UYO, Akwa Ibom — The Uyo-based civil society watchdog, Policy Alert, has publicly warned that Akwa Ibom’s acclaimed ARISE Agenda runs the risk of becoming a meaningless slogan unless the state opens its books, publishes the plan it promised citizens, and exposes its evaluation methods to public scrutiny.
This drama reads like a warning to any state government that confuses public relations with policy.
The accusation is straightforward: dazzling soundbites about funding and jobs are not a replacement for actual, verifiable facts, and the available data is becoming less and less reliable every quarter.
At a two-year review held at the Government House Banquet Hall, Governor Umo Eno showcased a two-year scorecard and celebrated impact numbers. It was a public narrative that included claims of tens of thousands of jobs and hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries.
The lead technical presenter, Prof. Christopher Ekong, put headline figures on the record: more than 30,000 direct jobs, about 800,000 beneficiaries touched by programmes and over ₦10 billion disbursed in grants to farmers, traders and SMEs.
Governor Eno framed the exercise as a step toward measurable, people-centred governance. “You can’t improve what you can’t measure,” he told the gathering.
Yet civil society says a crucial piece of the accountability puzzle remains missing. Policy Alert’s Executive Director, Tijah Bolton-Akpan, welcomed the fact of a public mid-term review but warned that the draft ARISE Agenda — the product of the 2023 Akwa Ibom Dialogue that, by design, incorporated citizen input — still has not been formally published.
“This is a timely opportunity to reflect on the state’s development trajectory and conduct an honest self-appraisal,” Bolton-Akpan said, and added that inviting stakeholders to a discussion about a document they have never seen relegates participation to “mere tokenism.”
The transparency red flags are concrete. Policy Alert and partner CSOs point to a worrying retrenchment in fiscal disclosure: the state’s Budget Implementation Reports (BIRs) for 2025 have been reduced to three-page summaries that omit capital-budget breakdowns, project-level details and disaggregated revenue streams.
According to the civil society statement, the truncated reports make it practically impossible for citizens, watchdogs or investors to track whether expenditure aligns with ARISE priorities or whether projects exist beyond the language of press releases.
Policy Alert frames this as a legal problem as well as a governance one, citing compliance failures against Akwa Ibom’s own fiscal laws and the spirit of public finance reforms that the state once touted.
Why this matters beyond the corridor of Uyo politics is obvious: development blueprints need credible numbers to attract the very private capital and donor support the state says it craves.
Policy Alert warns bluntly that “international investors and development partners need to see credible fiscal data. Without it, the ARISE Agenda will struggle to attract the financing it needs.”
That is not alarmism; it is the arithmetic of risk: lenders and partners price uncertainty, and incomplete disclosure raises the cost, or kills the deal.
A closer look at the tensions shows two competing narratives. The government’s presentation is data-rich in tone and headline claims, and the ARISE pillars — Agricultural Revolution, Rural Development, Infrastructural Maintenance and Advancement, Security Management and Educational Advancement — are politically attractive and wide-ranging.
The administration has been loudly promoting town-square meetings, grant rounds and model projects across the state as proof of delivery.
But the civil society critique is methodological: the metrics, sampling frames, and evaluation methodology used to produce the scorecard have not been disclosed publicly, and that omission falls short of the standards recommended in Nigeria’s National Monitoring & Evaluation Policy. Without methodology, numbers are just assertions.
The pattern Policy Alert describes is worrying because Akwa Ibom once moved toward greater openness. The organisation’s public statement recalls a previous decade in which the state published annual budgets, comprehensive BIRs, audited financial statements and citizen-friendly budget documents.
That progress now appears to be slipping; the Q1 and Q2 2025 BIRs’ lack of disaggregated capital expenditure details is evidence, Policy Alert says, of a slide into “fiscal opacity.”
For researchers and journalists, the difference between a 40-page BIR and a three-page summary is not cosmetic. It is the difference between meaningful scrutiny and ritualised nodding.
A responsible, developmental government must do three basic things: publish the definitive ARISE document (the draft from the 2023 dialogue), release full budget implementation reports with project-level capital details, and open the evaluation framework (metrics and methodology) so third parties can replicate or challenge findings.
Policy Alert recommends institutionalising the mid-term review as an annual, publicly accessible process and urges the State Bureau of Statistics to publish the technical annexes that underwrite headline claims. These are normal, established practices in mature public-sector M&E systems.
Some external context sharpens the stakes. Subnational fiscal transparency has been a focus of Nigerian reformers and international partners for years; initiatives such as BudgIT’s Open Nigeria States programme and civil society budget monitors have shown that when states publish clear, detailed budget and BIR documents, citizens hold governments to account and resources are more likely to reach frontline services.
Conversely, when reporting is opaque, procurement anomalies and project ghosting are harder to uncover. Akwa Ibom’s recent retrenchment therefore matters not just to Uyo’s civic activists, but to the state’s creditworthiness in a crowded market for investment.
This is not a call for adversarial posturing; Policy Alert has explicitly reaffirmed its willingness to work with the state. The organisation says it wants partnership, not protest: to co-design transparent publication protocols, to help stress-test the evaluation methodology, and to create channels for legitimate “shadow” reporting that can complement official data.
That, in fact, would be a model for other subnational governments in Nigeria: public communication of impact claims, plus open methodology and granular fiscal disclosure, equals trust.
For now, the ARISE Agenda sits at a crossroads. It has popular appeal, loudly declared achievements and an executive eager to court partners. But without the paperwork to prove the pudding — the published ARISE blueprint, full BIRs, and reproducible evaluation methods — the state risks trading real development for the appearance of delivery.
The following steps are both technical and political: release the documents, reveal the data, start the assessment process, and allow outside analysts to verify the assertions.
Transparency is essential if Akwa Ibom hopes to be taken seriously by both its constituents and foreign donors.
