Fulfilling the Akwa Ibom Promise

Introduction

As a new governor is sworn in to lead Akwa Ibom state, the many challenges the state faces are naturally at the fore of every citizen’s mind. For the governor, the time has come to move from the poetry of campaign promises to the prose of real governance. Reviewing the ‘ARISE’ agenda of the campaign, the governor was light on a lot of details and signalled in several media parleys, an intent to deploy an emergent ‘kop item’ strategy that takes on board insights and advice from well meaning citizens of Akwa Ibom. It thus behoves all experts and professionals of Akwa Ibom extraction to contribute tangibly to influence the policy direction of the administration via specific support, constructive criticism and ongoing rigorous monitoring.

It is with this backdrop that I pen this policy series. In it, I will outline some key focus areas and strategies that I feel the govt should consider in order to make tangible progress in the next 4 years. I write these as good faith suggestions to help potentially inform and provide a basis of critique for any programs the administration will embark upon. Following this series, I aim to provide regular commentary and viewpoints on various government interventions over the life of the administration. My goal is to contribute to fulfilling the Akwa Ibom promise that to my mind should be broad based prosperity for all people of Akwa Ibom state.

The biggest challenge — Jobs

Most Akwa Ibomites are united in identifying that the biggest problem that faces us is the issue of job creation. Akwa Ibom has a 51% unemployment rate, which resolves to about 1.2m people. To become the prosperous people that we desire, we must find a way to put our out of work citizens to work. Historically, the government’s approach has been to provide jobs directly. The industrial policy of outgoing Governor Udom buttresses this. His administration set out to establish 25 industries in order to create jobs. From my estimates based on the publicly available data, these industries have created 25,000 jobs at best.

These strides are laudable but represent just a drop in the ocean of the number of jobs we require. Without accounting for new entrants to the labour market, if we’re to solve the current unemployment problem we need to create 300,000 jobs annually for the next 4 years of this administration. This is the equivalent of 25,000 jobs a month. We need the scale of Governor Udom’s industrialisation effort over the last 8 years every single month for 4 years. The Governor being an entrepreneur that’s employed around 2,000 people in his Royalty group has insight into the difficulty of creating and maintaining jobs. We need the scale of 10 Royalty groups every month for 4 years. How might we enable this arduous task?

First off, we must accept that government has no hope of ever doing this directly. The only route is for government to enable job creation by businesses and entrepreneurs. Akwa Ibom must thus become the best place to do business in Nigeria and indeed in the whole of Africa. Today, this is sadly not the case. Akwa Ibom has slid from a rank of 4th in the ease of doing business index for states in Nigeria to 18th within 2 years. While the index has its flaws, it can be a useful yardstick to track progress on business reform. Our goal should be to become number 1 in Nigeria and then number 1 in Africa. The previous administration’s action plan for business-enabling reform was a step in the right direction.

The incoming administration should see it to its logical conclusion and share specific milestones and achievements as the year progresses. As we make strides in ease of doing business, the state’s Ministry of Trade and Investment or its investment corporation, AKICORP, needs to become an outbound sales agency whose main job is to sell Akwa Ibom as an ideal investment destination both home and abroad. ‘Invest in Akwa Ibom’ must be a phrase that’s echoed in every major city in Nigeria and Africa.

In the next section in this series, I’ll dig deeper into specific job creation opportunities, the fiscal strategy the state should consider and other strategies to make the state more business friendly.

Follow the publication to receive the rest of the series as it drops. Would also love to hear from you, leave your comments on this post.