Alex Otti

At last, Labour party now has its second Governor in Nigeria after Segun Mimiko of Ondo State. The Independent National Electoral Commission has announced Alex Otti as the winner of the 18 March governorship election in Abia State.

He scored a total 175,467 votes while his challenger, PDP’s Okey Ahiwe, polled 88,529.

Alex Otti was born to the family of the late Pastor and Mrs Lazarus Weze Otti at Umuru, Umuehim village in Ehi Na Uguru Ancient Kingdom, Isiala Ngwa South LGA of Abia State on 18 February 1965. He is a Nigerian economist, banker, investor, philanthropist and politician. The former Group Managing Director of Diamond Bank Plc, a retail financial institution in Nigeria, was a gubernatorial candidate of Abia State on the platform of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). As captured in different biographical writing on him, aggregated by Wikipedia, on 31 December 2015, the Court of Appeal which sat in Owerri removed Okezie Ikpeazu of the Peoples Democratic Party as governor of Abia State and declared Otti the winner of the April 11 and April 25 Governorship elections in the state. On February 3, 2016, the Supreme Court of Nigeria reversed the verdict of the Court of Appeal and affirmed the election of Ikpeazu as Governor.

He had his secondary school education at Ngwa High School, Aba and Secondary Technical School, Okpuala Ngwa in Abia State. He thereafter proceeded to the University of Port Harcourt for his university education, where he graduated with a First Class honors degree in economics in 1988.

Otti earned an MBA degree from the University of Lagos in 1994. He has attended various international courses including the Executive Development Programmes of the Columbia Business and Stanford Business School and Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania). He also did an executive programme at INSEAD, Fontainebleau, France.

In 2009 he was conferred with an honorary doctorate degree by Babcock University and in 2012, an honorary Doctor of Science (D.Sc.) Degree by the University of Port Harcourt. In 2013, he received another honorary doctorate degree from the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.