Peter Obi’s Statistics and the Unanswered Question of a Nigerian Blueprint

Peter Obi has travelled again, not physically but statistically. Today it is Ghana, tomorrow Malaysia, then Indonesia, Vietnam or the Netherlands. Nigerians are then expected to see these comparisons as a blueprint for governing Nigeria. In a viral clip attributed to Obi, Ghana’s $1.2 billion health budget was reportedly divided by 31 million people to produce “$41 million per head.” The arithmetic is closer to $39 per person. At the Nigerian Bar Association conference in Port Harcourt, he also proposed ₦100 million for a primary healthcare centre in each ward, but his estimated total did not match either 8,809 wards or a rounded figure of 10,000 wards. I do not doubt that Obi reads widely or that some of the figures behind his arguments are defensible. But statistics and international comparisons are not governance. Nigeria needs clear answers on the legislation, funding, institutional reforms, responsibilities and trade-offs required to tackle its own security, power, logistics and federalism challenges. The key question remains: beyond citing what other countries did, what exactly will Peter Obi do in Nigeria?

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