Given his well-known status as a public intellectual, I was taken aback to read Dr. Sam Amadi’s article, Peter Mbah Is Failing, and Failing Unnecessarily.
It was filled with intellectual dishonesty, extreme partisanship, unsubstantiated allegations, emotionally charged and incendiary rhetoric, spurious statistical interpretations, and a disturbing disregard for research and scholarship.
What purported to be objective political analysis was, in reality, an exercise in partisan rabble-rousing, emotion-stirring, and pandering to his well-known political constituency. @SamAmadi is no longer the intellectual we used to know.
Consider his preposterous claim that somebody is shot dead at a political rally in Enugu every week. What a reckless and irresponsible assertion! Where are the names of the victims, dates, locations, and police records? How did he arrive at this conclusion?
This is a state that security experts have consistently identified as having one of the lowest crime rates in Nigeria, with independent assessments indicating a reduction of more than 80 per cent in violent crime since Mbah assumed office in 2023.
Regular attacks and violent incidents occur in other states, including Imo and Abia, yet Amadi conveniently applies an entirely different standard to Enugu.
Indeed, Enugu has invested in one of Nigeria’s most sophisticated security architectures, featuring thousands of AI-enabled surveillance cameras, drones, nearly 200 patrol vehicles equipped with intelligent cameras, and a Command and Control Centre providing real-time monitoring.
The Inspector-General of Police, Tunji Disu, recently commended the facility and urged other states to study it. It is rated as one of the most advanced facilities of its kind in the country and an outstanding security investment in the South East.
These investments do not make crime impossible, but they make a mockery of the suggestion that the state is indifferent to security. Amadi should interrogate actual security data rather than fabricate a weekly killing statistic.
His economic analysis is equally embarrassing. He repeatedly presents Enugu’s impressive IGR growth as evidence that Governor Mbah is extracting more taxes from a relatively less productive economy. Has he bothered to examine the composition of that revenue?
The 2025 figures, publicly available at the click of a button, show that tax revenue accounted for just ₦51.5 billion, or 12.6 per cent, of Enugu’s ₦406.77 billion IGR.
The remaining ₦355.2 billion, representing 87.4 per cent, came from non-tax sources, principally the recovery, revitalisation, and commercial optimisation of previously moribund state-owned assets.
Technology-driven revenue tracking, electronic payments, and the plugging of leakages have also transformed collections. The days of indiscriminate cash collection have been replaced by traceable electronic platforms.
How did Amadi arrive at the conclusion that this represents excessive taxation? He has confused revenue mobilisation with taxation and then built an indictment on that confusion. This is a disappointing failure of the intellectual rigour expected of the Amadi we used to know.
His pronouncement on Enugu’s GDP performance is similarly unsupported. He offers no dataset, reporting period, or methodology, yet speaks with such astonishing authority.
On political pluralism, nobody should excuse intimidation or violence against opposition supporters. Every incident deserves an impartial investigation, with prosecution where culpability is established.
But allegations are not convictions, and political incidents do not automatically establish gubernatorial sponsorship.
