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Alia's administration said it inherited ₦359 billion in debt from the Ortom government, a figure Ortom and his aides publicly disputed, pointing instead to Ortom's own handover speech citing ₦187.56 billion, with steps already taken to reduce that through a ₦71.6 billion debt swap.

The competing figures were never independently reconciled in public; the dispute continued into 2024 with both sides trading accusations of dishonesty, and Benue's debt-service burden has since risen sharply rather than been resolved.

Alia inherited an entrenched farmer-herder conflict that had already displaced large numbers of Benue residents into IDP camps under the Ortom administration, driven in part by contested enforcement of the 2017 anti-open grazing law.

The conflict has continued and, by several measures, intensified under Alia, with the June 2025 Yelwata massacre among the deadliest single incidents and Amnesty International recording over 6,800 deaths in the state between 2023 and mid-2025.

The administration inherited a backlog of unpaid pensions and gratuities owed to retired civil servants, which it initially pledged to clear within its first 100 days.

The 100-day pledge was not met; retirees have repeatedly had to win National Industrial Court judgments compelling payment, and Alia issued a renewed pledge in late 2025 to clear all 2023-2025 arrears by the end of January 2026.

The transition from the Ortom to the Alia administration was marked by public disagreement over handover procedures themselves, compounding the later dispute over the state's true financial position.

No independently verified reconciliation of the handover process or the state's exact financial position at transition was identified for this entry.