An Extempore Speech of Dr. Peter Ndubuisi Mbah, Enugu State Governorship Candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the Enugu Business Community Town Hall Meeting held at ECCIMA House, GRA, Enugu, on November 1, 2022.

PART ONE

I am excited to be here today. My delight knows no bounds. The opportunity given to me by ECCIMA to be here today is such that we feel honoured and humbled. I believe that I am here today to address members of my family. The Enugu Chamber Of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (ECCIMA), is my family. In our veins runs similar blood of business professionalism and the quest to promote the civic, commercial, and industrial progress of Enugu State.

As you all know, our business roots are not so dissimilar. While ECCIMA’s crave is for a conducive business climate and the opportunity to drive entrepreneurial business here, I am a businessman and investor who understands the value and the dividends that accrue from operating in a conducive business environment.

So, united by this common thread, we must partner together and work to solve the compelling business challenges facing our state in order to grow the Enugu State economy.

I am not here to tell you what you do not already know about the larger picture of the Nigerian economic environment. The challenges before us are monstrous but surmountable. We are faced today with existential threats of immense proportion, mainly arising from the parlous state of our economy, rising insecurity, spiraling inflation and indeed, the worsening of the global economy. I share your pains as business owners and I have come here today to rouse you up.

In the midst of this heart-throbbing news, however, there is also a bigger picture that we must not lose sight of. It is the picture that can accrue if we collectively work together to ensure the economic growth of Enugu State. Enugu State today is standing on the threshold of history that would effectuate an unprecedented socio-economic shift. I am here today to call on all of us to work together to birth the Enugu State of our dream.

My purpose here today is for me to come and share my dream with ECCIMA, and I believe that by partnering with you, we can make that dream a reality. We are desirous of growing our economy in a proportion that will strongly shock economic pundits.

Few weeks ago we laid bare before Ndi Enugu, our social contract, what you now refer to as a Manifesto or Statement of Purpose. We committed in that document, to achieve and deliver a people-focused governance, to make Enugu State the preferred destination for business, tourism and living.

We envisioned an Enugu State that the economic growth will leap from the current state of $4.4 Billion to $30 Billion, and at the same time we want to achieve a zero percent rate in our poverty headcount index. This is a major departure from the incremental growth experienced in the past. What that means is that in order for us to grow at this rate, we must grow exponentially, that means we must take a quantum leap.

We must do things radically differently. That means we must embrace technology. And as you know, technologies are bundles of possibilities. We are going to employ technology in our growth plan. We have talked so much in our manifesto about sector based productivity growth. We have identified key sectors to drive this growth. We have looked at the commerce and industry sector and we have also identified the number of robust programmes to build on, and like I said before, I am a businessman and I know the pains of running a business in Nigeria.

I am also the CEO of a thriving company and I know how much time we spend dealing with externalities. So, those times that would have been ordinarily spent in crafting strategies that would help us grow, we have to spend them in obtaining one license or the other, massaging the egos of regulators and public sector operators. I feel your pain and I don’t think anyone else who is not a businessman will do better than myself in that area.

Therefore, our focus in the commerce and industry sector will be for us to de-risk the investment flow, and to ensure that we create the ease of doing business. What are those indicators of the ease of doing business? There are largely four indicators, and of course, there are sub-indicators. These four indicators are: ensure the ease of setting up business, the ease of obtaining your construction permits, the ease of registering your property and the ease of enforcement of contracts.

Looking at the sub-indicators, you will be talking about providing the enablers; the infrastructure, the security, the skills and the labour. We are here to address those things because we understand your pain. Our job would be to ensure that we de-risk investments. If our mission is to ensure Enugu is the preferred destination for businesses, then it means we must attract those businesses because businesses are not Father Christmas, they want returns on their investments.

A lot of the things we want to do are going to be system-based but they are also going to be looked at sectorally. If you pick commerce and industry, we are going to be asking questions like how do we de-risk investment flow? How do we ensure we de-risk those challenges that businesses will ordinarily have in order for them to set up? It may mean construction risk, it may also mean finance risk or commercial risk, and that is where we will put structures involving private sector partnerships. We are going to be asking hard and tough questions because our interest is about attracting businesses to Enugu and growing our economy.

We are going to be interested in discussing with business owners and those that are already setting up some, those that are already here with us. How do we ensure that we scale up production? How do we ensure that we increase the service level? We want to be able to provide the enablement. Working with you, we will be able to de-risk the commerciality of your business plan. We will engage you. We will provide you with the enabling environment that allows the de-risking of the commerciality. If it is the construction risk that you’re facing, we should be able to work with you to de-risk the construction risk.

In our commerce and industry, there are a couple of strategic programmes that we are going to set up. We are going to set up an annual N100BN seed capital fund that would help businesses. This again speaks to de-risking finance because we do know that we have people with great ideas. People that have created components that all they need is to make it a viable product. We could come in at that time to help, working with the venture capital firms.

Again, most of these things that I’ve said will be in conjunction with the private sector. We have micro, small, medium scale businesses that the major route they have would be access to finance. They have the ideas and have the plans. We are going to work with them to de-risk those assets.

We could also do this in a number of ways. We are setting up an Enugu State Industrial Fund. This will target industries that may not have access to finance. We are going to work with them and see how we can get them the right and necessary access.

We want to also set up an Innovation Incubation Centre to target our young talented youths who are tech savvy, who may have the brain but may not have the tools to develop their brains. We are going to ensure that we have a centre for them where we can provide 24/7 electricity, constant water, and high speed internet access. This will be a centre where we are going to employ our young people to explore their full potentials. We will also encourage these young people to offer services to people across our jurisdictions.

Our objective in the commerce and industry sector will be to project a lot of economic activities to grow our GDP. We are also talking about other key productivity sectors. In our agricultural sector, we will be looking at agriculture and agro-allied industries. Our goal is that agriculture makes a major contribution to our GDP. Currently, 40% of our GDP is through agricultural related activities. So, it is not a sector we can afford to play with.

We also have some other strategic programmes that we have developed. This is an area where we want to migrate from doing things manually, through the pipelines to platforms. We are going to deploy technology to enhance production in our agricultural sector. Our strategic programmes in the agric sector would be to build Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZs) across the three Senatorial Zones.

The current challenges we have is our farmers losing their produce because of lack of storage facilities and lack of final processing of the produce. Indeed our plan in the agric sector will see us deploying technology as a system for agricultural transformation. Today, we are not producing at the speed we want to produce.

First of all, we need to feed Ndi Enugu to make sure that we guarantee food security in Enugu. The second would be to become the food basket of the nation. But having attained that, we also do not want to allow our excess production to waste. We want to add value to them in order to be able to export them. We want to create a lot of economic activities in that sector.

Part of the challenges we have in this sector is that a lot of our land assets are dormant. And we have frictions with the investors going to interface with the communities. So, part of what we will do is to work with the State House of Assembly to harmonize our land tenure system such that it allows government ownership of those lands so that we can in turn lease them to prospective investors who would come in and develop them on a large scale.

In deploying technology in that sector, we are going to do a lot of things. The first is that the current manual and pipeline system we use to cultivate will end. We are going to create a platform where farmers can, through using that platform hire tractors and machineries to increase their cultivation. Just like what we do today when we sit in the comfort of our homes and order a taxi using our Uber app. That is the same thing we are going to do in our plan to create Technologies for Agricultural Systems Transformation in Enugu State – TASTE. What we are going to do is to develop sites that allow farmers by the push of a button to have a tractor and machinery to use.

We have a programme that is already going on – the E-wallet, that is the system that allows us to track high yield seeds that are going to be given out to Enugu farmers. We are going to track them and ensure that it gets to the hand of those that need them. We have the M-farm. The M-farm also allows us to address the challenges the farmers have with getting to the end users.

On that platform we will be able to bring in the farmers and the buyers and their produce in the same platform where they can all trade. Technology is going to play a major role. I have mentioned earlier that technologies are bundles of possibilities and we are not going to grow without deploying them in our various growth productivity sectors. We have the output target we expect from our activity in the agric sector. It will be for agriculture to contribute a minimum of $10 Billion to our GDP.

We also have the new sectors that we are going to create, that is the energy and mineral resources sector. The energy and mineral resource centre is a key area for us in Enugu State. It is one that we want to revamp and make it productive. Enugu State is blessed with a lot of mineral and natural resources. We ought to be an oil bearing and producing state. We do have several oil fields. We have one that is co-located with other states. We have those that are exclusively owned by Enugu State. We have OPL 916, which is already producing oil. It currently has 13 wells that are producing. The only state benefiting from it is Anambra. But the field has a larger formation and it has its feet into Enugu State. So, there is no reason why Enugu should not benefit from it. Our pledge to Ndi Enugu, therefore, is that within one year of our administration, we will make Enugu State an oil bearing and producing state.

We also have three gas fields that are exclusively owned by Ndi Enugu. We have OPL 914, 905 and 907. We are going to work with investors to commence this immediately, the exploitation and the exploration.

Enugu, as I have said, has a lot of mineral resources. A lot of it we hold underground and we are yet to ascertain the right quantum of these resources. Our job will be to conduct a geo-spatial mapping within the very few months of our administration to ensure that we ascertain the quantum of these minerals that are located across Enugu State. We have gypsum, glass sands, iron stone, clay minerals, limestone, alum, etc. These are the resources that will also be able to spark up the industrial revolution that we are talking about in Enugu State.

Some of the economic resources that would be generated from these resources will be humongous. We talked about the fact that despite the global and national economic output that we are standing in the threshold of history. We want to accomplish an unprecedented socioeconomic growth in Enugu State.

You can see that ECCIMA this is my home, I feel comfortable being here. I am indeed the best partner to have in this journey. I am the best partner to work together with you to solve the challenges that growing Enugu’s economy requires. You may be wondering; what infrastructure do we have in place to accomplish all these laudable programmes and development plans that I’ve mentioned?

We are not unmindful of the interventions that we need in order for us to provide that enabling environment. So if we’re talking about Special Agro-Industrial Processing Zones (SAPZs) in the three Senatorial Zones, it means by implication we must build roads.

We must have access roads, we must ensure that we have 24/7 electricity. We must also ensure that we have water. This would be achieved through government enabled private sector driven programmes.

There will be a need for us to have a multimodal transportation system so that we don’t have so much concentration on our road transport. We are going to be thinking about building light trains, tracks, and making sure that we explore other modes of transportation.

Enugu is a coastal state because we are part of the States that have access to water. We intend to develop our inland water transport so we can move persons and goods through that means as well, making sure there is a wide spread of different avenues of movement in our state.

Again, what I have come here to do is to lay bare some of these key programmes. We have exhaustively addressed a lot of other key sectors, which I hope we have all read in this manifesto that we laid bare before Ndi Enugu some few weeks ago and we are able to get into the phase where we can discuss in certain details. Some of your concerns and some clarifications that you may need in the sectors that we have discussed here. I’m not sure that you would want me to bore you with everything that I have written here.

I’m sure that you have read them in my manifesto and you understand some of them. And of course, the areas where you will need us to provide clarification, we will do that. But something that I find very important to mention is the fact that as part of the sub-indicators we talked about in the ease of doing business is labour and skills, and we are not going to leave our social service sector behind. If we must succeed in the long term, we must ensure that we invest hugely in our education sector.

We will not just be looking at formal education, we will also be looking at technical and vocational training. Part of what businesses want is to find their labour and skill in the localities where they invest. It makes the cost prohibitive if labour and skills have to be imported. We are going to be deliberate in making sure that we have well-equipped vocational training centres and that our centres produce those skills that our investors will require in order for them to succeed in Enugu so that we have the skills and labour domiciled here.

We also have robust programmes in our education sector. We have a programme that speaks to ‘catch them young’, or if you will, cut off point. This is where we target the age 4, pick them and pour into them, civic and moral values. We will also review our education curricula so that they will be in tune with modern realities. Our education sector will be infused with ICT so that our young people can compete with their peers across the globe.

We also have programmes of setting up our Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) centres. This is going to be a comprehensive school where our talented young people who want to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics would go. We would have them across the three Senatorial Zones.

Of course, the health sector is not left behind because we are also going to ensure that we have a healthy workforce. We have robust programmes for our health sector to ensure there is universal coverage for access to primary healthcare. We know that doing all these things will require us to have an institution that would ensure that this objective, as laudable as they are, will outlive us.

On that note, we are going to strengthen our institutions. For example, in the area of ease of enforcement of contracts, we are going to make sure that in our judiciary we have specialist courts so that you do not have to delay unnecessarily when there is a need for you to seek redress. This will help our matters to be treated or addressed expeditiously. So, we are going to set up specialist courts, like commercial court, family court, real estate court, and others.

We have also talked about technology being bundles of possibilities. We are going to train and retrain our public service sector. We need people that will use technologies. One of the things we want to do is to make sure that our civil servants and public servants are skillfully equipped to be able to operate these systems and that we are able to deploy e-governance models across all the four layers; whether it is the employees, the citizens, the government to government and also government to business.

We should be able as business owners, at the comfort of our homes, obtain government services by picking up our devices and going into the government portal to identify the services you want and get that just through your device. That would require us to train and retrain our civil servants and public servants to be equipped enough to provide this level of services.

We may not be able to do these things if we don’t have the values, the competence, the character and the capability to do them. As great as technology may be, if you do not have a diffusion of collective know-how, people who are able to work with you because you cannot do it alone, it will take you centuries to achieve all these if all the know-how will have to come from one hand. Imagine that!

There is a need to have people with the necessary competence and character to be able to do this. And please, do not let anybody come abd stand here and tell you, ‘trust me, I will do it’. You must interrogate what the person had done in the past.

This is not the time to play politics. Ask them to show you what they have done, what businesses they have done. I mean, imagine that you are going to be hiring a CEO to be at the Lion Building in 2023, is that a position you would want to gamble with? Are you going to bring a neophyte, who hasn’t done any business before, someone who doesn’t even understand the language of business we are using here, talking about transactions and investment? The position of a CEO is not one that we can afford to gamble with.We have discharged ourselves creditably in what we have done in the past. We have come into an industry that is crowded and has already been taken over by the incumbent. When we talk about what we want to do exponentially, there will naturally be doubters.

Don’t forget that in the ’80s when the ruler of Dubai proposed his economic plan for Dubai, nobody gave him a chance, but today he has surpassed that vision. In just one generation we are all witnesses to what Dubai has transformed to. And Dubai just like our state is a sub-national, Dubai is not a sovereign state. So, there is no reason we cannot isolate ourselves from the vicissitudes of going on in our national economic environment and growing the Enugu State of our dreams.

We are standing here credentialing ourselves based on what we’ve done in the past. My reason for standing here is driven by service. I’m at that point in my career as the CEO where you will wake up in the morning and look forward to going to work because you know you operate in a place where an action you take can affect the industry, considering that you have 23% of the market share and that you are the market leader even in terms of revenue. But we’ve offered ourselves to serve you and we also, in doing so, have pledged to serve with humility and moderation, with forthrightness and simplicity.

So, you need to be roused up. We have come here to urge you to take action. For you to see the urgency that we require to be able to work together to begin to prepare a template for a greater Enugu of tomorrow, today. Which is why we say, Tomorrow is Here.