South-East will be Nigeria’s fastest growing economy soon —Chris Okoye
Written by DENNIS AGBO
Sunday, 22 February 2009

*PPCP as the driving force
*Using industrial clusters to open eco roadmap

The South east geopolitical zone has opened an economic road map that includes the five states of the zone pursuing a common economic policy. The thinking is that since the former Eastern Region was the fastest growing economy in Nigeria, prior to 1967, which made a country like Malaysia borrow palm seedlings from them to become the present largest producer of vegetable oil, it is possible to recreate such stimulus in Eastern Nigeria.
Chairman of the South-East Nigeria Economic Commission (SENEC) Engr. Chris Okoye in this interview outlines the SENEC philosophy; the policy and the anticipated economic boom, which he says, would be replicated in other geopolitical zones of Nigeria when the east takes the lead. He also explains how the new leadership of Ohanaeze Ndigbo will play a vital role in the new socio-economic programme.




TELL us about the South–East Nigeria Economic Commission (SENEC) which
you are the chairman?




Engr. Chris Okoye, South East Nigeria Economic Commission will be driven by private public community partnershipThe South-East Nigeria Economic Commission (SENEC) has become an institution that is being promoted by the government of the five south east states, the private sector and of course, communities in the south east. In other words, the model that is driving SENEC is what we call the PPC partnership that is private public community partnership model because we have moved from the phase of the scratch of setting up the institution to making presentations to all the stakeholders and in which we have now brought on board the stakeholders and so it will be unfair to say it is being promoted by any group or individual because we don’t want to personalise it. The idea really is to make it become a project that is appreciated by every Igbo man or woman because that is the only way we can talk about the sustainability.

So what does it take to be achieved?

Well, if you recall, there was a workshop sometime in 2006 under the African Institute for Applied Economics (AIAE), that Professor Chukwuma Soludo set up here in Enugu. The workshop was on industrial cluster in the south-east, done under Enugu Forum in partnership with the institute. It happened that I was the chairman of that workshop and in my presentation, we looked at how we could set up industrial cluster in the south east and we felt that to set up an industrial cluster is one thing and to sustain it is even a much bigger problem. But we knew that there are few industrial clusters that are already existing in the south east like the furniture cluster here, the leather cluster in Aba, the spare parts cluster in Nnewi and so on and so forth. But they have not really been properly managed to play the kind of role that you will find in industrial clusters overseas, and so we thought there is a missing gap somewhere and that we need to have this initiative driven by the private sector even though government will offer some support and so that was how the concept of the South East Nigeria Economic Commission came about. Because I recommended in the paper I presented that there could be one platform under which we could hopefully deal with industrial clusters in the south east.

As a result of that workshop, the institute that organized that workshop, that is the AIAE decided to put together a research group that studied the modalities for getting this South East Nigeria Economic Commission (SENEC) and we went on with setting up a committee which I became the chairman with Prof. Ukwu I. Ukwu, Prof. Eric Eboh, Prof. Barth Nnaji, Prof. Chinedu Nebo of UNN, Prof Nnoli and quite a number of other distinguished scholars that got involved in the work. It took us about one year and the work was actually completed in November 2007. At the end we came up with a framework document that more or less showed how we could set up this SENEC.

Essentially, the aim of the institution was to create a robust platform for driving economic and social development in the South-East. We felt that if you look at what is now called the South-East Nigeria, viz-a-viz what happened before the civil war, we wondered why there was so much progress and we compared the two periods between 1960 and even 1966 and between 1970 when the war ended and now that we started this programme, and we came to the conclusion that there is no basis of comparing the progress that the Igbo nation made between these two periods and that perhaps the only reason they made the kind of progress they made that time, even though the circumstances are not the same, must be the fact that we had what we called the Eastern Nigeria Development Corporation.

When you look carefully, the then premier of the Eastern region, Dr. M.I.
Okpara seemed to have used that model very extensively almost in everything they did. Although, the Eastern Development Corporation was a government institution as against the model that we are now trying to put in place, everything done in the former Eastern Nigeria government was done by the defunct Eastern Nigeria Development Corporation.

If you recall, the first one million pounds sterling for the setting up of University of Nigeria, Nsukka was accentually raised by the marketing board under Sir Louis Odumegwu Ojukwu, father of Chukwuemeka Odumegwu Ojukwu, and that was an institution under the Eastern Nigeria Development. It was the one million pounds that they gave Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe for take-off of the University of Nigeria Nsukka. In the area of agriculture, the vegetable oil now in Malaysia was set up with the oil palms taken from the east courtesy of the same corporation and so you could imagine that if they had continued from 1970, Eastern Nigeria would have become the largest producer of vegetable oil in the world. But they couldn’t continue because of the Civil War. Again in eggs production, then, people were buying eggs almost at one kobo not to talk about meat and so on.

On the industrial aspect, they established the glass factory at Port-Harcourt, the steel factory in Enugu, the Nkalagu Cement factory which was probably the first cement manufacturing factory in Africa. As a matter of fact, I am aware that the limestone at Nkalagu cement factory is enough to guarantee production of cement for the next 300 years. The only problem is that they started with the wet process as against the dry process but if they had continued, they would have changed to a new line of dry production. So it seems to us that there is a clear indication that Okpara had an understanding of what such a platform could do and he did not really allow government to take an upper-hand. Now the circumstances are different because then, there was one central government for the Eastern Region. But now you have a number of governments.

So how will SENEC get these governments to act in unity and provide the Okpara kind of momentum that made Eastern Nigeria the fastest growing economy?

With our model of private public community partnership, because before the war, most of what we did, especially in the Igbo area, were through the town unions and by 1966, the Igbo had made significant impact in the education sector that the Yoruba began to wonder if these are the people that started school some years ago and yet we have been going to school for over 100 years and had not made the kind of impact the Igbo made and they were wondering how the Igbo made it because by 1960, the vice chancellor of University of Ibadan was an Igbo and that was Prof. Kenneth Dike. The vice chancellor of University of Lagos was an Igbo man, Prof. Eni Njoku. You do remember also that Yaba College of Technology; the rector, Engr. Agbasi was an Igbo man. So the pre-centre for excellence in Nigeria were in the hands of Igbomen and they also controlled the UNN.

These were made possible by the efforts of our town unions that were creating schools everywhere. So we want to exploit that strength of character once more so as to begin the process of re-creating ownership and that is why we brought in the town union as part of the partnership. Although the institution is going to be government private community partnership, it is going to be driven strictly by the private sector and the institution is to create world-class companies in the South East. Two, is the policy issue. When we talk about policy, we are talking about governance, leadership, co-operation and collaboration.

Right leaders

The institution will ensure that our quality people are the right leaders, that what we are doing on the economic platform does not get derailed. So we have proposed a structure that will have the government being involved not necessarily in the day to day running of organisation because it will be run by a board. Though there is going to be a board of trustees where the government is going to be involved in terms of appointing the chairman who appoints every other person like the managing director in accordance with best practices of course.

We started a system that will enable us go to the state assemblies to make sure that we can legislate so that there will be a law setting up this institution in every state. That is why the governors nominated the steering committee of SENEC. All the five states now have nominees. You know to register a company, it requires government and this institution is going to be registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission. It is going to be structured almost like a holding company that will certainly give birth to other companies. We have gone through the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and Olisa Agbakoba is the chairman of sub-committee on legal framework. The memorandum is to be signed in two phases. Once they sign, we begin the process of registration. The bill that will go to the state assemblies is being put together right now and will be ready by March. Before the end of February, the governments would have signed the MoU and with that we can begin. The bills will go to the state assemblies as executive bills through the various state governments and the essence of this is to make sure that nobody tampers with the process of how SENEC will be legalized. So that there will be no question of a governor coming-in one day to say he doesn’t like what is going on. Even as I am talking, the Ebonyi State government is a bit worried because SENEC may be doing what the governments are supposed to be doing. But SENEC is there to handle common economic projects, in all the states. A typical example is power generation.

Let’s assume we want to do something with coal to become a source of power supply to these areas. Instead of all the states setting up coal power plants, it will make more sense to have a company that will first of all resuscitate the coal industry and centralise a power plant that can supply power to all these states. That is an example of common economic project. In Agriculture, and in rice production for example, it is possible that rice could do better in Abakaliki, cashew in Enugu, palm oil for vegetable oil could do better in Imo and so on down the line. Now we do know today that if we do not treat agriculture as a business, we may not sustain. So we think that for agriculture to do well here, we need to approach it from that concept of common projects and you can apply it to rice, cashew, vegetable oil, cassava etc. we are looking at what we can successfully husband, showcase not necessarily to feed our people but even feeding Nigeria and export.

How are you going to deal with the issue of funding this great project?

We are also setting up what we call the South East Nigeria Development Fund and we are doing it simultaneously. It is a sub-committee that will have an investment bank at the end. That is how ECOWAS funds are sourced and today you have ECOWAS Investment Bank.We have held extensive meetings with the World Bank and it has said that what SENEC has shown them is something very unique.


How would you manage the individualistic instinct of the Igbo an to own his own business?

Remember we are talking about creating world class companies. There is no sentiment about this. We are talking about companies where world class people will work in and not a question of working in the company because you are from Anmabra State. It is the ownership that is important and not who works in it because if you own five percent in a company, you expect some dividends. We are going to look at education because it has collapsed. And if we have quality education we begin to have quality people coming up from different parts of the country.

What time frame do you think SENEC will take for us to begin to see the real changes?

I am almost certain right now all things being equal, the building blocks that is needed to set up SENEC will commence probably by June this year and by August, we will begin to see the first layer of the structure that will run SENEC. We have already applied to Enugu State Government to provide a temporary office for SENEC. We are already beginning to look at some strategic projects especially in the area of agriculture; gas pipelines for power and you know we have a lot of gas in the south-east especially at Ugwuoba and Anambra axis. We believe we can use the Nigeria gas master plan for the south-east and link it up with the ones that will come from Calabar, and Abia. We are also going to look at power supply and education. We are beginning to think about re-inventing our people to have skills.

In the printing industry, for instance, we don’t have people and you know printing and education go together. Good welders earn so much money in oil and gas industries and SENEC wants to play a major role for us to get back to where we were before the war. Therefore, within the next five years, if SENEC goes clearly in the part that we have defined for it, we will begin to see the concrete change in the south-east.

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