Aba Will Be My Main Project As Abia Gov.

…Anyim

Nyerere Chinenye Anyim is the gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC) for Abia State in this interview with Uzo Chikere he bares his mind on his plan to turn Aba around, develop Abia and why the people should vote Buhari. Excerpt:

Why do you think that your mandate is divine?

To the glory of God, there is an interesting personality in the Bible that I took after and that man is called Nehemiah, in the Bible Book of Nehemiah. He was the chief cup bearer to a king, so by all ramifications he should be a comfortable man but he was not because he was meant to understand that Jerusalem is in ruin. So, he wasn’t comfortable with the comfort of the palace, so he decided to seek the face of God to intervene to his master the king, to allow him to go and rebuild the falling walls of Jerusalem.

I have the same burden, my state Abia is in ruin as you can see. You must have passed through all the routes and crannies of this state, you may have equally read in the newspaper when somebody from a sister state, a stakeholder in Abia State, told the governor in his face that Abia State stinks.

Our situation is likened to what Jerusalem was in the days of Nehemiah. It is that burden and the vision to better the lives of my people and my state that informed my decision to come and aspire to be the rescuer, the person that God will use to make Abia a better State. That is why I look at it as divinely inspired. For this we have a platform I call Divine Agenda Organisation, DAO, which I have been using to bring hope to the people.

Over the years we have used that platform to help indigent students go to school up to university level. We have used that platform to rehabilitate rural roads within our community free of charge; we have even used that platform to help our local farmers by providing them fertilisers and farm implements to help in the agricultural development. So, over the years I have been into that and I feel this is an opportunity to do it on a larger scale to benefit humanity particularly my good people of Abia State.

Our home for the homeless programme too, has helped in giving succour to some aged persons and people who are quite indisposed. I recognise that when you asked the basic needs of man the answer is food, clothing and shelter. I think we shouldn’t play politics with those three things which should of necessity be the right of every citizen.

So, these are the things that I look at and I was inspired to think of coming to serve my people of Abia State.

In specific terms, if by God willing, you became the governor of Abia State, within your first 100 years in office, what will be your primary target?

My number one primary target is to clean up Aba, number two Aba and number three Aba. Aside from making Abians know that our priority will be to bring back God’s glory in our land, we will be embarking in a programme I call PPT, Praise, Prayer and Thanksgiving. That programme will give us opportunity as a people to come as a state in unity to use 10 minutes every day to praise, pray and thank God wherever one is, because the Bible says where two or three are gathered in His name, He is there. 10 minutes every day to praise, pray and thank God will amount to 30 minutes. It will be a sacrificial 30 minutes dedicated to God on daily basis for Abia State. That will help us bring down the presence of God and make sure that God is present in the Government House.

Again, I will start with massive infrastructural development in Abia State starting with Aba. You may ask me why Aba? Aba is the ‘goose that lays the golden egg’, ‘it is the horse that treads the mill’. So, if we got Aba right we have got Abia State right because 80 to 90 per cent of internally generated revenue that the state has comes from Aba.

How you intent to harness the resources of Aba should you become the governor?

It will be maximally harnessed. You can take for example, when you feed your cow very well it will make more milk. Once we tap the potentials with technological ingenuity of Aba amidst commercial potentials, once it is harnessed properly, then we will have optimal benefit for it as a state. So, I will not hesitate to do that, because it is that that will give us the strength to carry other parts of the state. What we will get from Aba will be used to not only develop Aba but other parts of Abia State to make the state a better place.

 Incumbency and PDP in Abia State factors in this election how do you see that?

I look at Those things as some of those political propaganda, you know one must have to give a little bit of confidence to himself. But why are we talking about incumbency that is embedded in failure, if you are talking about incumbency that is successful, that has something to offer, that has put smiles on the faces of the people, then you can be talking of something serious, but not incumbency that has turned the lives of people into misery and impoverishment.

The people of Abia are not comfortable with the present predicament we have found ourselves, not only by this regime but the regimes before it. In the past 15 years of our nascent democracy, what do we have to show for it in this state?  Massive infrastructural decay, hunger, you see sufferings on the faces of people. People are only managing to smile, even the people that claim to be in the ruling party are they happy? They are not.  That is why to the glory of God All Progressives Congress, APC has come to give people a credible alternative.

You can see what is happening; we believe this is time for proactive change, inspired change which has been what the people have been yearning for.

What are the contents of your agenda?  

The content of my agenda is embedded in that central fact, to make Aba, Abia a better place. In making Abia a better place, I have talked about the development of Aba. It is a special project and that is borne out of the fact that Aba will equally help us to equally bring out revenue that will help us in our developmental stride and process. You find out that the dwindling fortunes of our oil, is affecting the Federal Government statutory allocation. So, our best alternative is to look for alternative sources of income, which is why I’m looking at Aba as a project.

Aside from Aba, we will develop the markets then other infrastructural development, then clean up the city, develop the waterside so that waste can easily be discharged and we can have a new city. Once we make Aba new city commerce will thrive. Aba is a place where you have Factory Road without factories, so we will make sure we re-activate those factories, encourage investors to come and build new ones.

You cannot come in a city that is filled with filth, a city where one cannot drive conveniently  because of, we don’t call it gallop these days we call it hill-up because it has graduated from being gallop to hill-up. So, we are looking for a city that will have veritable platform for their businesses to thrive.

You find out that in a state where you have good infrastructure, thank God for the power plant we have within this vicinity, if it is put in place it will help our industrialisation, resuscitate those industries and as we are doing that we are providing jobs for the young graduates and youths. That one is automatically helping to solve the problem of insecurity because they say an idle man is a devil’s workshop. If these angry youths are occupied with work, you will find out that we are using one stone to kill as many birds as possible.

Then I have talked about Aba as a special project and kind of sum it with industrialisation because of our technological ingenuity. There is nothing that cannot be manufactured or produced in Aba and that is why we are called the Japan of Africa. Once we rekindle that, you’ll see a different Abia.

There is one important aspect I will not forget; our educational system. Building human capital development through education, I want education by God’s grace to be free in Abia State. Free and compulsorily education, because we have found out the number of miscreants and touts the succeeding government have been able to produce, if had converted them into effective workforce, it would have been better for our economy and state.

So, what I’m trying to say is that we are going to have a free compulsory education from primary school to university levels.  And our educational policy will be different though in tandem with the 6-3-3 system we have. In our own case we will have the first three years of general secondary education and we will lay emphasis on guardian and counselling, and we will ask them if it will it be better going to school may be to become a teacher, doctor architect or would you come and learn trade? In that case we have standard vocational institutions. So, they will have the option of going the first three years with vocational education or continue with the general secondary education. So that at the end of the three years we must have been able to produce skilled labour in their various fields. Skilled carpenter, electrician, tailors and then we have already made industries that will be able to employ these people. Some will have the capacity to even stay on their own.

In three years of general secondary school education, they will be able to read and write and then will now go for three years vocational training and once they come out they are not just being apprentices but skilled labourers. We cannot be talking about education without looking at educational infrastructure. If you look at our schools they are like what you read in the Bible, manger, you know the state of the manger where our Saviour was born. But in this case now it is even worse than the manger.

And then welfare of the teachers. I don’t see what a teacher who has not been paid salary for months will teach a student. I don’t see what a hungry teacher that has no money to feed himself and his family, will impact on any student. So, we will make sure if we are talking about free qualitative education, we look at the educational infrastructure, welfare of the teachers. We will equally improve them. We don’t want teachers that the students will be more intelligent than, we will make sure we have trained teachers that will help us to have quality students.

On health, if you go to some of our hospitals where they exist, you pity them because they even increase the magnitude of the sickness. If you go overseas the hospital environment is like a hotel. If you have seen what they call the Abia State Teaching Hospital, it is like where you rare pigs. So, what I want to do is to improve the infrastructure of these hospitals, building standard ones and furnishing them to be like standard hospitals. Then look at modern equipment, we have our own sons and daughters as doctors who are willing to come back but are outside the country because of the situation here. I know most of them are willing to come back and help develop their state once there is a conducive environment for them to work in. We will look for qualified medical personnel and equipment and have well equipped hospitals. We will also make sure that our pregnant women, especially in the rural areas, have the opportunity to go to hospital free. And also children bellow the age of 12, will have the opportunity to be treated free in the hospitals and then, enhance our health insurance policy; that is in the area of health.

On agriculture, we are known because of our agrarian posture. The Eastern Nigeria then under the leadership of the then premier of Eastern Nigeria, Late Dr Okpara, you see palm plantation everywhere located in all the senatorial zones, cashew nuts in Umunneji, Ihechiuwa has hundreds of acres of palm plantation. That is vision, active vision of a leader. But this time around, our successive leaders cannot even sustain what used to be, those that even tried now have decided to sell without even replanting another of their own. What legacy are they laying after destroying the legacies of our visionary leaders?

So, we want to pursue aggressively our agricultural policy, food will be more because Abia State, we were the food basket of the nation during Nigeria Biafran war. We produce the food that the whole eastern Nigeria was feeding on. So, where are those foods?

Do you think you will be able to generate enough revenue to execute these projects?

The revenue we have is more than enough to do these projects but the problem with our internally generated revenue over the years is where does it go? They are embedded in corruption. Who collects it and where does it go?

Look at the number of Keke in Aba and in the entire state, if they tell you how much they collect from each of them as levies on daily basis, it will be enough to put some of our roads in good shape. But where does it go? They are unaccountable revenue. If we have a system where internally generated revenue will be properly accounted for, you’ll discover we have more than enough to do recurrent expenditure in this state and still have enough for infrastructural development.

I heard that a state generated as much as N3.2billion from proceeds of their palm oil and we have more than enough but cannot make use of it. You see wonderful opportunity God has given us but we don’t know how to manage it. So, people like us are not coming to manage resources, we want to be more proactively involved in creating wealth.  

We have a place in Ukwa East called Ubak, there is a mini seaport there, all that is needed to be done in that place is to dredge it and then you see container passing through there. It can be institutionalised as a mini seaport where containers can be discharged and that will increase our income.

What I’m trying to say is that if our internally generated revenue is totally accounted for and harnessed we have enough to take care of our people.

Does what has often been referred to as balancing act in zoning structure been favourable to your ambition?

I want to look at it this way, if you come to Abia State like every other states there are three zones. We have the North, the Central and the South. Incidentally, I’m from the South, people from the North have governed the state for eight years, the people from the central have governed the state for eight years, the present governor is from the central. We are now talking about the South. If you look at it morally and ethically too, it just behoves them to say if there are people who are eminently qualified and capable from the South, nothing stops them from taking their shot at the governorship post. More so, I look at it not as governor of Abia South but governor of Abia State of Abia South extraction.

If you look at it holistically, just like every other person will say, I’m eminently qualified to take the mantle of leadership of the people of Abia State.

Where are you coming from, what do you think you have that qualifies you?

You see experience has failed us; we need a man with vision because experience has failed us over the years. The people with experience have kept our state in this comatose state, but suffice it to say that I’m at above 35 years of age which qualifies me as a citizen of Nigeria to be a governor of a state. And I have more than school certificate which equally eminently qualifies me to be there. I have managed business organisation that grew like a little drop of water that metamorphoses into a big ocean over the years. I have experience in various sectors of the economy and records of many successful businesses in pharmaceuticals, real estate and construction.

I think if I could manage some of those outfits to the glory of God and they are something to be recorned with today, my people will say “from the smell of fart, you can tell how the stool tastes”. That adage is better spoken in Igbo, So, for what I have been able to do over the years, you’ll be able to know that I’m capable. Government is like a business, if you can manage a business, where you have well over 400 staff successfully over the years, you can go into government and then apply some of these business techniques and you will be able to give the best for your state.  

The problem is that we have more people who say they are experienced without being able to deliver common good to the people.