Twenty-Nine years after the readjustment of Anambra State, the state is far from achieving her optimum potentials. Virtually all the projections made on the trajectory for the growth and development of the State have been missed. Today, Anambra is a destination to nowhere. We lack basic infrastructure to back up the verse entrepreneurial and commercial opportunities that are abound in the State leading to the gross underutilization of the business potentials of our citizens. The result is that our capitals as a people, are not working for us, because the people from our state, prefer to invest in other parts of the country where skills are better developed and where infrastructure and network readiness are easily available.
The near stability achieved in some sectors years back, have collapsed once again. Rural-Urban migration has remained on the high. Rural-urban income divide has continued to widen, due to visible absence of social safety net. Government have failed to exploit the numerous opportunities abound in our state to generate reasonable internally generated revenue (IGR) and therefore cannot meet up her basic obligations. Our government have failed to innovate and for many years have not added visible new initiatives for the development of the State and her people. New jobs are not being created for our teeming youths and those road infrastructures we usually beat our chest about some years back, are now collapsing and deteriorating unabatedly. Major cities and towns have become characterized by deteriorated road networks and walkways, unregulated building patterns, poor sanitation, uncontrolled street trading, chaotic transport systems resulting in unregulated road congestions, noise pollution, and overcrowding. The 20-year structural plans (2009–2028), to restore urban planning and guide their growth into the future, for our three major cities of Onitsha, Nnewi and Awka Capital Territory, have been abandoned without any alternative or focused direction.
People are becoming atrophied because of purposeless leadership. Cynicism and mistrust of government are becoming justifiably rife because for some years now, government has audaciously been lying to her citizens and thereby systematically denigrating herself. Our leadership recruitment process has thrown up wrong people because of the reluctance of the average person to follow leadership without seeking immediate rewards. We have unknowingly mortgaged our future, imprisoned our growth evolution, deemed our light and reduced our horizon.
These do not in any way take away the fact that Anambra State is abundantly blessed with rich natural resources and has the largest concentration of human resource endowments, entrepreneurial spirit and the lowest level of poverty incidence in the entire Africa. However, these distinctive potentials of ours have remained largely untapped because of our leadership selection process. Thus, the gap between where we are now and where we need to be, is continuously widening and we cannot allow it to continue to be so.
Ndi Anambra should take our bearing aright and exploit our potentials. As Light of the Nation, we must begin again to innovate and to create virtuous circle of prosperity within Anambra State. We need that synergy to regain our pre-eminent position as the commercial, industrial and business hub for Nigeria, contributing more meaningfully to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and to achieving higher human development index that will propel the development of the entire South East Nigeria.
We need a careful adoption and adaptation of sustainable development goals (SDG) ideals and we need leadership to propel those ideals. Because of our peculiar situation, individuals can make a lot of difference now, but overtime, however, institutions not individuals would sustain the changes. The quality and characteristics of the leadership that emerges in this state, going forward, will define the trajectory of our society and give clear hints on the type of progress we want to make.
As we go for yet another round of Governorship Elections in 2021, we should, if we must achieve our optimal potentials, look for a Governor that has the brainpower and imagination, invention and organization, vision and action, experience and political will. He must be a humble and a grassroot person with ability to apply a bottom-top approach to governance. Our new Governor must be approachable, with ability to network and reason with our people. His development strategy must be people-centred, leveraging on our defined socio-economic identity as a people. He must lead us to creating our narratives, defining and owning it, thereby making people feel invested in Anambra brand. Our next Governor must never leave us orphaned. He must be able to stand for our people in all the four corners of the globe, when the need arises and extract the best of our people to develop our homeland.
As Lester Throw did say, “today, knowledge, skill and experience, now stand alone as the only source of comparative advantage”. Our Governor should not be selected on the bases of the bags of money he can be able to throw at us or on the bases of mere name recognition. The new Anambra Governor need to be balanced enough, always conscious of his environment at all times. He/she must have the vision and affective commitment to navigate the State to a new frontier of our developmental quest.
Ndi Anambra, Ifedi Okwenna is that leader you longed for. I am an environment advisor and the former Commissioner for Environment, Mineral Resources; Science and Technology in Anambra State. I was a Special Assistant (Political) in the Presidency, former Adviser/Consultant to the Nigerian Senate, Former Consultant to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), former National Secretary, Southern Nigeria Peoples Assembly (SNPA) and South/Middlebelt Forum, Director General, World Igbo Summit Group, Director General, Save Democracy Africa, Convener, National Political Summit, Convener, Democracy Africa Youth Parliament etc. and winner of over 204 International, National and Regional awards. I am versatile, experienced, educated and have been in many governmental, non-governmental and International administrative, operational and management positions respectively, in the last thirty years.
By the grace of God, I have been adjudged a success in all my political, public and private sector governance endeavors. I have been adjudged as “highly cerebral and eventful” because of my knack for innovating, incubating, developing and sustaining new ideas, programmes and projects.
I seek your mandate to govern Anambra State because I have the vision, ideas, temperament, dynamism, energy, experience, political will and action to fast-track development in the State and close the gap between where we are now and where we ought to be. I have the networks, contacts, reach and wide acceptability and I shall exploit these to make Anambra State a prime destination in Nigeria and Africa.
As governor, I shall improve governance, create employment, invest in our people, strengthen partnerships, increase competitiveness, diversify our revenue sources and grow our economy. I shall provide necessary enabling environment for development, provide the infrastructure backbone that will propel Anambra State as the ICT hub for Nigeria. I shall develop human resources for all sectors and make government people-based and people-driven.
I shall be responsive and selective in my approach to governance and will encourage the creation and enforcement of necessary legal-institutional frameworks and infrastructure that will underpin our development ideals to make it sustainable and irreversible. I shall reengineer our sociopolitical system and construct from the best of our traditions, endowments and cumulative experiences, the politics we need from the politics we have.
I shall retrieve the years of the locust by fast-tracking sustainable development of the State. More importantly, I shall make Anambra a CITY STATE, an investors heaven and a centre of innovation in Nigeria. Anambra of our dream, shall be a destination for the youths and will provide opportunities for women.
Ndi Anambra, I urge you to give me a chance and I pledge, on my honour, I shall never fail you.
Guided by the tested and successful Singaporean model, I shall abide by the basic principles that can help us progress; work for social cohesion through sharing the benefits of progress, creating equal opportunities for all and giving meritocracy the chance it deserves with the best man or woman for the job, especially as leaders in government. We shall apply e-governance, e-business and e-learning systems to promote transparency, efficiency and productivity. We shall not segregate anybody based on circumstances of religion, occupation and zonal configurations.
Ndi Anambra, as our Governorship Elections draws near, we should all realize that the future of our State is as full of promises as it is fraught with uncertainties. The new divide in the world will be between those with the knowledge and those without. Ndi Anambra cannot afford to be without knowledge. We must therefore, learn to be part of the knowledge-based world.
I invite you to painstakingly go through this my manifesto. This shall be my covenant with our people for realizing our dream State.
I invite you to join me:
Together we shall build Anambra of our dream.
Ifedi Okwenna
Ugwumba Osumenyi
January, 2020
