Dr Peter Mbah, governor of Enugu state, has promised to disrupt the state’s incremental growth and grow it sevenfold in his time as the chief executive. On the sideline of an investment summit where his administration’s ambitious economic roadmap was interrogated, he spoke with GEOFF IYATSE on how he intends to leverage a creative finding model in the phase of fiscal challenge to turn the state into an investment destination. It’s been quite an exciting journey. Nothing has happened that has taken us unawares because we did an expensive study of the situation. We knew what we were coming to meet. When we made promises to our people, we gave timelines. The reason we backed our promises up with timelines was because we were aware of the things we needed to deal with and we knew the timelines we committed to were sacred, we were not going to deviate from them. We did promise we were going to have an investment forum or round table within 100 days in the office and today we have kept the promise. It is not just about the symbolism or making a promise and keeping it, but it is essentially the substance; the fact that there are huge takeaways and huge successes from what we have done today.Our strategy is to have a creative alternative financing model and that is quite broad. The creative alternative financing model means that the current financing model, which focuses on revenue from the federation account, is suboptimal. It is not going to work with this current model. So, we all have agreed that this current model cannot serve us if we want to intervene across critical sectors.Out of the three-pronged approach we have taken, our strategic objective is strengthening our institutions. We are not just building this around us as individuals, we are also building the institutions. These are policies that will outlive anyone. At the end of the day, if you have strengthened the institutions through policy frameworks, it will not be easy for one single person to come and reverse that because it is entrenched and that is essentially what we are doing. We are strengthening our public service sector by ensuring that a lot of what we are doing has regulatory and legal frameworks. They are all embedded in the regulatory framework.
We get the buy-in of the lawmakers. We have retreats with them, we have workshops with them to get them to understand the policy direction of the government, and then we will build systems around this. That makes it almost impossible for any one person to reverse the policies. So, we are doing things that are bigger than us, things that would outlive us.What may help you to know I dare to just do a check on my background. I came into a sector where we were regarded as late entrants. We were just regarded as one other oil company. Fast forward to 14 years, we became the market leader, having 23 per cent market share with the next company having just five per cent, in a sector that was already mature. That is the oil and gas downstream sector. So, it is not like a nascent market where new players are struggling for market shares. We came in as late entrants in 2008. By 2021, we were the market leader. You don’t go from starting from point zero to becoming a market leader without courage.