Sustainable long-term growth and development is a function of an enabling environment for investment and entrepreneurship to thrive.

Over the years in Nigeria however while there has been a lot of talk, few governments at all levels have ever been able to articulate and give practical meaning to the concept of “creating an enabling environment” for enterprise.

China has been able to move over eight hundred million of her citizens out of poverty in four decades, by understanding and applying the concept of ecosystems.

The Chinese government where the government provides public goods and services and the environment that enables enterprises to be established and to grow, which has made China the manufacturing and logistics capital of the world, with every major industry carrying out their production in China.

The Edo state government under the leadership of Governor Godwin Obaseki, has successfully applied the concept of ecosystems to unprecedented impact, which has set the state up to become a major hub for an emerging industrialized Nigeria. The Obaseki job creation focus has been able to reach a combined 169thousand beneficiaries directly and several hundred thousand more indirectly, which can be confirmed by the 6% drop in unemployment rate, from 25.1% in Q2 2018 to 19% in Q2 2020, per the recently released numbers by the National Bureau of Statistics.


For political reasons there have been vigorous attempts to pour scorn on the entire programme, by the opposition even when the facts state otherwise. It is clear that Edo deserves to be put on the path of mending, in order to change the negative narratives about the state over the medium to long term, built on a solid economic and productive base rather than propaganda as has become the norm with the All Progressives Congress.

The opposition cannot claim that the World Bank that gave the Edo state government commendation, over the success of its job creation programmes, was bought over by the Obaseki administration, as the World Bank group is known to base its assessments on facts on the ground.

The APC town criers, in the interests of the continued development of edo state, would do well to also refer to the BusinessDay Research and Intelligence Unit publication of November 2019, which after due diligence, confirmed that Edo State had created over 150,000 jobs between year 2016 and November 2019.

It cannot be denied that BusinessDay is an independent media outfit and one of the few Newspapers in Nigeria that cannot be said to have any partisan interests in its operations, while dishing out business and economy specific publications.


It is a known fact that Edo Jobs has attracted the largest number of private and international partners, and these wouldn’t have keyed into the programme if it wasn’t properly conceptualized and backed by verifiable good faith of the state government.

The likes of Uber, MainOne, Facebook, Google, Amazon, EdoBits, GIZ, Slot Foundation, Pan Atlantic University (SME Toolkit), Curators Academy, Amena Academy, Sabihub, PIND and eOutSource among several others wouldn’t have put their name and brands behind a project that looks or smells like the regular Nigerian government jamboree.


The naysayers would do well to consult the beneficiaries, under the auspices of Edojobs, who themselves as youth, traders, artisans and business owners around the state have come out to testify all over the internet and in their communities about the impact of the Edo Jobs programme in their lives.

Edo state is on course to become a model manufacturing and creativity hub in Africa and the APC would do well to give commendation or highlight areas where the programme can be improved upon to make Edo an investment destination rather than trying to pull down the entire programme for partisanship.

The choice before the people of Edo, in the upcoming election, is whether innovative projects, conceived and executed based on solid data collection and analysis, such as Edo Agripreneurs Scheme, Edo Independent Farmer Initiative, Edo Innovates and Edo Agric Cluster among other, should be sustained and consolidated upon and their decision will be based on facts not the tissue of lies and propaganda that has become the stock-in-trade of the sinking APC ship in the State. To give the notion that its not national but limited to Edo state