From Maurice Okafor, Enugu
Governor of Enugu State, Dr. Peter Mbah, has challenged the South-East to maximise their economies of scale and also pool resources together to build critical regional infrastructure to boost the socio-economic parameters of the zone.
Governor Mbah further canvassed for a multi-dimensional approach to tackling insecurity across the zone by establishing a common security command and control centre, encouraging an inter-agency cooperation and adopting non-kinetic approaches in restoring the economy of the zone.
He gave the charge in his address yesterday at the on-going South-East Economic and Security Summit in Owerri, Imo state.
He identified transportation and logistics as some of the key enablers needed to transform the South-East economy and by so doing curtail the poverty and unemployment rate in the zone.
“Since we now have railways in the Concurrent List, there is nothing stopping us.
“So, if we pick one or two projects from this summit that we can say as a people of the South-East, we want to make sure that we execute them, I believe we can achieve them and they are going to have a huge spillover effect on our economy and security.
“How do we fund such projects? That brings me to this philosophy of ‘Aku Ruo Ulo’, which, in my view, is for us to encourage our kith and kin to bring back their wealth to the South-East.
“Putting a benchmark of about 30 per cent and 40 per cent of our wealth will go a long way. We have people that are wealthy Igbos. So, if we begin to think about how we invest some of those funds in the South-East, it is a way of making sure that we have a huge capital inflow to be able to execute some of these critical projects”, he said.
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