*Says ‘We’re fastest growing state in revenue generation yet less than 13 % comes from taxation
Editors of print, broadcast and now online platforms were wowed once again by the giant strides of Governor Ndubuisi Mbah when they visited the Coal City for the Annual Conference of the Nigeria Guild of Editors last week. Enugu also hosted the conference last year and repeated the project tour that made some editors wish Mbah could be hired by their states as they do in football. Work on the New City that will sit on 10,000 hectares, the new secondary schools, Enugu Ranch, Pine Forest, a tourism centre, Enugu International Hospital were among the sites they beheld. Former Governor of Ogun State, Segun Osoba, President of the Guild of Editors, Eze Anaba were full of praises for Mbah, arguably the star governor of the southeast east and one of the best performing governors in Nigeria.
At the end of the tour, the editors asked the governor about the continuity of the huge projects at the end of his tenure, the transformation of the Enugu economy among other questions. As usual, he was eloquent in his answers. Excerpts:
Let me once again restate how grateful we are as government and people of Enugu to have the honour of hosting you for the second year in a row. We truly understand the value, and we do not take it for granted. I’m also grateful that two days ago I invited you to explore Enugu, to go out and see for yourselves what we’ve done in Enugu. Thank you that you were able to take up that invite.
I’m interested to know what you saw. What surprised you? What disappointed you? What doesn’t add up? And the questions that you may have raised. You know, I just wanted to get feedback. But again, for us, what you saw, the security, the transports, the investments, tourism, and all that, they are all interconnected. They are mutually reinforcing. They’re all designed to achieve a common objective.
When we took office, we laid out a blueprint. One was to grow the economy of the state exponentially, but also to eradicate poverty and to create a state where people can live, work, invest and build futures. What I said to them when I was campaigning was that I was tired of seeing young people leave Enugu after their education to go elsewhere to look for work.
The idea was for us to create something here that will keep people here so they can create wealth here, find employment, live here, have a satisfying life here without necessarily going out. We don’t want our boys only to come back to Enugu when they want to attend funerals or weddings. Those projects in themselves are not the end point.
They’re actually the means for us to achieve that, and if you notice, if we talk about them, you see how they are designed to achieve, for example, the investment in the tourism is to help us attract 3 million people into Enugu. So, we’re currently doing six massive tourism sites. I understand you saw one.
You went to the pine forest where we’re doing the zip line. We’re also doing the cable car at Opatu, 5.6 kilometer cable car. We’re also recasting the Nsude pyramid.
It has a history of over 2,000 years. We have the ledger, iron smelting site. That, again, with a history of over 4,000 years. So, we’re preserving these things, trying to make sure that they become an icon that will bring people here. There are a whole lot of things. Even in the transport sector, we got ourselves into aviation because we want to create connectivity to the state, and we want people to have access to this place with ease.
It’s all designed towards growing the economy exponentially, but also eradicating poverty. That would tell the story about our intervention in the social sector, intervention in education, in healthcare. It’s almost, as I always say, insane.
Doing over 7,000 classrooms within two and a half years. But when you hear 7,000 classrooms, it’s not even about the classroom. That doesn’t tell you the story about the 464,000 furniture items that we also had to procure to go with the 7,000 classrooms.
The solar system, the data and all that. They are not for political acclaim. Our hope is that whoever comes after would have to build on what they see because these things are, for example, our intervention in education is not about the structure. If you go to any of the smart green schools, you see that the future tells a difference. It underscores the fact that our children are entering into a different world.
Not the one we lived 40 years ago where we went to school with chalk and blackboard. We recognise that in designing the smart school to capture the evolving 21st century skills.
This is what these kids must be exposed to. So, once these kids begin to learn what we now call experiential learning, you cannot take them back to the rot system of learning where you teach them to memorise and write. We’re hoping that once we’ve raised the bar, that whoever comes thereafter would just build on it because the citizens would demand for that because they would have been used to that. In any case, we’re now doing the heavy lift.
The capital expenditure we’re carrying now. We’re hoping that whoever comes subsequently will be focusing more on the operating cost. Which we know is sustainable in terms of what we have done.
In terms of growing the revenue of the state. You may already know that in terms of revenue generation, we are the fastest in the country in terms of the speed of growth. We ended last year with N406 billion from N25 billion we started in 2023.
We are only behind Lagos and Rivers in terms of IGR. We tell people that a lot of that doesn’t come from tax because there is this narrative that has been framed – that we’re overtaxing our people. It’s just a three part of it. Less than 13 per cent of our IGR comes from taxation.
Over 87 per cent we get from the businesses we’re building. We’ve activated all our moribund companies, and they are all running.
The United Palm Products. The Sunrise Flower Mill. The Niger Gas. The Presidential Hotel. The International Conference Centre. The terminals. These are major revenue generators. And they have created employment. We are making money from them. And that was our commitment to pluck the leakages and activate, revive all the Moribund industry. And that’s where the revenue is coming from, not from taxation.
The approach, as you said, security is difficult for you to insulate yourself from your neighbours. But what we’ve also done in terms of making sure that our borders are well-policed is that we also have a line of sight of those coming into our states from the different gateways. Whether you’re coming through the formal or informal gateway, we can see you, we know you and we know when you’re leaving.
But there’s also this conversation around peer review, which is something that is going on now. And we’ve had a number of my colleagues who have come to, of course, see what we’re doing here. And the whole idea is for us to, at some point, also have an integrated system.
Where we can have a common command and control centre for the entire South-East. Not just for intelligence, but also for operations because what tends to happen is if you have tension in a certain location, once you neutralise that, you see those people migrating to other areas.
We’re mindful and it’s a work in progress. It’s something that we do hope to achieve. In terms of the South-East integrated development, we’re lucky that federal government, the president, approved and signed into law the South-East Development Commission.
And that’s somehow now driving these South-East common projects. For example, the SEDC is working on the pressure gas pipe to all the major cities in the South-East. They’ve taken ownership of that.
It was something we were working in isolation. But since the coming into force and the operationalisation of the South-East Development Commission, that project is back to life. In fact, the integrated South-East railway line is also back. They are currently trying to find funds for that project. I think that we must commend the president for signing the SEDC into law and operationalising and also funding the SEDC because they are now taking up these projects of common interest in the South-East.
Again, on our part in Enugu, we’re also doing our bit in making sure that the airport, which we believe should be a major gateway for the entire South-East, the international wing, as you may already know, has been concessioned. And we are trying to make sure that the investor gets it operationalised. We are working on that.
In terms of our partnership with federal government, we are actually partnering with federal government in several ways, particularly with the road infrastructure. The road you drove through today, I think when you are going through the Enugu-Abakaliki Road, the flyover on that road is being done by federal government. But the dualisation is being done by the states.
So the state is doing the 22-kilometre stretch, we’re dualising it, and then federal government is stepping in. And then you can see that they have also done the Enugu-Onitsha Expressway. That was almost a road that was impossible to get done, but we now can drive easily to Onitsha with ease and quite a whole number of interventions.
So we have quite a good synergy with the federal government, and we also use this opportunity to commend the President for his interest in the South-East, and quite a lot of intervention has taken place since he assumed office. The Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway now, the whole one carriage of that entire stretch is completely done.
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