Echoes After Taraba

Last week, I published a travelogue on Taraba State. The response was instructive—over 2,010 emails, notes, and social media messages, ranging from praise and disagreement to thoughtful extensions. In line with the right-of-reply tradition that sustains credible public discourse, I’m sharing the most rigorous response I received—not to argue opinions, but to deepen the conversation. I invite you to read openly and welcome your continued engagement. Below is Olufemi Awoyemi’s review, “When Potholes Become Policy Statements: Reflections on Dakuku Peterside’s Taraba Journey and Nigeria’s Governance Paradox.”

He writes: “There are moments on Nigeria’s roads when infrastructure ceases to be a mere technical question and becomes instead a language, crude, unambiguous, and deeply revelatory. Dr Dakuku Peterside’s recent journey through Taraba State offers us precisely such a moment.

Writing from firsthand observation during a five-hour odyssey from Jalingo to Wukari, a distance that should take half that time, he translates the grinding physical reality of failed federal roads into a broader grammar of governance. “There are moments on Nigeria’s roads,” he writes, “when you stop thinking of potholes as engineering failures and begin to see them as policy statements. Each crater says, ‘You can endure this.’ Each collapsed shoulder says, ‘Your inconvenience does not matter.’ Each missing stretch says, ‘you are far from the centre of attention.'”

This is not rhetoric. It is field reportage elevated into diagnosis. And it warrants serious analytical reflection, not least because Peterside’s account crystallizes a tension at the heart of Nigerian governance, beyond the particulars of Taraba: the balance between critique and empathy, the danger of romanticising citizen resilience, and the imperative to hold leadership accountable while acknowledging incremental progress where it occurs. His reflections remind us that effective commentary on governance must resist two temptations – cynical despair on one hand, and sentimental celebration of “coping mechanisms” on the other.

What Nigeria needs now is clear-eyed analysis that names failure without flinching, yet recognises possibility without naïveté.

The Language of Neglect

Peterside’s journey through Taraba is instructive precisely because it refuses abstraction. He does not traffic in the usual statistics about infrastructure deficits or recycle well-worn complaints about federal abandonment. Instead, he takes us with him, through the jolt of each pothole, the delay at the collapsed Namnai Bridge, the contrast between state-led interventions and federal indifference. The bridge, which collapsed in August 2024 and remains unrepaired, becomes in his telling “more than a fact”, it is “a symbol.” He continues: “A bridge is not just concrete and steel; it is a connection. Its collapse is a failure of urgency, attention, and governance.”

These matters because it reframes infrastructure from the domain of technocrats into the realm of citizenship. When roads fail, markets cannot function. When bridges collapse, communities are severed not just physically but economically, socially, symbolically.

Resisting the Romanticization of Resilience

What makes Peterside’s account particularly valuable is its refusal to indulge in the familiar narrative that treats rural Nigerians as perpetual victims awaiting deliverance from Abuja. Instead, he documents agency, state-level leadership attempting to fill federal voids, communities mobilising resources, philanthropists like General T.Y. Danjuma constructing hospitals and schools when government fails to deliver.

Yet even as he acknowledges these interventions, he resists the seductive logic that would normalise them as sufficient. Observing Danjuma’s transformative work in Takum, Peterside writes: “The message was unmistakable: when public systems fail, committed individuals sometimes become the fulcrum of development. Yet even as I admired what one man’s love for community can accomplish, I also felt the uncomfortable question beneath it: why should any community’s access to basic infrastructure depend on the benevolence of exceptional individuals? Philanthropy can supplement development, but it must never substitute for the state.”

This intellectual position cuts to a fundamental problem in Nigerian public discourse: the tendency to celebrate endurance as though it were development, to applaud communities for “managing” deprivation rather than demanding systems that make deprivation unnecessary. The point cuts deep.

When Sub-National Leadership Matters

Yet the Taraba story also demonstrates that governance is not monolithic. Peterside’s account of the 12-kilometre Takum-Lissam Road launch and the 41-kilometre Wukari Township Road Network reveals something important: sub-national leadership can matter, even when federal capacity fails or federal attention wanders.

When Governor Agbu Kefas invests in roads that restore connectivity, when he builds forward operating bases to consolidate security, and commits resources to education and healthcare infrastructure, he is not merely “doing his job.” He is indeed, making deliberate choices about prioritisation, signalling that even constrained budgets can produce tangible outcomes when leadership is focused and accountable.

Peterside captures this clearly: “Here, in the midst of what often feels like national forgetfulness, a state government is choosing to invest where it matters most… even when federal attention wanes, consistent, transparent, and people-centred sub-national leadership can still drive real transformation.”

The philosophy embedded in these projects which are incremental, visible, and responsive, deserves articulation. Development is not always dramatic. Sometimes it is simply the construction of a flyover bridge that reduces travel time, the rehabilitation of a township road network that allows commerce to flow more freely, the repair of a stretch between communities long isolated by terrain and neglect.

As Peterside observes, “roads do not give speeches. They do not trend on social media. Yet they are the silent engines of economic life. They shape how farmers reach markets, how traders move goods, how workers commute, how ambulances arrive, how children get to school, and how a town becomes a city. Roads are not mere infrastructure; they are opportunities arranged into movement.” This understanding, that development is fundamentally about expanding the realm of the possible for ordinary people, is too often lost in our fixation on megaprojects and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

But recognising sub-national effort does not absolve federal failure.

Taraba’s Unrealized Competitive Advantages

Taraba is not a blank slate. It sits on resources that, if properly governed and strategically deployed, could transform its fiscal position and expand economic opportunity across multiple value chains.

The state’s agro-ecological diversity is extraordinary, fertile land, favourable rainfall patterns, and microclimates that support everything from rice and maize to groundnuts, yams, and cash crops like sesame and soybeans. Livestock production, particularly cattle rearing, remains significant but underexploited in terms of value addition and formal market integration. The Mambilla Plateau alone represents untapped potential for high-value horticulture, dairy farming, and tourism.

The Test Case Nigeria Cannot Afford to Fail

Peterside concludes his account with the conviction that “a land with this much potential, and a people with this much spirit, cannot remain forgotten forever. Not by potholes. Not by collapsed bridges. Not by bureaucratic amnesia. Taraba is rising, stubbornly, steadily, and unmistakably.”

The sentiment is not naive optimism. It is observation grounded in evidence, roads under construction, state investments materialising, communities speaking with “cautious confidence.” But whether Taraba’s rise accelerates or stalls depends on choices yet to be made.

Will the federal government finally treat peripheral states as full citizens of the federation, entitled to functional infrastructure and institutional presence? Will state leadership convert short-term visible projects into sustained, system-wide transformation? Will regulatory frameworks evolve quickly enough to unlock new economic sectors before demographic pressures overwhelm fiscal capacity?

Taraba is indeed a mirror of Nigeria’s broader development dilemma; a place where abundance and deprivation coexist, where potential mocks performance, where resilience becomes necessity rather than virtue. It is also a test case: can sub-national leadership convert comparative advantages into competitive advantage when federal systems fail? Can incremental progress compound into transformation if sustained over electoral cycles? Can governance move from reactive firefighting to proactive strategy?

– Olufemi Awoyemi, mni is the founder of Proshare LLC, a macro policy analysis, impact research and thought-led market information services firm. [email protected]