I TOOK ABIANS SHOES MAKERS To SEE Gambian PRESIDENT

Gov. Ikpeazu------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Explains why he is seeking re-election------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By engr Naser daher

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Governor Okezie Ikpeazu, in this interview, speaks on his scorecard in almost four years of superintending over the affairs of Abia State. Excerpts: . . . . It’s been almost four years since Abians gave you their mandate. Can you tell us what has really happened within this period? . . It has been three and a half years of hard work, painstaking planning, constant monitoring and evaluation of our assignments. What has made the job a little more interesting for us is that we had a clear vision of what we wanted to do and we also spent a lot of time developing strategies that will help us deliver on our mandate and some of these strategies are not classical pieces of information from the regular books of economics or development in other climes; we had to do some home grown devices and strategies to suit our peculiar circumstances in Abia. We decided to look at how best we can deliver on our vision which is to create a better life for our people and to make Abia a destination for trade and commerce as well as an environment and ecosystem for small and medium scale enterprises. And in order to achieve this, we looked at the things we think we had comparative and competitive advantage in over other states. Prominent among them is trade and commerce because every Igbo man is acclaimed to be a good trader and in Abia, we have very successful traders better than even the Lebanese. We also noticed that World Bank had at that time, 2015, reported the presence of over 200,000 artisans doing all kinds of things with leather and garment. So, naturally it will be a misnomer for us to ignore the impact of those 200,000 people knowing that each of them will employ at least four persons and about a million people or so doing one form of handicraft or the other cannot be ignored by any serious leader. So promotion of small and medium scale enterprises became our second pillar. Abia is blessed with one of the most fertile soils in the world. A recent study by some Brazilians who wanted to do some sugar cane farming here showed that if you throw any fruit out of the window you will get that same plant, so everything can virtually grow and flourish in our state but we don’t have all the soil in the world. I think we are one of the smallest states in terms of land area, so we needed to be careful about choice of crop and also diversify our agriculture as it were and we are also desperate about value addition as well as bringing science and technology to bear in agriculture in Abia. Why I gave Nwosu to Imo people – Okorocha So we decided to do oil palm, cassava, cocoa, rice and cashew because we just did not want to be jack of all trades. Beyond this, we have a little bit of oil in some local governments down south and we decided to also mainstream oil and gas as one of our pillars. Education became the fifth pillar because if you want to produce an agriculturist, you must educate him first. So, education is relevant in SME promotion, incubation growth, agriculture, trade and commerce and all of that; so we had to see how best we can retune our education system to suit our purpose. But the enablers that will drive the five pillars became the main issue because these are the things you need to work on and the manifestation will begin to show on the pillars.