₦airaland Forum

pandax:
I am an Apostle of good governance irrespective of party affiliations, and I believe Soludo is from the same school of thought. I have always given my vote to APGA in Anambra State, except during presidential elections. Obi had his well-known limitations no doubt, but we voted for Soludo to right the wrongs of Obi et al, unfortunately, he is not living up to expectations in spite of the good wills he has from Anambrarians

If Anambra cannot afford Julius Berger for certain economic Roads, especially within the Onitsha and Nnewi axis of the State, Please let him engage CCECC, Arab Contractors, RCC, or even Craneburgh (This company is new in Nigeria from South Africa and not so expensive to engage like JB, but they will deliver quality infrastructures and they are currently doing wonders in Aba)

I know that Soludo is a BIG Ideas/Pictures individual, and I am expecting him to think big in his projects, especially Road Construction. I expected him to dualize the following roads in Anambra and even build some green field roads to open up the state:
1. Starting from Amawbia Roundabout (Houses to be demolished) - section of Onitsha Road @ Amawbia- Amawabia R/A - Nise-Agulu-Nanka-Ekwulobia(flyover here as he planned)- Uga
2. Ekwulobia-Isuofia-Awka Etiti-Nnobi(Flyover here)-Umuoji-Nkpor
3. Nnewi(demolitions) - Nnobi- Nnokwa- Agulu
4. Nnewi(demolitions)- Ojoto-Oba- Owerri/Onitsha Expressway(Flyover here)
5. Dualize Atani Road to Atani Town
6. Alex Ekwueme Boulevard Road extension to Ifite Awka
7. UNIZIK tempsite Road - Isuaniocha- Mgbakwu
8. Extend Esther Obiakor Road northwards through Ifite Awka to join Roads 6 & 7 above
9. Dualize 33 Road
10. Dualize Upper iweka to Main Market
11. Dualize Ogidi -Awka Road- Main Market
12. Greenfield Road from Awka Road - 33 Road, Onitsha OR Inosi Onira R/A - 33 Road
13. Dualize Niger Street, Onitsha
14. A green field road perpendicular to Awka/Onitsha expressway at Airport Junction with a clover-leaf flyover around Umunya-cutting Awka/Onitsha old road perpendicularly around Ogidi/Ogbunike/Abagaga to join Owerri Interchange of 2NB (Toll this road on completion or give it to a contractor to build)


N:B
1. You can toll some of these roads, we will pay to use decent infrastructure. The state is choking, then you can start your other wonderful projects like AAU Automotive City with Innoson as the anchor company, Ikenga - Mixed City with EMZOR as the anchor company, Solution Innovation District @ Awka, Solution Fun City @Awka, Agulu lake theme Park, Export Emporium, AND I am proposing that you have Solution PARK (SPARK City) around Ekwusigo or Oba for Light manufacturing. Also, mandate your environment ministry to plant and maintain at least 2m trees on Anambra Roads.

2. Anambra is the smallest state in Nigeria in terms of landmass, after Lagos. The total distance of all the aforementioned roads should not be more than 300km and cannot cost the state more than 150B if we use Craneburgh for all the roads @N500m per KM.

Cjrane2:
First Flight Lands in Ebonyi International Airport on Thursday, April 27, 2023!!!

Wow!!! Big congratulations to Ebonyi State for this massive achievement! Thank you Governor Dave Umahi for your tenacity and great perseverance to see this project completed in record time!

Now the work of developing new tourist attractions such as Ndibe Beach, nice hotels, fantastic restaurants, and world-class clubs to drive the entertainment industry to boost tourism and the state's economy must be pursued vigorously. That is a way of making this airport one of the busiest in the country. Congratulations once more to Ebonyians on this achievement. Ebonyi to the world!

Cjrane2:
Nwokem, without diminishing Umahi's excellent projects,, Obiano performed way better than Umahi.

Apart from Obiano's physical infrastructural projects, he heavily invested in human resources improvement and poverty alleviation projects to reduce poverty in Anambra.

Conversely Umahi used money which could have been wisely invested in education, agriculture and Healthcare to build too many flyovers at irrelevant junctions. This is not to say his countless multicolored flyovers are a bad thing. But if you consider that he ruled the state with the worst poverty in Southern Nigeria and one of the least human development index in Nigeria, his multicolored flyovers where there were no traffic becomes a tragic misuse of public wealth. While we have praised Umahi for doing many concrete roads to ease accessibility to rural parts of Ebonyi state. I believe the money he spent on too many flyovers where there were no traffic gridlock as a tragic waste of precious state resources.

Unike Wike that also built multiple flyovers because he ruled a state with serious traffic problems and relatively more wealthy citizens. Umahi had no such problems. Yet he acted like he had some inferiority complex that flyovers were a symbol of development and to prove Ebonyi was developed he had to have more flyovers. Thus he went on a flyover building spree while other areas of human development suffered.. Umahi's only useful projects are the concrete roads, Abakaliki mall and airport. Even at that it is questionable if those projects will be viable due to the crushing poverty rate in his state. That is why I praise Umahi and bash him sometimes for doing nothing on the poverty alleviation front.Overall I rate Umahi as a great transformative governor, but he could easily have been the greatest Igbo governor since 1999 and done better on all fronts not just on physical infrastructure, and thus be rated as a well rounded governor.

ebufa:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RHWmfRX7dKs




Talking of re-developing the Awka Town market......may we borrow a leaf from the Kejetia central market in Kumasi..........a modern spin on the Onitsha main market built in the 1960s........Truth be told decades of retrogressive military and fulani rule has stagnated regional initiatives in real development. Nigeria and especially Ndigbo have lost the plot absolutely.........projects are ill conceived and even in the rare cases projects are well conceived they are shabbily executed! we need to up our game ....and fast too!

investnow2013:
Let us promote Onitsha as our answer to lagos!





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBSvGrpLdZo

Cjrane2:
With May 29th being only about two months away,, this airport is under a high risk of becoming an abandoned project unless the runway is marked and made verifiably operational one month!

Umahi needs to concentrate all the effort in getting the runway ready for test flight now.

Airport terminals in London and globally are gradually improved endlessly as the airport operates on a completed runway. Therefore unless the runway is completed immediately and test flight conducted successfully on it to prove that the airport is operational, this airport will be a tragic abandoned project in the next regime after May 29th.

johnmartus:
Buhari should understand that we are not going for war all we need is peaceful election stop instigating war.

gidgiddy:
Not bad, but not my taste. The mansion is starting to look like a Church

IGBOSON1:
A more detailed update of ongoing works at Ebonyi airport, courtesy madamsabi cook:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMAgQRzB3ek

IGBOSON1:
My sentiments down to a T!

In the past one or two years in the south-east, we’ve seen new big-ticket projects (capable of serving as economic drivers/multipliers and a catalyst to uplift other sectors of the economy and society) being launched only in Anambra, Ebonyi and Abia to a lesser extent (GEOMETRIC power plant)!

Meanwhile, other states or regions are using the political/economic advantages they’ve acquired for themselves over the past decades of operating a unitary national gov’t to attract multi-billion dollar industries and initiatives to their own states/regions, while some of their states (like Lagos, Rivers, Kano and Kaduna) can, to a large extent, run on their own steam courtesy of these political/economic advantages garnered over the past decades!

Some may not realise it, but the subtext to your submission points to the need for every region to have the capacity to have their own ‘Lagos’….their own centre for cultural, social and economic interaction with the global community, so each region can sell themselves to the outside world to the best of their ability and develop at their own pace using their own human and natural resources which wouldn’t be appropriated by others or lost in the ‘unified’ confusion that is ‘one Nigeria’! Basically, i’m talking of the need for a TRUE Nigerian federation….not one only in name, while reality on the ground is the opposite!

The damage for our entertainers to first have to go to Lagos in order to make it globally cannot be quantified! We may not like to hear this, but some have appropriated Lagos for themselves and see our presence there as an ‘irritant’! They can easily use their control of the machinery of state governance to frustrate us in many ways, and this has actually been happening….mostly codedly!

Part of the problem is also self-inflicted, as we’re a bit docile in promoting and hyping our own! In the late 50s and 60s, some of the best Nigerian entertainers came from the East…mainly of Igbo and Ijaw extraction! This was a period when there was true federalism and each region didn’t have to first go to Lagos in order to be a success. Though Lagos, even then, was still the cultural and entertainment capital of Nigeria, this prominent position was achieved organically as then ALL Nigerians saw Lagos as theirs without one group or ethnicity claiming it and its governance!

The dangers and unfairness in operating a unitary system of national governance in such a pluralistic and diverse country as Nigeria can also be seen in how the Anambra airport has seen NO federal push to see it grow beyond what the state gov’t has done! There’s zero effort from Abuja in seeing it can handle one or two international destinations, even though it’s one of the most functional and best equipped airports in the country! Can you imagine Hadi Sirika hasn’t visited the airport even for once!

Also, we see the negative impact of operating a unitary system of national governance in how they’ve been playing mind-games with that Onitsha river port…almost mirroring the way they used 2nd Niger bridge for political football! Leaving aside the fact that it’s possible to upgrade Onitsha river port to a sea port (yes, a bit difficult and capital intensive, but still possible), the little river port operations that are possible and easily achievable are yet to commence! All we’ve seen thus far are teasing and empty platitudes and promises of commencement of operations! Remember we’re not just talking of any other town or city here! We’re talking of Onitsha…..a city that held so much promise in the 50s and 60s, and was once one of the centres of gravitational pull for commerce in West and Central Africa!

OreMI22:
Great information Sir! Thank you so much for taking the time to explain this history of filmmaking to those who always doubt if modern Nollywood originated in Onitsha or not.

It is obvious that the BIGGEST weakness of Ndigbo is the ability to IMPROVE anything from its initial basic model/version. Like the Chinese, we are expert copiers but unlike the Chinese that continuously improve their initial model/version, we pay little attention to innovation and improvements. Thus, once something is successful, we copy it exactly without trying to improve our version of it to match the current or future trends of the same thing. If we had improved the Mike Orihedimma model instead of trying to repeat it exactly for many decades after the 1970s until it became obsolete, we would have been somewhere now. Those types of Mike Orihedimma Igbo traditional films would be on Netflix now competing with other international standard films.

The reason I LOVE Flavour and Phyno is that they understood that playing Hi-Life did not mean performing it exactly like Osadebe, Oliver De Coque, or Morrocco did in the 1970s. They understood that they had to work hard to adapt the beats and evolve Hi-Life to the current trends of the 2000s so that it would remain relevant and not an archaic beat of the 1970s.

That is what we must imbibe as Ndigbo today. We should strive to IMPROVE on what we had and not blindly copy everything without making any effort whatsoever to improve anything. Then we would wonder why people find it tasteless or inferior to currently trendy technology and modern ways of doing the same thing.

That is also exactly why crude toys and fabrications do not impress me. Since we need to jettison and discard the cultural idea of "awalawa". Which literally translates as producing an inferior quality of something instead of aiming to improve on what is already available. We must strive to improve anything that we wish to copy instead of aiming to make a substandard version of the original thing. The same mental mindset of continuous improvement should be applied to our culture, our music, our industrial products, and the way our schools, markets, hospitals, and cities are built. That is the way to evolve as a modern society when we strive to always make things better, and not always blindly copy to produce a substandard version of anything we do. That is the way we can continue to grow from strength to strength as Ndigbo.

investnow2013:
Mike Orihedịmma— The First Man to Start Igbo Movies in the whole world.

His real name is Solomon Eze. Popularly known as Mike Orihedịmma.

Popular Nollywood stars such as John Okafọ—Mr Ibu, Ngọzi Ezeọnụ, Stephen Alajemba (Ụwaezuoke), etc came into movie life through him.

Mike Orihedịmma started in the 70s. He was a friend with Oliver De Coque. According to him in his interview with Ugwumba TV, he said while Oliver was playing guitar and ekpiri, he was playing mouth organ.

Oliver would finally got sponsored in 1975 and release his album, expo 76. He too went in search of sponsor and couldn't get any even though he had recorded songs and produced them in cassettes.

He noticed that it would make sense if films were produced in Igbo. He had watched Indian movies, French movies and decided to replicate Igbo films.

Then, there was nothing like Nollywood. A few television series like Zeburudaya, Ichoku, Ifesinachi were showing on NTA and were popular in the 70s. Things Fall Apart would later showed up in 1980s where Pete Edochie acted as Okonkwọ.

Mike Orihedịmma gathered a lot of people. He was looking for sponsors but couldn't get any. He started a program called "Ka Ụwa Si Aga"

He started from radio. But said he want his face to be known. NTA was promising him. ABS started then, they were promising him. None gave him platform. Come today and come tomorrow. He started producing films in cassette.

From "Ka Ụwa Si Aga", he started "Okpuru Anyanwụ."

Ngọzi Ezeọnụ was into makeup then. Mike Orihedịmma brought her into her first ever film. Mr. Ibu started through Mike Orihedịmma.

Ụwaezuoke was taken to Mike Orihedịmma by a man he often changed his clothes in his shop who saw him as a talented man.

Mike Orihedịmma made many actors and actresses. He produced Nwaude Nwakpụda.

The Igbo films we know today started through him.

The first film he produced is called "Ọtaakị."

Maazị Mpịrịmpị was popular TV series in the 80s as well.

His name was very popular in the 70s and 80s as well as 90s.

Mike Orihedịmma became a popular name.

He hailed from Ihitenansa, Imo State.

He is late now.

He made English films as well.

Daveconsult007:
I'm disgusted and ashamed by this reportage from the presenter.

How can she call Anambra an unknown hub for movies?
This is a quite unfortunate.

Back in 2000s ,most nollywood movies watched here in Cameroon were mostly from Onitsha .
You can't decide movies in WestAfrican sub region without a city like Onitsha.

I think there's an implicit agenda to hide treasures of Igbo region to the outside world.

I made some research and I found what I expected

investnow2013:
EMERGING FILM INDUSTRY IN ANAMBRA STATE





https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lstCxT2svrc

globemoney01:
Anambra confrence center is now the busiest in SE. Very strategic. Gradually we are taking over SE capital from Enugu.

Grgton:
Awka and onitsha combined together can not match OWERRI.

Is it onitsha that has massive disorganized and unkept roads Or Awka with zero functional traffic lights?? Sandy roads

Soludo hasn't started work yet ..

investnow2013:
NEW FACE OF AWKA ANAMBRA STATE

ebufa:
I agree absolutely, however Anambra has to start from somewhere no matter how small...................The kind of modernization you envisage will be quite invasive......a lot of demolition and relocation of infrastructure ( something we can ill afford now). Let me assure you that whatever infrastructure you put in place will be swarmed and overwhelmed in no time!

I drove all the way from Enugu to Igbuzor.....then all the way to Port harcourt via Ughelli last summer!( a trip I did thrice) ! Nigerian cities are not well run and administered.............Activities and transactions that ought to be done in designated facilities and complexes are carried out right on the roads or walkways. Even those who own stores carry out all their wares unto the road in the name of sampling..........welders,carpenters,funeral homes,block industries all have their showrooms on the roadway and walkways.........it is exponentially worse in Alaigbo! From headbridge in onitsha to the old toll gate ,it is bedlam all the way.....keke,wheelbarrows,container semis,commuter buses all on top of each other!

I remember when Amaechi implemented his policy of frontal fences not being no higher than 6feet and fences had to be see through as well,the whole GRAs outlook changed overnight for the better! We are saying the same thing o but we differ on the ways to get to our target goal! Onitsha metro is built up and hardly any room to expand......bulk of the money for urban renewal should be saved for developing new towns in and around Awka.....................Decongest Onitsha,maintain existing infrastructure,expand where possible and improve municipal services........let the private sector modernise and introduce new services and businesses!

Chikeluba25:
Black and yellow state... May Soludo keep succeeding, and Anambra keep soaring

Jahwinaboy:
Na wa o. This one Federal government take side

lexylaw40:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-bkdbnjg_I

globemoney01:
Show us pictures or videos not faceless propaganda articles written by Obi propagandists for fools like you. Go and compare Peter Obi with local government caretaker chairmen that worked under Obiano not Obiano himself, stop embarrassing yourself

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6HbZHUPTqBU

globemoney01:
Who? The IPOB boy? Are now also IPOB? Desperation

Omanambala:
Lmao...ain't no way you are not either drunk or blind. I thought everyone here knows I am an Obi's disciple. What changed


Hehehe...stop being smart by half. You know the monikers Nri-Priest , Odenigboaroli, IDENNAA Omanbala and this current one. Chino knows me very well even on Facebook. You know I am the strongest Anambra boy on this forum. I never shifted grounds and I call a spade a spade without flinching. I call Obiano out where he underperformed and praise him where he did well. I am a uniting figure for Ndi Anambra.

I am also one of the people that promoted the Omanbala website a brother once floated. In fact , I made the name Omanbala popular on this site.

The difference between you and I is that I treat Anambra like a man should safeguard his father's legacy, with love and passion. I will never lie to Ndi Anambra to promote my paymaster.

The gods and ancestors of ani Omanbala are with me because I am a honest man that only want the good of Anambra and her advancement. I am not a very wealthy man but God has blessed me and like Peter Obi I am so grateful to God but I want to see my father's land shine like a morning star.

You cant never deceive God because he sees our heart desires and only he knows what's on your mind. No matter how much you hide and try to deceive Ndi Anambra.

You , Globemoney and your other friends have attacked Obi here for many years but , like Bob Marley said, "he whom God blessed no one can curse".....look at Peter Obi and the blessings of God in his life. Ezi afa ka ego. You wish you had my character....lol

Omanambala:
If Obiano deserves a hero welcome what then does the man who saw tomorrow and saved for the rainy day deserve....worship ? Without Obi's foresight there would not be an airport.

globemoney01:
Amen! Soludo should be very intentional about relating with FG and attracting more Federal benefits to Anambra like Obiano did for us. He should facilitate the proposed Air Force base and other aviation agencies to make the place a true airport city. This is one of the things I hope he's able to achieve.

I'm not impressed by all these cutting cost of governance and travelling economy class. That to me is playing to the gallery and we have moved way beyond that phase. Anambra is not a poor state and now every governor will be judged by their projects and records, IGR etc not lifestyle.