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AdvoKC Foundation, a youth-led civic tech organisation committed to strengthening governance performance and citizen engagement, states plainly what its findings show: Governor Alex Chioma Otti has failed the students of Osusu Amukwa Community Primary School, World Bank Model Primary School, and Ihie Ukwu Community Secondary School. These were not vague, generic pledges. The Governor named these three schools himself, in his own 2023 manifesto, as priority beneficiaries of a promised school rebuild. Three years later, not one of them shows any evidence that the promise was kept.
The clearest evidence of this failure is at Ihie Ukwu Community Secondary School, which AdvoKC's independent, repeated field verification found has deteriorated to the point of being uninhabitable. Pupils have been relocated out of the school entirely. This is not an abstract policy shortfall. It is children being taught outside the classroom a Governor personally promised to rebuild for them, a direct, ongoing, and entirely avoidable disruption to their education imposed by a promise this administration chose to make and then chose not to keep.
AdvoKC Foundation rejects any suggestion that this failure can be explained away by pointing to spending elsewhere. The Abia State Government has publicly claimed billions of naira in education infrastructure spending, and the Governor has himself disclosed that 222 schools have been identified for urgent attention under a wider rehabilitation programme. If that claim is genuine, it makes the neglect of these three named schools harder to justify, not easier: a government capable of that scale of spending, and that has publicly said so, has no credible excuse for bypassing the exact three schools its own leader promised, by name, to fix.
"There is a difference between a general campaign promise and a promise with a name and an address attached to it," said Onyinye Edyson, Programme Manager at AdvoKC Foundation. "Governor Otti did not promise to 'improve education generally.' He named these three schools as priorities. Three years on, Ihie Ukwu's children are learning outside a condemned building while government claims billions have gone into education infrastructure elsewhere. That is a failure of the administration's own making, and it is the students who are paying for it."
AdvoKC has formally written to Governor Otti and to the Commissioners for Basic and Secondary Education and Works, setting out these findings and requesting a response, any response, on the status of these schools. To date, only the Commissioner for Works responded, saying it is not under the Ministry's purview. That silence, in the face of a documented and ongoing harm to children, is itself unacceptable, and AdvoKC states so directly: a government that will not answer for a promise it made by name has left citizens no choice but to hold it accountable in public.
AdvoKC Foundation calls on Governor Otti to do one thing without further delay: tell the people of Osusu Amukwa, World Bank Model, and Ihie Ukwu communities, clearly and publicly, what he intends to do about the promise he made to their children, and when.
