By Soni Daniel, Editor, Northern Operations
Enugu State Governor, Dr Peter Mbah, has undertaken many transformative projects across the length and breadth of the state in just three years. After meeting with the Renewed Hope Ambassadors and members of the Presidential Media Team who were on tour of projects being undertaken by governors in the South-East geopolitical zone, Dr. Mbah spoke on the vision that inspires his projects and says President Tinubu”s Support has helped governors in the Southeast to do more for their people.
What are you doing at the moment in terms of the programmes and policies of your administration?
When we were campaigning for office, we set out a blueprint for what Enugu could become under our watch. And that blueprint was predicated on three factors. One was to grow the economy exponentially, from $4.4 billion to $30 billion in eight years. The second was to eradicate poverty. We inherited the poverty headcount of 58% and we have committed to bringing that number to zero in eight years. The third was to make Enugu the number one destination for tourism, living, business and investment.
So, if you take the first item there, that is exponential growth, meaning growing the economy from $4.4 billion to $30 billion, if you look at the capital, that’s about 27% compound annual growth rate. If you look at the trend of growth and the pattern of growth over the years, it doesn’t quite reflect what we are projecting. So, you will see why we had some sceptics, we had some naysayers, people wouldn’t give us a chance, because if you look at history and antecedents, what we were talking about would not make sense to such people. But we realised that we needed to do things differently. And we pointed out that this is going to be an era of constantly disruptive innovation, things that were going to disrupt the status quo. And then the important thing was that that growth is going to be government-enabled for the private sector to improve.
And what that means is that we needed to put the fundamentals in place for this private capital to flow into action. The fundamentals, and I’m coming back to your question of what’s our intervention in the medical sector, but these are not isolated projects, they are all connecting these dots and mutually reinforcing.
What we did was to look at what are those key drivers, what are those things that are part and parcel of the cross-breeding, part of the biggest element of growth as the security challenges for anyone who had a sick at home, people were told days of the week they have to sit at home and days of the week they have to go to work. That wasn’t acceptable to us. We had to put in place security measures, working with the security agencies, investing hugely in technology, bringing that so-called sit-at-home thing to an end, making sure that we provide a safe environment for this private capital to flow. If you look at our manifesto, our objective has been to capture some of the markets of the medical firms and we’re talking about the market size of about $2 billion.
If you can do something very attractive and you’re able to capture just 10% of that market, we would be talking about $200 million, which is huge. So, we said let’s build a world class hospital and bring in top-notch professionals and ensure that the place is run very well and that way we can bring in the experts and capture some of that market size and essentially, what we’ve done here is going to be able to provide you the opportunity to carry out your scan. There are a few locations where you can do that, like an advanced oncology centre where you can do all your diagnosis and also your therapeutics and do treatment as well.
To what extent is the Enugu state government involved in the concessioning of the Akanu Ibiam International Airport, which is a federal government project in Enugu?
Again, it’s part of connecting the dots and growing the economy. The target is to bring in 3 million visitors to Enugu. If you look at our manifesto it speaks of bringing in 3 million visitors, and that means you have to operate at least 100 aircraft landing into Enugu airport every day to get close to that number. And we’re talking about an airport that takes at the time it came in, maybe 4 or 5 aircraft landing here but it was just not possible and we just didn’t have the facility to take more and all that.
So, we felt that we needed to have our skin in the game. We want to first create the pull factors. We are doing four massive tourism sites, we’re doing the longest zipline in Africa, which is about 300 metre zipline, which takes you from the Pine Forest all the way to the cave, and it brings you back. We’re also doing a cable car of 5.6 kilometres that can take one from the highest point in the state, 580 metres above sea level and it is a massive cross of hope, which goes from there to a monastery. For those who are interested in religious tourism, it will take them to the highest point of the cross, another 70 metres, where they have a chapel and they can worship there.
These things have been carefully curated to act as pull factors to bring people here, and if you have to do that you also have to start thinking about assets and ask how the people will be able to access the state. Again, we had to set up our own airline, because we now operate regular flights of close to 20 flights coming on a daily basis now. But that’s really not our target, our target is to move that number to 100.
We are also looking at bringing in the Diaspora, attracting those foreign partners, and investors who also want to be able to have direct flights to their state or location of investment. So, we got involved with an investor who is interested in ensuring a successful concession of the Akanu Ibiam Airport and to make it become operational. We want to use this opportunity to give credit to Mr. President, because this is the first airport in history that has been successfully concessioned, and very soon it will be up and doing.
So, I thank the President for the support. And, I think the entire South-East is grateful that this has happened because very soon, we’re going to have a functional international airport from the South-East so that the people of the South-East can travel from here, from December this year. Our people should be able to get a direct flight from Enugu to the US, UK, and China.
What have you been able to do about the security of the state under your administration so far?
What we are essentially doing is to invest hugely in technology to at least have a clear line of sight of what is happening in the state and to also monitor the gateways. We were able to identify the former nine gateways, and we were able to have a clear line of sight of those coming and those leaving the state. And, then our objective again is to nip crime in the bud because this sector is one area where you must get everything right in order for people to sleep well each day. If in a spectrum of 10 you have done nine well and get an error in one, the whole effort gets messed up. So, you always have to be extremely vigilant by investing in digital equipment and tools that can help you to be that vigilant. That is why we have gone to set up Distress Response Support with AI-enabled cameras, giving us the power of both the static and the mobile cameras. So, if you look at our DRS vehicles, they all have AI-embedded cameras, which means as the policemen are driving or they are static, they know what is happening within two to three metres since they have monitors in the vehicle. Our DRS men are armed with body cameras and we are also viewing what they are doing and being able to monitor their performance. That is why those who are on night duty are also being monitored to ensure that they do the right thing at all times.
How do you intend to sustain these high value, high capital investments in your smart school drive if your internal revenue slows down?
We imagine that the operating costs won’t be as high because in the last two and a half years, we’ve been able to do more than 7000 classrooms, built as of today 267 smart learning schools and equipped them with all the features of a typical smart school including robotics centre, an AI, ICT, 3D printer. Beyond these, we have to push on something which for us is the number one risk factor, that is the right teacher to real staff. That has always been identified as the major risk factor. So, what we did was that we built what we refer to as a Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation.
Finally, what we’ve done is to also move away to an experiential learning system, that is teaching by practice by getting the kids to constitute themselves as a team and we begin to get them to get involved in what they are learning. So, beyond seeing them on the e-Learning platform, we also do practical stuff, we have locations for example where we get the kids learn how to create a filtration system that enables them know how to clean the water they produce, practicing and seeing themselves as problem solvers rather than just coming to normalise or repeat what the teacher has said. We are now pushing the teachers through that pipeline to enable them to perform maximally.
We are going to continue training them to also increase the number of teachers with skills to teach AI, skills to teach robotics, mechatronics and all the evolving 21st century skills that these kids should be acquainted with. We’re also picking them from age 3, so we have 12 years of free and mandatory education, free from age 3.
How has Mr. President’s policies and reforms impacted what you’re doing in Enugu as a governor?
I think it would have been impossible for us to have done things at this scale without some of the bold and courageous policies of Mr. President. First of all, what the policies of Mr. President have done for sub-nationals, largely, is to free up resources. And, I think the President has been very intentional in terms of how this $1 trillion economy is to be achieved since he believes strongly that this is not going to come from up, but it’s going to come from the periphery. In order to achieve that you have to strengthen the full intent of responsibility, acting and providing them with finance.
I had a conversation with my predecessor who told me what he went through and how he sometimes struggled when he came back from FAAC to pay salaries and how in many instances after the payment of salaries, nothing was left for the state to work with.
So, what we’re seeing today at a scale is only possible because we now have more funds coming from the federation account and of course a lot of support from the centre to the sub-national. For us, it is good to make good use of that opportunity and that is essentially all we are doing in Enugu. So, whether you want to look at things from the removal of the subsidies, the unification of the exchange rates, the reform in the tax sector and a whole lot of great initiatives, Mr. President means well for this country and we are very proud of him. Now we’re also having a look at the NELFUND policy, which is something that we’re excited about because typically the list of scholarships you get, the applications you get, it’s almost unimaginable, but today we encourage them to assess NELFUND, which has then freed funds for us as states to do other essential things for the progress of our people.
