling water before use.

It was a crisis of dignity disguised as an infrastructure problem. Then came July 16, 2025. Governor Alex Otti stood at the premises of St. Joseph’s College, Aba, and did something unprecedented, he stopped waiting for the federal government. He declared that Abia would solve its own problems. He flagged off the resuscitation of the Aba Water Scheme, a project he described as being “very dear to my heart.”

What struck me immediately, watching from Abuja, was the approach. This was not the haphazard “dig-and-forget” style we often see. This was systematic. Governor Otti’s vision for the Abia Integrated Water, Sanitation and Hygiene Accelerated Programme (AIWAP) mirrors the operational logic of the Abuja Water Board itself, a phased approach that includes the revitalization of the Aba Water Intake, the Ariaria schemes, and the Ogbor Hill Booster Station to create a comprehensive reticulation network.

The governor’s promise is the hallmark of modern urban planning, placing a public water standpost within a 2-3 minute walk from every household. This is the kind of accessibility we chase in Abuja. This is a vision that understands that water is not just a utility, it is the bedrock of public health, education, and economic productivity.

By deploying solar-powered, renewable energy to run these facilities, Otti ensured that the water doesn’t stop flowing when the national grid fails. That level of foresight resonates with anyone tired of the infrastructural fragility in Nigeria. The numbers tell the story of this ambition, the water scheme, located at Christ the King Cathedral, Aba, has a production capacity of over one million cubic metres daily, capacity that had been rendered dysfunctional by ageing infrastructure and poor maintenance.

During the commissioning, residents could not hold back their tears, not of sorrow, but of joy. For Mrs. Chinyere Onyeukwu, founder of an NGO, it was a historic moment, water had not flowed in her area for over 20 years. But here is where the story takes an unexpected turn, one that connects the brooms to the pipes, the cleaning to the flowing.

In January 2026, Governor Otti announced that waste products in Abia are now being converted into renewable energy through biogas. What was once dumped is now burned, not in the open, polluting the air, but in controlled systems that generate electricity. The pilot programme at Umuahia In-Farms is transforming organic waste into clean energy. You cannot talk about sanitation without talking about water. You cannot talk about water without talking about the energy that pumps it. The Otti administration understood something fundamental, everything is connected.

Speaking of power, on December 24, 2025, Abia took full control of its electricity regulation. When the national grid collapsed recently, as it often does, significant portions of Abia remained unaffected because their power infrastructure now operates under local authority. The government went further than anyone promised, they built their own framework, created their own regulatory authority, and began generating their own power from their own waste. Today, solar-powered water points and toilet blocks dot the landscape, from Okigwe Park in Umuahia to communities across the state.

In February 2026, something happened that showed how deeply this transformation has touched the hearts of Abians. The Catholic Diocese of Umuahia donated two brand-new electric street sweeping vehicles to ASEPA. Bishop Michael Kalu Ukpong personally blessed the vehicles before handing them over. He said the donation was inspired by the government’s visible commitment to keeping Abia clean. When I heard that the Bishop himself blessed the sweeping machines, I said to my friends, see, even the church is happy. This government is doing something. That is the point. When faith institutions invest their resources in supporting government policies, it is not merely partnership. It is endorsement of the highest order.

Recently, critics have mockingly referred to Governor Otti as “the painter”, insinuating that his work is merely cosmetic, just surface-level beauty without substance. But the evidence on the ground speaks otherwise. You cannot paint a pipe that has been dry for thirty years and expect water to flow. You have to rebuild the system from the ground up. You cannot paint over mountains of rubbish and expect them to disappear. You have to haul them away, truck by truck, day by day, until the ground beneath is clean again.

Paying tribute to the legacy of Sam Mbakwe, Otti recently visited the late governor’s residence in Imo State, describing him as a leader whose achievements have not been equalled. He noted that the quality roads built in Aba during Mbakwe’s tenure are still standing today, while many built years after him have disappeared, a proof to the standard of leadership the region once had and yearns for again.

The manifesto had promised it all. On page 38, Dr. Otti promised to restructure ASEPA. On page 27, he promised to explore renewable energy. On page 37, he promised to clear all blocked drainages. On page 24, he promised integrated economic development. On page 21, he promised transparent and open government. Three years later, every one of those promises walks the streets of Aba and Umuahia. There is data behind the visible change.

Abia now ranks above 35 other states and the FCT on ease of doing business according to Phillips Consulting as of August 2025. The state has moved from 33rd to 21st position nationally. Abia’s internally generated revenue has grown from about N15 billion annually to over N30 billion. When the environment is clean and businesses can operate, everyone benefits.

Academic research from Michael Okpara University confirms that proper waste management is essential for soil health and agricultural productivity in communities across Abia. The environment is not a separate sector, it is the foundation on which everything else is built. But transformation is never perfect. Some communities have faced challenges. When ASEPA’s activities affected farmland in some areas, women spoke out, with both pain and hope. Yet the system, imperfect but responsive, has entered negotiations and is learning to listen.

That is the difference. Not a government that claims to be perfect, but a government that can be talked to, that can be held accountable, that shows up even when it makes mistakes. The manifesto had promised transparency. That transparency includes admitting when things go wrong and fixing them.

I visited Aba last in November 2025. As I walked through areas I remembered from that afternoon in 2022, I could hardly recognize them. The dump sites are gone. A clean stretch of road now sits where mountains of rubbish once stood. The environment is shining. The air is clean. The little boy I once saw holding his nose, he would not need to do that today. The Otti administration understood something fundamental, you cannot build a modern state on a foundation of filth. So they started with the basics. They started with the environment. They started with water. They started with the dignity of everyday life.

As I write this from Abuja, looking at the regulated water supply in the capital, I am filled with hope for Aba. The governor has proven that the chaos of the past is not an immutable destiny. By replicating the efficiency of the Abuja Water Board in the heart of the Enyimba City, Governor Otti is doing more than just supplying water and clearing waste. He is restoring our faith in public service

He is proving that good governance is portable, it can travel from the federal capital to the commercial heartbeat of the Southeast. It can travel from abandoned pipes to flowing taps, from mountains of rubbish to clean streets where children play without holding their noses. The water will flow again in Aba. The streets are clean again in Aba. And with them flows the hope of a new beginning. Now, when you visit Abia, you do not hold your breath. You breathe deep. And you know that change has come.

In the end, governance is not about grand speeches or ribbon-cuttings. It is about whether a mother can bargain food stuffs without covering her nose. It is about whether a child can play without stepping over rubbish. The taps are flowing again, the streets are clean, and the people are breathing deep.

And that is everything.

Emenike Vincent Onyembi is a policy development analyst based in Abuja, vincentonyembi@gmail.com