Gov. Otti
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.
