Soludo’s Challenge

 By Obi Nwakanma

Charles Chukwuma Soludo is a brilliant economist. He made a Nsukka first in the years when to make a first-class at the University of Nigeria was like a camel passing through the eye of a needle. These days the University of Nsukka is poorly run, and badly situated/oriented, and there is a narrowness to its own self-image that degrades it radically.

One hopes that the rise of its great alums, like Dr Soludo, a former student, and former Professor of Economics at the University of Nigeria might help push a “Nsukka renaissance.” In a sense, Nsukka gave Soludo his first rodeo.

*Soludo

One returns to the fountain of one’s intellectual growth to fetch the waters of life. But though Soludo might have been taught by the likes of Okwudiba Nnoli, I’m a little worried about his centrist, middle of the road politics: Charles Soludo was known among his fellow students in those years of Students Union Politics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as something of an “establishment figure,” who ran with the hares as a student member of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) in the 1980s as an undergraduate student.

He was undoubtedly brilliant and forceful, and politically active: but he lacked the common touch. He lost the presidency of the University of Nigeria Nsukka, Students Union Government, to the equally brilliant, clearly more charismatic, and now late Chima Ubani, who was in league with the equally brilliant Olu Oguibe. Oguibe was the powerful Secretary-General of the University of Nigeria Students Union, in possibly the most excitingly radical era of Nsukka Students politics in the 1980s.

The joke used to be that Oguibe and his friend Chima Ubani retired Charles Soludo from Students Union politics.

But quite clearly Soludo’s political training began from that cradle of Igbo Nationalist imaginary – at Nsukka. Quite ironically, while the artist and poet Olu Oguibe now lives in futile and angry exile in the United States, his political life is clearly behind him, and Chima Ubani lies dead in the cold grave, Charles Soludo is the man in ascent. He has proved more dogged than his fiery adversaries at Nsukka who burned out too quickly.

He has been elected governor of Anambra State, and there has to be some unseen hand of fate in it all, that has summoned him to public service in the same office as his Nsukka contemporary, Mr Peter Obi, who took a third in Philosophy, in the same graduating year as Soludo at Nsukka. Here is Soludo’s chance to etch his name powerfully in the sands of immortal time, as one of those generations of Igbo kids specially trained and positioned to rebuild the Eastern economic corridor and rejuvenate its competitive spirit.

As a Nsukka alum, Soludo is in a sense, an inheritor of the Zikist vision of society. In his first public act, Charles Soludo indicates that his conception of governance is broader and rooted in a vision of a revival of the Igbo economic and political space. He did say that his public acts – his dressing, and his official conveyance would reflect his interests in local content and in support and even revival of local industry. His clothes would be made from the famous Akwette clothes made by the famous, traditional Akwette cloth weavers of Abia State.

He made a public commitment that his official vehicle would be an Innosson brand sedan. This is a brilliant move, and is taken straight out of the economic playbook of the other brilliant, modern Igbo, nationalist economist, Mbonu Ojike whose “boycott the boycottable” movement sought to ginger local production, and to put our pennies where our mouth really was. I salute this gesture by Dr Soludo. But there certainly has to be more realistic.

Charles Soludo occupies a unique position now as one Igbo governor on whom much expectation is placed. I should say his first task must be to quickly help build his party, the APGA into a formidable political movement. Years ago when I was exchanging notes with the now late Professor Ben Obumselu and Pini Jason on the structure of the APGA on the occasional paper I was asked to submit by them, leading to the formation of the party, I had suggested six zonal Working Committees.

The various chairmen of these zonal Working Committees would collectively act as the trustees of the party, and every year, they would nominate from among themselves, the chair for the party’s annual convention who shall then be the chair of the party for the year. This would eliminate the cult of personalities which makes party leadership intensely personalized and weak.

The Administration of the party must be run by an Executive Secretary, professionally trained in party organizing, who must be charged with organizing an effective Party Secretariat, and who can be hired and fired by the Trustees of the party. In any case, Soludo’s first call must be to organize a party that should outlast him, and that would have a life of its own.

The second must be the rebuilding of the Eastern Economic Corridor. I have in the past outlined the nature of this development. But let me briefly sketch, within the limits of this column, the possibilities which Soludo must consider as central to his policies. He must quickly set up an Eastern joint services commission. An important part of Soludo’s mission must be to place before the Anambra State Assembly a Civil Service reform bill. Under him Anambra must recruit, and retrain a new generation of talented young civil servants, and reposition the Civil Services of Anambra in line with what I propose to be the joint Services Commission of the Eastern states.

A free movement of personnel from these states will rekindle an economic and cultural union which will rebuild the dynamism of the East. Imagine getting the Eastern states to agree that 25% of their civil servants, judges, and teachers,  would be routinely transferred and exchanged among the states under a Joint Services Commission. I keep talking of the Eastern states, and I mean the nine states of the former Eastern region. But I should also include the government of Delta states.

An outreach must also be made to the governments of Edo, Benue and Kogi, towards creating a formidable regional economic partnership that would leverage the contiguity and potential markets of these contiguous states for the higher benefits of their people. A key to Soludo’s economic miracle might certainly be to build the “Ten Thousand Workshops” – turnkey, very contemporary workshops for Blacksmiths, metal fabrication workshops; wood workshops; goldsmithing and jewelry; Electrical and computer systems workshop, plumbers, etc.

These well-equipped workshops should be built under the Anambra Rural Development Works program, which using the NDE, should retrain unemployed young men and women with University and polytechnic education, give them start-up credits, and lease the workshops on a rent-to-own basis. They must commit to making their lives in the rural communities. The revival of the rural economies must be sustained with the preservation of the natural environment.  The Soludo administration must quickly embark on the Tri-City development initiative that would link Awka-Onitsha-Asaba into a powerful conurbation.

The development of the Onitsha-Asaba Waterfront economy is key, and it requires an extensive new urban planning to turn the Onitsha Marina into a well laid out business district with banks, insurers, restaurants, art galleries, bookshops, Museums, the Onitsha stock exchange building etc., and link it to a joint development area with the Cable Point in Asaba, with the Delta State government as partners.

This will instigate and expand one of the biggest economic development areas in Nigeria. Imagine the Onitsha cricket club playing the Cricket club of Asaba, or the Row club of Onitsha against the Asaba Row club. These are the founts on which social and economic developments take place.

It takes initiative and imagination. It takes careful planning and the common touch.

I am interested in seeing Soludo’s move to bring not only the Igbo states but the old Eastern states together, to begin to see the benefits of joint planning and mutually beneficial development. Imagine resuscitating the Oriental lines under the new Eastern Nigerian Development Corporation, which should also revive the African Continental Bank; the Cooperative Bank of Eastern Nigeria; the Nigercem, Nigergas, Niger Optics; Niger Steel; Niger Construction; the boatyards at Bonny and Oguta; etc; the numerous industrial plants of the East all now lying in abeyance, so that they would not only generate income for investors but also absorb the numerous unemployed of the East and other Nigerians. Imagine creating boat services between Onitsha-Asaba – to Idah/Agenebode up to Lokoja, and down to Uli, Oguta and Ahoada.

Imagine dredging an in-land waterway from Bonny to Okpala/Owerrinta, to Ife/Ezinihitte, with an artificial lake port at Okigwe, along the Imo River. Imagine the Itu-Afikpo-Itigidi interchange on the Cross Rivers, or the Onitsha-Warri River Express.

Imagine an intra-regional network of metro lines that would connect the major cities of the East. These would activate a massive economic boom, and it is all possible.

*Obi Nwakanmma, a Nigerian poet and critic, teaches at the University of Central Florida. He writes a weekly column in Vanguard newspaper