How We Turned Things Around In AKWA IBOM

54

• Gov. Pastor UMO ENO Address At Yoruba Tennis Club

In Akwa Ibom our own blueprint is the ARISE Agenda, and it rests on the same conviction: that a government is judged by what changes in the lives of ordinary people.

Let me begin where I believe government ought to begin, which is with those who cannot help themselves. We inherited a backlog of gratuities dating back to 2012: ¦ 111 billion owed to men and women who had already given the State their working lives. We have paid more than ¦ 88 billion of it, and we intend to clear the balance before this term ends.

We have built over 461 compassionate homes, every one of them solar-powered, and handed them to the neediest households across our 369 wards, each with ¦ 500,000 in living support. Food vouchers drawn from our Social Register are going out even as I speak.

Business grants have gone to farmers, market women, artisans and young entrepreneurs, and we have placed ¦ 2 billion with the Bank of Industry so that small businesses can borrow at single-digit rates instead of being bled by interest. Over 3,000 young people have been trained at the Dakkada Skills Acquisition Centre, and each one leaves with between N500,000 and N1 million in seed capital, because a certificate without capital is a cruelty.

We have completed the recruitment process to employ 2,000 primary school teachers, 2,854 healthcare professionals, 1,000 technical and vocational instructors and 3,000 officers into the State civil service. We have paid nearly N7 billion in WASSCE fees for our students since May 2023, and we have raised bursaries for those in our tertiary institutions to ¦ 1,695,970,000. We are investing heavily in our youth because no democracy can endure without sustained investment in the next generation. Young people must not only inherit democracy but also be equipped to strengthen and advance it. Our administration is building fully equipped Youth

Development Centres in all 31 Local Government Areas, featuring ICT hubs, laboratories, vocational training facilities, creative development studios, and co-working spaces, some of which have been commissioned and being put to use .

Training has already commenced and our target is to produce 1,000 skilled youths from each centre every year, equipping our young people with the knowledge, technical skills, creativity, and entrepreneurial capacity needed to drive economic growth, create jobs, and strengthen our democracy.

We have also written the Human Capital Development Framework, HCD 2.0, which was launched in Uyo last year by the Vice President, Distinguished Senator Kashim Shettima, GCON, directly into the ARISE Agenda. We did so deliberately, because human capital is not a side programme of development. It is the substance of it.

On infrastructure: 1,346 kilometres of economically viable road and 41 bridges in three years, and not one inherited project abandoned. Under our One Project Per Local Government policy, there is now no local government area in Akwa Ibom without a completed government project: a road, a model primary school or a model health centre.

Permit me a word about food, because no government that cannot feed its own people has any serious claim to success. We have put grants directly into the hands of our farmers rather than into the hands of intermediaries. The Ibom Model Farms, an integrated farming project with tourism assets built into it, will be commissioned shortly, and it is designed not merely for our own sufficiency but for export. And we recently launched our Tree Crop Revolution to restore Akwa Ibom to its former standing as a pre-eminent producer of palm oil and of everything along its value chain. Farms are now springing up across all 31 of our local government areas. Before long we will be producing a surplus, and a surplus is what turns a farmer into a business.

And we are building the economy that comes after this one. The international terminal at Victor Attah International Airport will be commissioned by the President in September, and Ibom Air already operates commercially from it to Accra. Cadet pilots trained at the Airbus Academy in Toulouse and engineers trained in Addis Ababa are now flying and maintaining that fleet. Our 350-bed Ibom International Hospital, with 24 specialties including oncology, will be ready within eighteen months. The ARISE Palm Resort I spoke of earlier, with its nine-hole golf course, its lakes, its chalets, its floating restaurant and its conference hall, will be commissioned in the same month, alongside the Ibom International Hotel and Conference Centre and the ARISE Shopping City. Eighty-five further projects are running across transport, housing, seaport development and sport. Investors in this room are welcome, and I mean that as an invitation and not as a formality.

I would be doing this club a disservice if I stopped there, because the obstacles to democratic governance are real and they are not defeated by speeches.

Corruption leaks away development. Weak institutions delay everything. Political polarisation makes consensus expensive. Insecurity frightens investment away. And policy discontinuity, that Nigerian habit by which each administration buries the work of its predecessor, has probably cost this country more than any single act of theft.

Let me dwell on that last one, because it is where we have taken our clearest decision. In Akwa Ibom we resolved that no project inherited from a previous administration would be abandoned, regardless of which government began it and regardless of which party that government belonged to. A road left half built is not a monument to our predecessors. It is a broken promise to a community that was told it was coming, and that community does not care which administration made the promise. So we finish what we meet. Our people call it the Finisher’s Anointing.

We have tried to answer each of these deliberately: equipping institutions with the tools they actually need, opening up budgeting and procurement, digitising government processes so that discretion has fewer dark corners to hide in, strengthening legislative oversight and monitoring, enforcing fiscal discipline, and institutionalising continuity so that programmes outlive the administrations that begin them. ARISE Agenda 1.0 has substantially run its course, and we are preparing to launch ARISE 2.0 to consolidate those gains on a sustainable footing.

But let me be plain. Government cannot do this alone, and any government that tells you otherwise is deceiving either you or itself.

Citizens must vote peacefully, hold their leaders accountable by lawful means, refuse corruption in the small daily transactions where it actually lives, respect the courts and pay their taxes. Institutions must be permitted to grow stronger than the individuals who lead them. That, finally, is the test of a serious country. And our young people must be given education, skills, digital opportunity and capital, not because they are the leaders of tomorrow, a phrase we have repeated until it means nothing, but because they are half of our population today.

Our diversity, too, must remain what this club proved it could be: a source of strength rather than a fault line. Every Nigerian must be able to feel that he belongs.

Distinguished ladies and gentlemen, hope is not sustained by rhetoric. It is sustained by evidence. Citizens recover their confidence when the road is finished, when the school works, when the hospital has a doctor on duty, when the young man finds employment, when the farmer receives his support in time, and when the small business survives its first three years. That is what renews hope: competence, compassion and consistency, all three of them, and in that order.

Which brings me back to where I began. In 1926, men who had been shut out of somebody else’s club did not spend a hundred years complaining about the door. They built a house. They gave it rules. They gave it a creed. And they made certain it would outlast them. That is precisely the work in front of us as a nation.

Not the perfection of our institutions within our own lifetimes, but their construction, their honest governance, and their safe delivery into the hands of those who come after us.

Abraham Lincoln called democracy “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. It falls to our generation to ensure that those words continue to describe something real.

Permit me one final illustration. Singapore became independent in 1965 with no natural resources and little to its name beyond its people. What Lee Kuan Yew gave it was not wealth but institutions that worked and a public service that could not be bought, and within a single generation it became a country the rest of the world now studies. That is the whole lesson. Elections by themselves guarantee nothing; it is strong institutions, accountable leadership and democratic principles honestly applied that turn a vote into a road, a classroom, a hospital and a job. This is what we are pursuing with the ARISE Agenda.

Let me end, then, on the reason I remain optimistic, because there is every reason to be. Our people are resilient in conditions that would have broken others. Our young people are inventive. Our entrepreneurs keep finding opportunity where much of the world sees only difficulty, and our communities keep showing a courage that ought to humble those of us who govern them. Nigeria’s greatest resource has never been what lies beneath our soil. It is what lives within our people. The future will belong to societies that choose cooperation over conflict, service over self-interest, accountability over corruption, and hope over despair. That is the choice we have made. With God on our side and with sustained focus, I remain confident that we are on track to galvanising our people to Arise to a Renewed Hope.

BEING THE KEYNOTE ADDRESS BY HIS EXCELLENCY, PASTOR UMO ENO, Ph.D., GOVERNOR OF AKWA IBOM STATE, ENTITLED “DEMOCRACY AND THE IMPERATIVE OF GOOD GOVERNANCE: RENEWING HOPE IN CHALLENGING TIMES”, AT THE CENTENARY CELEBRATIONS OF THE YORUBA TENNIS CLUB, LAGOS, AUGUST 6, 2026.