Our initiatives driven by vision to grow Enugu’s economy to $30bn, achieve zero poverty – Mbah      

Governor Peter Mbah outlined the vision behind his projects and initiatives since his assumption of office in a chat with members of the presidential media team and a group of journalists during the South- East leg of the Renewed Hope Ambassadors organised nationwide tour and inspection of federal and state projects.    

By Ayorinde Oluokun

Q: We’ve seen so many of your projects, including the Enugu International Hospital being projected as a world-class medical facility capable of reversing medical tourism. But what is driving your vision?

A: 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, grow it from 4.4 billion dollars to 30 billion dollars in eight years. The second was to eradicate poverty. We inherited a poverty headcount of 58 percent, and we had committed to bringing that number to zero in eight years. The third was to make Enugu State the number one destination for tourism, living, business and investment. So, if you take the first item there – exponential growth that is growing the economy from 4.4 billion to 30 billion. If you look, if you did the calculus, that’s about 27 percent compound annual growth rate. If you looked at the trend of growth and the pattern of growth over the years, it doesn’t quite reflect what we’re projecting. So, you could see why we had some skeptics, we had some naysayers, people who wouldn’t give us a chance because if you looked at the historical antecedents, you wouldn’t be able to make sense of what we’re talking about. But we realized that we needed to do things differently, and we pointed out that this is going to be an era of quantum disruptive innovation, which means that we’re going to disrupt the status quo. And then the important thing was that that growth is going to be government enabled, but private sector driven. And what that means is that we needed to put the fundamentals in place for this private capital to flow towards this direction. And that informed our intervention in the medical sector.  But these are not isolated projects. They (the projects) are all connecting the dots and mutually reinforcing. So what we did was to, okay, what are those key drivers? What are those things that would attract private sector here? First, we identified the biggest elephant in the room as the security challenges. We came in, we had the sit- at -home thing – people were told the days of the week they have to sit at home and the days of the week they have to go to work. That wasn’t acceptable to us. So, we had to put in place security measures, working with the security agencies, investing hugely in technology, at least bringing that so-called sit at home thing to an end and making sure that we provide a safe environment for this private capital to flow. The other things are, you know, services, making sure, again, that things like healthcare- if you’re bringing an investor here, he would be worried about two things, basically. One is security. The next thing is if I’m sick, where do I go to? And if you look at our manifesto, our objective has been to capture some of the market of the medical tourism. We’re talking about the market size of about $2 billion annually. And our plan was, okay, if you can do something very attractive and you’re able to capture just 10% of that market, you’re talking about $200 million. That’s huge. So we said, you know what, let’s build a world-class hospital, bringing top-notch professionals and ensure that the place is run very well. And that way, we can at least capture some of that market and that’s essentially what we’ve done. So, what you see, the international hospital here is going to be able to provide you the opportunity to carry out your SPECT scan and your PET scan. There are only a few locations where you can do that. That’s like advanced oncology center, where you can do all your diagnoses and also your therapeutics. You can do the treatment as well. So, yes, so this is just talking about the medical sector.

The state is also involved in the aviation business. Anambra State has now started an airline and is also involved in the concessioning of the Akanu-Ibiam International Airport. To what extent is your state involved? Because we know Akanu-Ibiam International is a federal airport.

Again, it’s part of connecting the dots and growing the economy exponentially. Our target is to bring in three million visitors to Enugu if you look at our manifesto. Again, doing the calculation, three million visitors mean you would have to operate at least 100 aircrafts landing into Enugu Airport every day.  And we’re talking about an airport that takes, at the time we came in, maybe four or five aircrafts landing here. So, it was just not possible. And we just didn’t have the facility to even take more and all that. So, we felt that we need to have our skin in the game. We want to first create the pull factors. Not sure time allowed you to go to the tourism sites. We’re doing four massive tourism sites. We’re doing the longest zipline in Africa. It’s a 300-meter zipline. It takes you from a pine forest all the way to a cave and then brings you back. And we’re also doing a cable car. A cable car of 5.6 kilometers takes you from the highest point in the state, 580 meters above sea level. It’s a massive cross of hope. It takes you from there to a monastery for those who are interested in religious tourism. It takes you to the highest point of the cross, another 70 meters, where you have a chapel and you can commune there. So, 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. How will people be able to access the state? Again, we felt just get into this game. We had to set up our own airline. And then, of course, we now have regular flights. You have close to 20 flights coming into Enugu on a daily basis now. But that’s really not our target. Our target is to move that number to 100, but you have to also pull the passengers. And then we’re also looking at bringing in the diaspora, attracting those foreign travelers. And even the investors, they also want to be able to have direct flight to their state or the location of investment. We got involved with an investor who is interested, because as you know, federal government won’t concession to a state. That’s the rule. So we worked with an investor to ensure the successful concessioning of the Akanu Ibiam Airport and to also make sure that it becomes operational. Anytime we have the opportunity, we give credit to Mr. President, because it took Mr. President standing behind us for this deal for this success to be recorded. This is the first airport in history that has been successfully concessioned, and very soon it will be operationalized. So, we thank Mr. President for his support. And I think the entire Southeast, I must say, is grateful that this has happened, because this very soon we’re going to have a functional international airport for the people of the Southeast. Our target is December this year. We’ll be able to get a direct flight from Enugu to the U.S. and from Enugu to the U.K. to China, to Guangzhou from here. So that’s the objective, just making sure we achieve our target of bringing in three million people to Enugu.

The security control center – we were made to understand that since we came into Enugu, all the things some of us have been doing are being monitored. And we’re really impressed with the non-kinetic infrastructure put in place in terms of how it connects to investment and the well-being of people.  But how do you intend to sustain this, with taking into consideration that security is almost everything at the back of what you intend for the people?

We believe that if we don’t get this security thing right, it would almost be impossible to attract the level of investment we expect to happen here. And so, what we’ve essentially done is to invest hugely in technology to at least have a line of sight of what is happening – monitor the gateways. We were able to identify the formal gateways, we have about nine gateways and we were able to have a clear line of sight of those coming into the states, those leaving the state and then our objective again is to nip crime in the bud because this sector is one area if in a spectrum of 10, you have done nine well, if there’s an error in one, that one gets magnified and it diminishes everything you’ve done within the nine. So, you always have to be extremely vigilant by investing in digital equipment tools that can help you to nip crime in the bud, but also when there’s a breach, you also have the capability to act swiftly. That’s why we had gone on to set up the distress response squad with an AI enabled cameras -we have both the static and the mobile camera. If you look at those DRS vehicles, they all have an AI embedded camera- that means as the policemen are driving or even if they are static, they know what is happening within two-kilometer radius. The DRS men – their vests have body cam so from the command-and-control center, we’re also viewing what they are doing so we’re able to monitor their performance. Those that are on a night shift, the helmet they wear also has a camera, so we’re able to monitor them remotely and then of course, we’re also working very closely with the security agencies. I must commend the security agencies in Enugu state – the army the police, the DSS, the civil defense we have a very good collaborative relationship. Because you may have all these fantastic tools if you don’t have the personnel, if you don’t have the motivated workforce to use them, you also run into trouble.

We’ve seen the schools. But how are you bridging the teacher literacy gap, especially in terms of ensuring that the teachers have the necessary digital skills to impart knowledge to the students in the smart schools? And also, how do you intend to sustain this high value high capital investment if internal revenue slows down or federal education fluctuates?

Starting from the sustainability bit, what we’ve done is in the last three budget cycles is that we’ve dedicated 33 percent of our total budget to education. That’s not sustainable because that means we’re carrying the heavy lift the capex- we’re not going to continue that going into the future. We imagine that the recurrent or the operating cost won’t be as high because in the last two and a half years, we’ve been able to do more than 7 000 classrooms. We’ve built 267 smart green schools – we are equipping them with all the features of a typical smart school and that means you have to have a robotic center, an ICT hub, a 3d printer and all that.   But most importantly, you’ve also touched on something which for us  is the number one risk factor- how do we ensure that we get the right teacher or tutorial staff ? So, what we did was that we built what we refer to as center for experiential learning and innovation. By the way, what we’ve done is to also interrogate the current pedagogy. So, we’ve also modified that and moved away from rote system of learning to an experiential learning system- that is teaching by practice. We get 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 an e-learning platform, they also do practical stuffs. We have locations, for example where the kids were taught how to create a filtration system that enables them now to drink the water they produce. We try to get the kids to learn by practicing so they see themselves as problem solvers rather than just coming to memorize or repeat what the teacher has said. We’re now taking the teachers through that pipeline at the center where these teachers are all taught to be eligible to teach at a smart school. First of all, we conducted a CBT exercise where we now were able to then pick teachers that would be trainable and then of course get them to teach. But that’s not something you relax on. It’s a continuous thing. So, we’re going to continue to train them to increase the number of teachers with the skills to teach AI skills, to teach robotics, mechatronics and all the evolving and 21st century skills that these kids learn. The interesting thing is that we also pick them from age three. So, in Enugu state, we have 12 years of free and mandatory education free – there is the early child learning that is free, you have the nursery pre-primary one pre-primary two and then you start from basic one to basic nine. We stopped the common entrance thing. Basic six to basic seven is in one environment, so just pass here you just get to that. Basic nine is mandatory and free. So, yes, we believe that once we are able to move away from this heavy lift that the operating costs will be manageable and if we don’t do this, how can we possibly eradicate poverty in the long run? The idea is that if we sustain our investment in education, we are able to save a lot of money that would have been spent in security tomorrow. Because if we don’t get these kids skillfully equipped, they will take to criminality as venture tomorrow. So, we might as well spend that money today training them.

 How has President Bola Tinubu’s policies, his reforms, impacted what you are doing in Enugu?

I think it would have been impossible, to say the least for us to have done things at the scale we are doing without some of the bold and courageous policies of Mr. President. First of all, what the policies of Mr. President did for subnational is largely to free up resources. I think Mr. President has been very intentional in terms of how this $1 trillion economy is to be achieved. He believes strongly that this is not going to come from the top bottom, it’s going to come from the periphery. And in order to achieve that, you have to strengthen the periphery, both in terms of responsibility and also in terms of financing. So, provide them with the finance. And I think if you just cast your mind back, even having a conversation with my predecessor, he would tell you what they went through. Sometimes they struggled from when they come back from FAAC to pay salaries or maybe after the payment of salaries, nothing is left for keepers. And what we’re seeing in Enugu today and the scale these things are happening, it’s only possible because we now have more funds coming from the federation and quite a lot of support from the center to the subnational. And for us, it’s to make good use of that opportunity. And that’s essentially what we’re doing. So whether you want to look at things from the removal of the subsidies, the unification of the exchange, the foreign exchange, if you look at the reform in the tax sector, and quite a whole lot of great initiatives. If you look at the NELFUND policy, this is something that we’re excited about because typically the list of scholarships you get, the application, the applicants you get every year, it’s almost unimaginable. But today, we encourage them to access NELFUND and that again frees up funds for us to do other things. So the impact is invaluable. .

What are you doing with agriculture?

For us, agriculture is not just about food security. It’s also a major business and we’re looking at agriculture beyond food security. What we have done is to announce a programme called the construction of farm estates. So we’re doing 260 farm estates. So the idea of a farm estate is to have a location that is ring-fenced and the size of a typical farm estate is 200 hectares. Then you bring in your smallholder farmers there, people who ordinarily did subsistence farming. You introduce them to mechanized farming. You also have an agronomist who helps them with extension services, training and all that. And then you also have a storage and then you have an aggregation center. So, for a typical local government in Enugu, you have about 15, we also have some that are 20, but on the average 15 wards. The total wards in Enugu is 260, so when we talk about 260 in education, 260 in healthcare, we’re referring to the electoral wards because our model of development is all inclusive, so making sure that no part of the state is left behind. So the farm estates, we’re doing the same thing. We have the database of our farmers. We have about 80,000 smallholder farmers in Enugu. What we do is to make sure we put them in those farm estates and providing them with the machineries, the tractors and the implements as well to be able to practice mechanized farming. What that does essentially is to scale up our production. And because we are now producing at scale, we’re also now building processing plants beyond the aggregation centers. We also have the ATC, the agro-transformational centers. We also have the SAPZ coming on, which is something we’re doing in conjunction with the federal government through the funding from AFDB. So we have the special agro-processing zone that is coming. That is a much larger scale processing zone. That also connects with the airport because it helps us with exports and all that.