TheCable

Peter Mbah, governorship candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Enugu, says he will ensure the state becomes a private-sector driven economy, if elected as governor in 2023.

Mbah said this during the official opening of the Godfrey Okoye University European business park and centre for practical skills (CPS) at Ugwuomu, Nike, Enugu.

The event had in attendance Thomas Schlesinger, ambassador of Hungary to Nigeria; Martin Huth, minister counsellor of Germany in Nigeria; Markus Margner, country director of the German agency for international cooperation; Abubakar Rasheed, executive secretary, National Universities Commission, among others.

Speaking at the event, Mbah said the initiative was in line with his plans to catalyse skill and vocational education and de-risk investment inflow, adding that the goal was to make Enugu state a preferred destination for living, investment, and business.

“My joy in being here stems largely from the fact that what we are doing here today is everything we had proposed in our manifesto to the people of Enugu,” he said.

“One of the ways to de-risk investment flows to Enugu state is to work with centres like this because, in our development plan, it is well captured that we are going to have a lot of skills acquisition, technical, and vocational education across many locations in the state.

“One of our strategic plans is the transition of Enugu from a public sector-driven to a private sector-driven economic growth.

“Our goal is that in the near future, this CPS and indeed the European business park would constitute one of the hubs for the emergence of small and medium scale businesses in our state.

“We have, therefore, proposed a humongous vision to the people of Enugu state that we are going to grow our economy from the current $4.4 billion to $30 billion in eight years.

“Such a proposal was tagged as crazy when it was made, the reason being that in the last 21 years, we have only marginally grown the economy, and here we are saying we are going to have exponential growth.

“Again, we want to create an environment for the private sector to thrive. So, we simply said that our mission is going to make Enugu the preferred destination for investment, business, and for living. So, we understand clearly that as a government, we are going to have to de-risk investment flow by the private sector into Enugu.

“We understand the need for businesses because we are also coming from that background and we know that skills and labour are one of the key indicators for the ease of doing business in any community.”

Mbah also said “made-in-Enugu” products would serve both domestic and foreign markets and would address the problem of unemployment, eradicate poverty, and also create opportunities for investors to explore other areas such as the new energy and mineral resources sector his soon-to-be administration is exploring.

“We believe that with the establishment of a skills centre like this, our unemployment rate will drop drastically. We must ensure that this centre is singled out for recognition because this is what we hope to replicate as a government across different locations in the state,” he said.

“What this centre has done is to bring our tomorrow closer to us today, which is in sync with our tagline; ‘tomorrow is here’ and indeed our tomorrow is here because we no longer have room for procrastination. We can no longer wait. We have to hit the ground running.”

On his part, Jens-Christian Moller, an international energy investor from Europe, said he was confident in Mbah’s ability to achieve the “ambitious $30 billion economy”, adding that his company would be willing to invest in the state once he is elected.

He said the European contingent was interested in training Enugu people in Europe and bringing them back so that they could replicate the technical know-how and other skills in their home state.