Chidoka, founder and Chancellor of the Athena Centre for Policy and Leadership, made the call ahead of his keynote address marking the 35th anniversary of the creation of Abia State, scheduled for Thursday in Umuahia.
The lecture, titled “Abia at 35: The Rise of a New Abia,” is expected to provide a broader assessment of the state’s development journey while examining what is required to build a more capable and enduring state.
The former minister had, in an earlier lecture at the Abia State Leadership Academy Executive Education Series, warned that the quality of government should not be measured solely by the number of projects completed, but by whether institutions have the capacity to deliver and sustain the benefits of those projects.
He defined state capacity as the ability of government to translate policy intentions into actual results, stressing that effective institutions could not be built without competent and disciplined personnel.
Drawing lessons from countries including China, Britain, Singapore and Rwanda, Chidoka identified merit, administrative competence, disciplined execution and accountability as critical ingredients for transforming government from a collection of political promises into an effective instrument of development.
He also challenged the long-standing debate over recurrent expenditure in Nigeria, arguing that governments frequently devote attention to the construction of visible assets while failing to provide the personnel, equipment, power, maintenance and administrative systems needed to make such infrastructure functional.
According to him, a newly constructed police station without operational materials, a school without effective inspection or a diagnostic laboratory without dependable electricity may represent physical development but does not necessarily translate into improved public service.
The former Corps Marshal of the Federal Road Safety Corps said the challenge facing governments was to ensure that political leadership and the permanent civil service worked within a coordinated system rather than operating according to conflicting timelines.
He described the political cycle and the continuity of the public service as “two calendars of government”, arguing that sustainable governance required the two to be aligned.
Chidoka drew from his experience at the Federal Road Safety Corps to identify performance measurement, regular management reviews, visible results, consequences for failure, capacity development and institutionalisation as essential elements of successful reform.
He warned that reforms could easily disappear when their architects leave office unless they were converted into enduring systems and institutional practices.
“Reform changes what government does. Institutionalisation changes how government behaves after the reformer has gone,” he said, stressing that the real measure of state capacity was what remained after individual leaders had departed.
The argument is particularly significant for Abia, which was created on August 27, 1991, alongside several other states during the administration of the then military government.
At 35, the state faces the familiar Nigerian challenge of converting successive development programmes and political commitments into institutions capable of delivering consistent public services irrespective of changes in government.
Chidoka also linked the Abia State Leadership Academy to this broader challenge, describing investment in leadership and human capital as equally important as roads, schools, hospitals and other physical infrastructure.
“An academy is an intention. Its graduates will be the evidence,” he said.
Governor Alex Otti, in his remarks, described Chidoka’s intervention as timely and relevant to the state’s emerging governance model. He said the administration was placing emphasis on merit, execution and citizens’ welfare.
Otti cited the removal of state-of-origin considerations in appointments and the appointment of a Head of Service from Edo State after a mandatory examination process as examples of what he described as the administration’s commitment to merit-based public service.
Earlier, the President of the Abia State Leadership Academy, Prof. Kenneth Kalu, said the institution was established to help prepare a new generation of leaders and put the state on a sustainable path of good governance.
But Chidoka’s central message was that leadership reform must ultimately produce institutions that can function without depending on the personality or constant intervention of the governor.
He illustrated the point with a simple but revealing story of a government commissioning ceremony at which everything had reportedly been prepared for the ribbon-cutting except the scissors.
For Chidoka, the missing scissors symbolised a much larger problem in public administration: the gap between government announcing an intention and government possessing the systems to execute it.
The objective of reform, he argued, should therefore be to create a public service in which basic responsibilities are anticipated and delivered as part of an established institutional culture—not because a governor has demanded it or a commissioner has raised an alarm.
As Abia marks three and a half decades of statehood, the message places the question of institutional sustainability at the centre of its next phase of development.
For Chidoka, the measure of a “new Abia” will ultimately not be the projects unveiled during one administration, but whether the state can develop the people, systems, standards and institutional memory required to keep those achievements working for generations.
His prescription is simple: build infrastructure, build systems, build standards, build people and, above all, build institutional memory.
That, he argued, is how a state moves from dependence on individual heroes to a government that knows what to do—and remembers to do it.
