‘My plan is to triple Imo IGR from N600m to N2bn per month within 2 years’‘My plan is to triple Imo IGR from N600m to N2bn per month within 2 years’

Chidi Okoro is a frontline aspirant in the 2019 Imo State governorship election on the platform of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). Before joining the governorship race, Okoro, who trained as a pharmacist at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka and holds MBA from University of Lagos and Executive Masters Degree in Positive Leadership and Strategy from IE Business School, Madrid, Spain, has held senior management positions in Promasidor, MTN, Reckitt Benckiser and Emzor Pharmaceutical. He has also served as managing director/CEO, GlaxoSmithKline Nigeria, CEO Africa, Suntory Beverages, and managing director/CEO, UAC Foods Limited. In this interview with CHUKS OLUIGBO, assistant editor, Okoro unveils his plan to jump-start the Imo economy with a N25bn venture capital fund. Excerpts:

As someone who aspires to be the governor of Imo State in 2019, could you give us an insight into the state of Imo at present?

Imo State is at a crossroads; it is at a tipping point. We are at a stage where we stay stagnant or we just fall off the cliff and it will take so much to recover. Let me tell you what the issues are. The first is lack of rule of law, lack of transparency in government operations, lack of respect for citizens’ rights and traditional institutions – these things no longer exist. So, over time we have bred a generation of Imo young people who don’t understand what it means to respect court process or follow due process for transparency to thrive. Number two is that quality of life is complicated right now. If you look at education, school enrolment is good at 97 percent, but when you come to quality, it is an issue. And education happens to be the industry in Imo. Every year we turn in about 150,000 people doing WAEC, about 90,000 candidates going to do JAMB exams, and typically 40 percent of them get admitted. We have five higher institutions and those institutions take about 15 percent of Imo indigenes. So when you go round Nigeria and the world, you see Imo indigenes all over the place. But in terms of quality, teacher-student ratio in Imo is about 1:67, the recommended ratio is 1:18, so we need three times the number of teachers. Many of the teachers have to retire because they are out of date. ICT is not taught in our schools, so that tells you the education is actually broken. Waste management is zero, it doesn’t exist in Imo at the moment, so when you go through our major cities you see heaps of refuse. Security is also an issue. Unemployment in Imo is about 30 percent, youth unemployment 58 percent, so there are about 300,000 Imo young people looking for job right now. Every year we graduate about 35,000 to 40,000, so in another 10 years we would probably have a million people hanging out there and looking for job. When you have this quality of people looking for job and there are no jobs coming, they would go into crime. Unemployment is high because we don’t have industries in Imo. Imo is number 7-10 in consumption of goods in Nigeria. This means that Imo can consume if it can produce. Imo is also an hour from Onitsha, Nnewi, Aba, and Port Harcourt, all big commercial industrial consumption cities, meaning that if you can provide environment for manufacturing to thrive, then you can have people set up. Imo disapora is about the biggest from South-East of Nigeria because we don’t have opportunities back home, so we are all over the world. Again, development in Imo has centred around a small space in Owerri, even though Imo has 5,000 sq. km land, and you have to get into Owerri to feed because that’s where government thrives. We haven’t been able to create the environment for development to get diversified. It is a very tough situation and if we don’t fix it now, we have a very terrible future coming. And these are facts. Over time I worked with the Imo Arise Group to understand what the issues are; we researched and we got the facts, and that’s why we thought that we should get in the race to try to devise solutions.

You seem to have a thorough grasp of the challenges facing Imo, but you will agree with me that solving these challenges requires a lot of money, at a time many states depend entirely on allocations from the Federation Account. How do you intend to tackle this challenge?

Let me give you a couple of facts about Imo State. Imo economy is a $14-billion GDP, per capita is $3,500, actually almost double Nigeria’s per capita. The Imo diaspora ship in a lot of money back into the state, the challenge is that it is consumption money they ship in, it’s not investment money, so the money is not turned around. If you look at countries like India, Indonesia, China where they have big diaspora, they take the money and turn it around up to seven times. So, what am I going to do? I want to jumpstart the Imo economy with a $25-billion private sector-funded venture capital fund. Imo gets in about N4 billion to N5 billion every month from the Federation Account. Our debt situation is N90 billion and $63 million. By the way, a state that makes N50 billion-N60 billion a year can afford to owe N90 billion, the challenge is how you intend to keep an economy that pays that off while meeting other obligations to civil servants, pensioners and contractors. Imo IGR is about N500 million-N600 million every month, that’s a shame because we do not produce anything. So, with the N25 billion, what do we do? The first thing Imo has to do is to start producing. We are going to create eight light manufacturing clusters with this money, so we are going to build 25 hectare-50 hectare land across different parts of Imo. Orlu will have a pharmaceuticals cluster. Pharmaceutical is a $1-billion market dominated a lot by Imo indigenes but they don’t take it home. Mbaise will have a building materials cluster. Owerri will be beverage. If you go to a place like Akokwa, ceramics is their business. Ngor-Okpala will have electrical cluster, and so on. When we do this, we will build structures, put in embedded power and put in the roads, and it costs barely $2 million per cluster. Then we invite people to come and invest, and we give them two years to start paying for the property. The moment we start manufacturing, jobs get created, IGR will rise. The plan is that within two years we will triple the IGR to about N1.5 billion-N2 billion per month, and that’s easy. Because we can consume, we can manufacture, and because we have the manpower, we can manufacture.

Number two, ICT is a trillion-dollar industry. We have good education level in Imo, 89 percent literacy rate. Median age is about 20 years. We will create an ICT innovation hub and we partner with people in Asia and the West. We will get Imo youths into the structure so that they can start making inventions that we can sell in Nigeria, Africa and the rest of the world. We have some of them doing that already but they don’t have the infrastructure, they don’t even have the power, they don’t have the basic wifi.

Thirdly, Owerri is a hotel city today; we want to transform it into hospitality, conferencing and entertainment city so we quadruple the value. That’s where the money is. Hotel rooms at N12,000-N18,000 a night cannot build you an economy. But if I can get entertainment, hospitality and conferencing thriving, it will be about N60,000 per night and money will flow in.

Education is another place where we thrive. We love education. We can partner with the private sector to build high-value, high-quality secondary schools and universities. Imo is about the only state in the South-East where you have almost no private university yet. The ones built around the South-West and South-South, go there and see the student population. We can make investment into such and let private sector run it, they return funds to us and we use it to fund our basic education. A typical university can create jobs for about 5,000 people. If we put that money down, we create those jobs.

You have a background in pharmacy, which makes you a key player in the health sector as well. So, what would be your approach to healthcare delivery?

Let me tell you about Imo healthcare at the moment. Imo vaccination rate is at 58 percent, so 58 percent of children born in Imo get vaccinated. Imo has 100 registered pharmacies. Imo has a doctor-patient ratio of 1:7,000, World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends 1:600. Imo has below 500 doctors, so we need another 10 times the number of doctors. At the moment we train about 25 to 30 doctors a year, that doesn’t work. We don’t have enough doctors, and we will not have enough doctors because as you train them, more will leave. So we need public health specialists or community health specialists, it takes two years to train them. What we need to do is revamp their curriculum in schools and get them the proper training. The community health centres no longer function, we will get them functioning again. Only about 25 percent of Imo people would get decent medical care, I am not saying quality medical care. 27 percent of Imo indigenes still go to streams in the villages to fetch water, that’s what they drink. We have 17 general hospitals, they still remain the same size they were many years ago and our population has doubled in the last 30 years. So the healthcare is broken. There are six ailments that worry our people in Imo State – malaria, lower respiratory tract infections, hypertension, diarrhoea, and so on. We want to do basic things, and our approach is going to be preventive healthcare. We will make sure we achieve 100 percent vaccination over a two-year period. We will cut stream water out. In every community and in the schools, we put tap water. If the people have access to good water, you cut the disease burden by half. When you get 100 percent vaccination, it helps productivity, because when people are more productive, they can look after their health. It’s a cycle. When they are healthier, they spend more time in school, and when they are educated, they’re healthier. So the family has more money to actually do other things.

On tertiary health, we plan a ‘Medical Village’ where we intend to attract the Imo diaspora to contribute to build world-class medical facilities. We will provide the infrastructure, with power, security, and our people in diaspora can build good hospitals so medical tourism can thrive. And we will also push some of the N25 billion venture capital fund to facilitate private community healthcare industry to create pharmacies, medical laboratories, and maternity homes in rural and semi-urban areas so that Imo development gets diversified and the economy starts to really be genuine and real. We will revamp the teaching hospital in Orlu. Digital health is taking the fray. We can deliver digital health to communities without having to have a doctor there.

Successive governments, both at the federal and state levels, keep speaking of economic diversification through agriculture, but there is really not much to show for it. What plans do you have for the agric sector?

What we want to do in the agric sector is very simple: we want to do a farm-to-shelf policy. We want to focus on a few things. A lot of cashew nuts come out of Imo, we have banana and a lot of crops other crops. How can we take these to the shelf? If you go through Okigwe, for instance, a woman sells a small bowl of cashew for N1,000. If I take that cashew and process it, I will sell it for N5,000. Just processing gives it five times the value. This woman goes through so much stress planting that crop, but she cannot unlock value because we haven’t tried to energise the value chain. So, my focus is how to unlock that value chain. If this woman knew that the cashew she is selling for N1,000 can actually be sold for N5,000, and if she knew how that happens, she would work harder. I spoke about creating light manufacturing clusters. I spoke about food processing in Okigwe. We are going to set up those factories through PPP so that people can go and process their produce and get them on the shelf. Our plan is to energise farmers, facilitate them to take their produce to the shelf.

The post ‘My plan is to triple Imo IGR from N600m to N2bn per month within 2 years’‘My plan is to triple Imo IGR from N600m to N2bn per month within 2 years’ appeared first on BusinessDay : News you can trust.