How Umahi is carrying out the infrastructure reengineering in Ebonyi, by Deputy Governor
Kelechi Igwe, deputy governor of Ebonyi State, in an interview with our correspondent speaks highly of the state Governor, David Umahi. According to him, “It is difficult to see any abandoned project in this state (Ebonyi) that is left on attended to since 2015 when we assumed office. I speak so highly of him because all of us have become students under him. Those who are under his government, including the citizens of Ebonyi, who enjoy the participatory leadership of the governor, all of us learn from him.”
Your Excellency, how has the administration been able to deliver on huge infrastructure, empowerments, considering your-not-too-fantastic allocation from Abuja?
First of all, I want to thank Businessday for the giant stride; your integrity over the years is quite commendable. I am very much convinced that Businessday Newspaper is not one of the mushroom media houses that would just go into the society calling people up that they have been nominated for award for commercial reasons. You do not often pick people to show to the world except you are convinced who they are. BusinessDay Newspaper is not seen in the society making unreasonable noise and that is why your stability over the years is something that we call other media houses to emulate; so, I commend you and also congratulate you for the recognition and award you have given to my governor. Ordinarily, it is something that is very difficult for him to speak about himself. Governor and I are one; we ran on the same ticket, whatever I say about him or to him is like saying that to myself. So, the society would ordinarily be saying what else do you expect him to say about his boss, but it was Christ in the Bible that asked his disciples a very pertinent question, because a time came when he was almost, if it is possible to say Christ was confused, we would say he was confused; he needed to know the opinion and impression of people about him and he asked his disciples please what do they say and who do they say I am? A time will come in history when even if people don’t talk about you, you will say who you are to the people that may have some impressionsin their mind; what they say about Businessday, it may be all falsehood and you need to come up and speak for yourself so that people will hold you on what you said. So, it is on this premise that I wish to say that my governoris first and foremost, a Christian, a man who has the fear of God, a man who is also very conscious of the fact that whatever he does here on earth a day will come when he will be accountable to his Creator and Maker.having that consciousness at the back of his mind, he has always worked with that goal that accountability in the great beyond is a focus he must not lose sight of. Secondly, he is a consummate politician, he is a politician of note; if about 10 percent of Nigerians will understand politics the way he does, I do not think that we would be having the rancour we all are having in the Nigerian political space. We call him the Professor of politics and we call him the master of the game.
Thirdly, he is before now a businessman; I still call him a businessman, because the art of governance is shielded in business. If you do not have that mindset of a businessman you will not make any meaningful or tangible progress in governance. After all what is business, some says it is buying and selling, shielding your profit and loss, accounting to understand when you have made profit and when you have lost out in your trade. A man who is not convinced of the fact that profit is key to success in life, cannot successfully govern a people, you must be able at the beginning or at the end of the year, articulate the gains that the citizens have made in the cost of your governance to appreciate what next you will do for them. A man who is just flat is not good in governance so you must have that business acumen, you must have that skill to engender the system and in a state where the citizens will be able mid-term, quarterly, annually to access the performance of government and say look we use to be there but now we are here. The citizenry should also be able to say to themselves by way of assessment this government has failed, or passed and that is when you have made losses in government, that is when you have made losses in your business, Christ himself, after all, was interested in developments and increase and he was given to what the Christians call making or working of miracles. You must have that skill, you must have that focus, and you must have that enthusiasm, to multiply whatever is placed in your hand. If you do not have the idea of multiplicity, you cannot survive in anything; so, I call governance business. Our governor, David Nwezeumahi, my boss, is a man who is always conscious of the ability and skill he has in him to multiply whatever small seed that is in his hand. I came to appreciate him more, as a great leader, because when we read about great leaders in the world even in Africa, people like Nelson Mandela, Gandhi, Zik of Africa, Awolowo and Ahmadu Bellow, you see that these people had certain threats and qualities in common; every great leader must be accountable to his people, every great leader must be a good communicator, every great leader must be very transparent, honest and every great leader must be able to engage the citizens; citizens engagement in leadership; I have checked for the past five years that he has been my boss, that all these things are not lacking and are not in short supply in him. Therefore, his achievements in the land called Ebonyi State is something that is phenomenal. Anybody who was here in the year 2015, specificallymay 2015, would marvelat the tremendous achievement and infrastructure development that have taken place in the land of Ebonyi. It is supernatural and superlative transformation that has taken place in Ebonyi.here is a state that everybody, including indigenes and citizens of the state, thought and felt is a backward state, it is a state that has been forgotten, is a state that will never come to be reckoned with in comity of states, but the governor came with all the attributes I mentioned, very well packaged to change the narrative of the state. Like I said earlier, because he is a great leader, he know why he was coming, it is also the Holy Scripture that says who is that man who would wake up to build the house without first sitting down to count the cost. He is a man that has been prepared for the job.
Apart from God endowing him with good abilities, he prepared himself sufficiently to lead; when the call came, he had to hit the ground running without looking back and that is the bane of Nigerian politics. You see, so many people that are entrusted with power as our leaders today, majority of them did not prepare themselves for leadership. So, once they find themselves on the throne they began to gamble with policies and ideas. That is why, you can see abandoned projects everywhere in many parts of the country. It is difficult to see any abandoned project in this state that is left on attended to since 2015 when we assumed office. I speak so highly of him because all of us have become students under him.
Those who are under his government, including the citizens of Ebonyi, who enjoy the participatory leadership of the governor, all of us learn from him. He came, he saw challenges as opportunity, but for some other persons who tried to lead,it overwhelmed them. But because of his great qualities, challenges are opportunities. I tell you, when you go round the land of Ebonyi, you see that Chief David Nweze Umahi is not a man who is given to dreaming small, he is a man that dreams big. The bigger the project, the happier he is. The larger the programme, the more excited he is.
What he is doing in Ebonyi is laying very solid foundation and leading legacies that many generation will come and say,yes a man passed through this political space. He has done not just so well; he has done very, very well in governance. We wake up each morning to be greeted with a new idea of how things should be done. We wake up each morning to be told and thought by him that mantra that we hear at the Federal level, it is no long business as usual, it should
not be theoretical, it is something to be practicalised; something that we used to demonstrate. In Nigerian governance structure, before a contract is awarded, the civil servants will need to do their clerical and surgical operations to the budget and budgetary provision to such contracts. Sometimes, in the course of what we may call undertone among some of the civil servants, because in every trade you have some bad eggs, even in governance.
So, among the civil servants, there are people who have different intentions from what the leadership has, when they are preparing documents for contracts you see them padding out and padding in, it is the language of National Assembly, so they do all that, not necessarily at the back of their mind to truncate a project, they look for personal gains and aggrandisement, but the implication of that is that such projects are frustrated and government finds it difficult to execute the project that has or is over-budgeted,. In Ebonyi, he has thought all of us to become construction giants; he thought us to become farmers; he thought us to have that commercial orientation in whatever we are doing.
Do not be surprised that you see commissioner for information who is also a lawyer, doing what you may not be able to do in terms of engaging his hands infarming, having been in the ministry of agriculture where he also did very well. He also served in the ministry of human capital development, where he became the mobiliser of men and resources, and thought the entire society what the master of the game Engr. Umahi thought him.
This is the way the people will go to come out of poverty and from there he is deployed to the ministry of information. people may tend to ask questions why this speed of achievement in Ebonyi, it is because he has gotten all hands to engage in what he is doing.how does he do that? While political appointees elsewhere are turning out memos for chief executive to approve for them to have this consultant or that, here, we have a man, the governor, who will tell you that the consultants you are hiring, how many heads do they have, they have only one head, and you have one head also; some of them who are foreign consultants are people that may not even have degrees or even certificate that our people have here in Nigeria and they come here and answer consultant; they are grabbing our resources. In Ebonyi, if you want to hire a consultant, he will tell you to do the job of a consultant. When you get it right he will say yes you have gotten it right but if you don’t get it right he will tell you look you have failed here and there and encourages you to make corrections; that money that would have gone to the consultant flies back into the project. There is also a reward system. When you do wonderfully well, you will be appreciated for it. So, he has given the impetus to his lieutenants to do very well and excel.
If the governor has trained so many of his lieutenants to do a good job in many areas; what then does he do as the chief executive officer?
The projects that he engaged himself in are the legacy ones, the projects like I said earlier, that will speak both now and tomorrow.
How is he succeeding in completing such projects within a stipulated time?
As I mentioned earlier, he is an engineer by profession;engr. David Umahi will not start a project he will not complete. He will first sit down to calculate the cost and also think out the sources of funding before embarking on it. So, while you are looking at the jumbo size of the project, he already knows how much that project will cost him to execute and the time frame within which that project will be completed. Why he is succeeding is that he is not the leader of yesteryear Nigeria; he is the leader of today and tomorrow; as he is giving out assignments, he is following it with supervision and monitoring.
It will be delivered and contractors will always have stories to tell, while some projects are truncated, why they cannot take step further, but as he is awarding projects to contractors, he is following the contractor. He is also going to ask you, look, this is what I want you to achieve, between today and tomorrow, and even before tomorrow he is already there. If you don’t achieve those milestones, just be ready that the contract will be revoked and he will re-award it to a more serious person that will deliver on time. So, we believe that speed of completion of jobs and contracts is also key to his success in governance.
Can we say that he is doing what he is doing in Ebonyitoday out of genuine love for the state and the people, or some other ulterior motives?
Like I said earlier, he is a man who believes in God; who trusts God; he has come to serve; he did that when he was a party chairman, he also did that when he was a Deputy Governor and having learnt the game very well, this is the time to consummate all his experiences along the line, coupled with the natural ability God has given to him. Ebonyi people are happy because leaders like him do not come all the time, but once they emerge, they will do everything to make impacts, as the people will gain from him, He has done more than any governor could do in any state given the background where we are coming from.you see, when you have a state that is already running on the pledge of development programme, it is easier to achieve results. Then when you find yourself in a place that you need to do or start everything afresh. The first military administrator of the state Walter Feghabor, did tremendously well, first executive governor of the state Dr. Sam Egwu, also hit the ground running, he tried to develop human infrastructure, he tried to give a name to our people; a progressive name; he also tried to wipe away the social stigma that was attached to an Ebonyi man and gave us confidence that you can compete among the rest of the people and Governor Elechi came, by his age, so many people would say he will not perform, but he performed and tried his hand on so many things that also conferred advantage on the state. And here we are with the man who knows how to run the ring around and look at the entire thing all these people had done and say if we put them together, the achievement of all these great men, it can enhance the state; that is all; that is what we have done in the last five years.