[An Insider’s Testimony]
By: Nestor Udoh
The dawn of the 29th May, 2007, broke like any other bright morning. A mammoth crowd of colorfully bedecked men and women trooped into the lavishly decorated Ibom Hall ground in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital.
Over time, the expansive arena of the ethereal venue had seen many public functions. And so, to the casual observer, this may not have been chalked up as anything unusual.
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To the average Akwa Ibom person, however, the day was very unusual. It was the crescendo of a tailspin of high wire political activities that culminated in a young man, from a minority ethnic group, winning a governorship election, against all political odds and calculations. At the age of 44 years, Chief Godswill Obot Akpabio, the man of the moment to be sworn in as governor, was unarguably one of the youngest in the country to be sworn into that exalted office.
At the inception of his regime, sundry pundits did not give him a chance. But it was Henry Kissinger who said that: “normally prudent, ordinary calculations can be overturned by extraordinary personalities”. In every sense of the phrase, Godswill Akpabio turned out to be that extraordinary personality. Armed with stupendous experience from the private sector, and most importantly, having been a Commissioner in Governor Victor Attah’s regime for six years, he swept the political scene like a tornado.
When, therefore on 23rd of February, 2009, he approved my appointment to join his administration in the capacity of a Permanent Secretary, little did I know that it was not just another appointment. As it turned out, it was a call to participate in, and be a witness to history.
Three months later, we were seated in the posh banquet hall of the Hilltop Mansion, as Akwa Ibom people fondly call their governors lodge, for a function, when he made a statement: We want to turn this state from a pedestrian state to a destination for all Nigerians. People just pass through Uyo, Ikot Ekpene and Eket to other places like Calabar and Port Harcourt to do business and savour their leisure without stopping over to sleep, much less settle down. We want to change all that.
I was hearing this for the first time. And if I say I was jolted, it is an understatement.
It was a tall vision by any standard. As we left the hall to our duty posts, I kept wondering in my mind how he intended to accomplish the feat. We were to find out that it was not an empty boast. He mobilised and motivated all of us to work at a dizzying pace, as he kept telling us that he was so eager that, he had decided to approach the development of the state with anger.
Two words describe this vision: planned `change. Planned change is a process of preparing an entire organization, in our case a political entity, to achieve new goals or move in a new direction. Kurt Lewin, an expert in planned change believes that the process of planned change entails “creating the perception that a change is needed, then moving towards the new desired level of behaviour, and finally solidifying the new behaviour as a norm.”
Akpabio wanted to change Akwa Ibom from a “pedestrian state to a destination,” and from an entity that produced house helps to a proud state that produced captains of industry and professionals in all fields for Nigerians. To do this, he needed change agents. And his change agents were tourism development and education. For tourism development, he used infrastructural development and setting of sundry tourism traps. First the roads.
There is an anonymous saying that if you don’t like the road you are travelling, you should start paving a new one. The roads in the state were not as well paved as he would have wanted. In 2008, he commissioned a German firm, Albert Speer and Partners GmbH to produce a comprehensive review document of the transportation system of the state, and propose long term strategies for making the roads key economic drivers.
In his regime, road construction was not done haphazardly, as this document, which we proudly called the MANTRA, served as a veritable roadmap for road construction in the state. It was what an entrepreneur would call a business plan, and it became a veritable plan for his government business as far as road construction was concerned.
Tourism development demands that you work using certain basic principles, and with the visitor in mind. In his book, From Third World to First: The Story of Singapore, 1965 -2000, Lee Kuan Yew, former prime minister of that former British trading post, says that if he were to use one word to describe what one needs to trap and keep visitors in one’s enclave, that word is confidence. Visitors have to have confidence in your facilities. That is to say, your roads, schools, hospitals, transportation system, etc must be at par with, or better than what they have back home in their places.
As we worked, we noticed that the governor emphasized on quality, and speed of delivery. For most of the projects, he used what he called five-star contractors, like Julius Berger Plc, that has a track record of quality. Most of the roads, bridges and flyovers were constructed by this company, and such other ones that had the same track record. He used to tell us that he had extracted technical guarantees from these companies for these roads to last a minimum of twenty-five years. Notice that long after he left office, most of his roads are still very solid without potholes.
Visitors coming into the state must see a clean environment; and so he embarked on a systematic program of urban renewal. He awarded a contract for landscaping of some major roads to a company called Nigerpert Structures Nigeria Ltd. With this, the streets were cleaned up; and women as well as some unemployed youths were engage to sweep the streets on daily basis, waking up when it was yet dawn.
His vision to make the state a destination drew him to develop a one-stop facility for business and leisure, modelled after Disneyland in the United States of America. This, he called the TROPICANA Entertainment Center, which components included a hotel, a convention center, a shopping mall, a Cineplex and a dry and wet theme park. The idea, as he explained to us, was that while you are attending a conference at the convention center, your family members, if they came with you, could watch a film at the Cineplex, or enter the mall for shopping, or play at the dry or wet theme park.
Time did not permit the completion of these projects, but by the time I left the supervising Ministry of Special Duties, we had completed the Cineplex and shopping mall. Today, these draw an endless stream of visitors from far and wide.
Talking about quality, he told us directly when we were supervising the construction of the Godswill Akpabio international stadium in Uyo in 2013: You have to supervise that work to meet international standards. When in future, FIFA will decide where matches are to be played in the country, we will not be there. It is the quality of the stadium that will speak for us.
It has turned out to be a statement from a man who saw tomorrow. Today, most international matches that come to Nigeria are played in that stadium, which is one of the most elegant tourism traps you can find in the country because of its high quality. And talking about speed of delivery, it took us less than two years of backbreaking work to supervise that gigantic and elegant project from the award of contract to commissioning. As well, it took us one year six months to complete the supervision of construction work on the qualitative Four Points by Sheraton Hotel at Ikot Ekpene, which today is drawing a stupendous number of visitors.
With the same eye on tourism development, he awarded the contract for the building of a first class, multispecialty hospital at Itam, which aimed at redirecting the tide of medical tourism from India and sundry countries back to our country, and to gain the confidence of tourist in our health system.
But perhaps, the most fundamental of all the futuristic programs of the governor was his declaration of free and compulsory education in primary and secondary schools. In his eight years as governor, we watched as school enrolment more than doubled. Before the program started, school enrolment stood at 147,000 students as at March 2008; after declaration of the free education program, the enrolment jumped to 267,191 by April 2009, representing a 66% increase. This was because, most of our children had returned from peoples’ homes in major Nigerian cities where they served as house helps, and hawked sundry wares in dangerous traffic, to attend school.
Many parents in Akwa Ibom, in ignorance, had labelled their children witches and wizards, and in collaboration with some dubious religious people, abused and sometimes killed them. Barely one year into his administration, he forwarded a bill, on the 26th of June, 2008, to the State House of Assembly, to domesticate the United Nations child rights law in Akwa Ibom State. It was speedily passed by the Assembly, and he signed it into law on 5th December 2008.The law prescribes some prison terms for anyone accusing any Akwa Ibom child of being a witch or wizard.
It will be a mistake to think that the only tourism traps he set were in the area of construction. Year after year, his technical wonder boy, Aniekpeno Mkpanang organized the famed Christmas carols. This culminated in the state breaking the Guinness World Record, when he organized a mass choir numbering 25,272 on December 13, 2014, to sweep away a previous record set by a group called CENTI in Bogota, Columbia the previous year. The event, watched all over the world on more than 50 television channels worldwide, was the culmination of his vision to draw the attention of the country, and now the world, to a state that hitherto fitted snugly its description with the word pedestrian.
The question may now be asked: at the end of his tenure in 2015, did he achieve his vision? To give you an idea of the answer, let us look at just one index: the air traffic inflow into the State. After he built the airport, started by his predecessor, the first flight touched down on Akwa Ibom soil on 23 September 2009. It is begging the question to say that before then, there were zero flights. At his exit, the airport could boast of 326 aircraft take-offs and landings, and an average of 7,556 passengers monthly, making it one of the busiest airports in the country alongside Lagos, Abuja and Port Harcourt airports.
Uncommon transformation attracted high net worth visitors. Some of these included the Rev. Jesse Jackson of the famed American civil rights movements, Wole Soyinka, the savvy Nobel Laureate, and the affable incumbent President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, who visited more than six times in eight years. All paid glowing tributes to the political wonder boy, Godswill Akpabio, the man who saw tomorrow for his people. Some of these people, like Terrence McCulley the American Ambassador to Nigeria said: I have visited Akwa Ibom State for the first time. But from what I have seen so far, the future of Nigeria as a country is in Akwa Ibom state. We all clapped.
Not a bad remark for a state whose children were, a short while ago, seen as house helps for other Nigerians in the same country.
It was Alan kay, the American computer scientist who developed the first ever computer windows desktop interface, who said: The best way to predict the future is to invent it.
Godswill Akpabio had invented a future for his people with his Uncommon Transformation. And this is why Terrace McClulley could dare to predict that the future of Nigeria as a country is in Akwa Ibom State.
Udoh, a Medical Doctor and Consultant Public Health Physician, retired from the Akwa Ibom State Civil Service as the Dean of the College of Permanent Secretaries, Akwa Ibom State.
He is the author of the bestselling book CIVIL WAR CHILD, and the new one LEADERSHIP SECRETS OF GODSWILL AKPABIO.
