When a governor chooses to make ordinary people the measure of success, policy stops being performance art and starts being durable. That is the quiet, steady logic driving Governor Francis Nwifuru’s administration in Ebonyi State. Since taking office in May 2023, he has framed his agenda around the “People’s Charter of Needs”—a manifesto that reads less like campaign rhetoric and more like a programme for human flourishing. The result, to date, is not spectacular headline-grabbing drama but incremental shifts across rural education, primary healthcare, and basic infrastructure that, taken together, look like the early bones of enduring development.
There’s an important political signal behind the policy choices: Nwifuru has repeatedly said he places his own children in Nigerian public schools, three in Ebonyi and two in neighbouring Enugu, paying modest fees – a claim he uses to demonstrate personal confidence in the system he is rebuilding. Whether or not you accept the gesture as political theatre, it is factual evidence of an accountability posture rarely seen in Nigerian subnational governance – a governor literally staking his family’s welfare on the performance of public services. That message matters in a country where elite flight to private or foreign schools removes political incentives to fund and fix public education.
On paper, the People’s Charter of Needs is broad and pragmatic: education, health, roads, welfare, and livelihoods are prioritised as interlocking pillars. That architecture has translated into concrete decisions. The state’s 2025 budget, presented as part of the same people-first narrative, commits substantial resources to basic services, and the government has moved to institutionalise funding for education through an Education Development Trust Fund to create a more predictable financing stream for schools. Predictable financing matters; it changes tasks from firefighting to planning.
In rural education, the approach is deliberate rather than theatrical. Instead of headline schools in the capital alone, provincial investments have focused on school rehabilitation, unified textbooks and standards, and measures to close the quality gap that pushes parents toward private options. Those steps, reinforced by state policy and budgetary allocations, aim to raise the baseline quality of schooling that rural families can expect. Taken over time, a strategy that reduces private-school flight and keeps children in community schools reshapes human capital formation: better teacher attendance, higher enrolment and retention, and more equitable skills acquisition for students who will form the next generation of innovators, leaders, farmers, traders and civil servants. Recent government communications and policy briefs show these priorities being advanced.
Healthcare is being treated with similar pragmatic attention. The state has recently approved recruitments and administrative reforms intended to shore up primary health clinics, and the governor has shown a willingness to hold officials accountable – suspensions and reshuffles have sent public signals that services must improve or commissioners and advisers will answer for failings. The policy emphasis is on expanding frontline capacity rather than only building tertiary hospitals – a recognition that mortality gains in poor communities come from functioning primary care, immunisation, maternal services and drug supply at the point of need. Coverage of the health reforms has highlighted both progress and continuing gaps, which is to be expected in an ongoing reform effort.
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Infrastructure choices are also calibrated to rural realities: road repairs that restore market linkages, small bridges that shorten travel time to clinics and schools, and investments in township electrification and water that reduce transaction costs for households. These are not glamorous projects that necessarily make viral headlines, but they are precisely the investments that raise productivity and reduce everyday fragility for rural households. Local reporting and government briefings document a wave of locally focused works and conditional disbursements tied to the People’s Charter priorities.
Two practical features make Nwifuru’s approach promising. First, he is institutionalising reforms – the Education Development Trust Fund is a good example, which increases the odds that gains survive electoral cycles. Second, the personal politics of his public-school stance creates a rare, credible accountability mechanism: if a political leader publicly places his family within the system, the political cost of collapse becomes personal, and incentives align for sustained attention.
Yet the model is not without flaws. The first is capacity and scale: transforming scores of dilapidated rural schools and dozens of failing primary clinics into reliable institutions requires more than intent; it demands technical capacity in procurement, monitoring, teacher training, supply chain management and data systems. Early signs show administrative reforms and recruitments, but building that managerial muscle is a medium-term task. The second flaw is the slow pace of visible outcomes. Structural reforms take time; voters and donors often expect faster, more visible wins. Those competing temporalities can create impatience and political risk. However, the governor’s focused commitment to enduring development results holds the balancing scale to overcome these flaws.
A separate and important shortcoming is one of public perception rather than policy design: a gap in coverage. Partly it is structural: media attention in Nigeria remains highly concentrated in the megacity corridors of Lagos and Abuja and often orientates to national politics and spectacle. Partly it is strategic: an administration that prefers steady, low-key implementation will naturally generate fewer dramatic news cycles than one that stages ribbon-cuttings and high-visibility events. Finally, there is a feedback problem: without consistent reportage of incremental policy wins, success stories do not spread, and policy learning across states suffers. The result is a paradox – a people-centric approach that produces real but quiet gains remains underappreciated precisely because it avoids spectacle.
God bless the Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Ekpa, Stanley Ekpa, lawyer and leadership consultant, wrote via ekpastanleyekpa@gmail.com.
