Akwa Ibom State Governor, Mr. Udom Emmanuel has been described as an excellent manager of both human and material resources, especially in his effort to reposition the state from a purely civil service state to a frontline industrial hub in Nigeria.
The Commissioner for Information and Strategy, Comrade Ini Ememobong made the commendation, while fielding questions from a section of the media, recently in Uyo.
Comr Ememobong said that his commendation was on the heels of the governor’s demonstration of humongous capacity to harness potentials and mobilise resources to stimulate the local economy through the initiation of life-touching projects across different sectors of the economy.
While the state’s spokesman reechoed the achievement of the Emmanuel administration in infrastructure, industrialisation and agriculture, he also stressed that the performance of the governor has continued to attract the attention of both local and international players, thus strategically elevating the state to a place of reckoning in terms of good governance.
According to Ememobong, ” the focus of this administration is to ensure that eighty percent of what we consume in the state are sourced and produced locally, that way, we can round-trip our monies and stimulate our internal economy “.
“By industrialising the state, which is the cardinal programme of Governor Emmanuel’s Completion Agenda, the aim is to create employment opportunities for gainful employment of the people, in order to increase their incomes, as well as their spending power, which is one of the ways to maintain a healthy GDP “.
Meanwhile, in another development, the CEO of Orascom Properties and a freelance journalist, Mr. Majeed Dahiru, while speaking as a Guest Analyst during an early morning television programme, Kakaaki on AIT TV, recently, described Akwa Ibom as an “exceptional state “.
While making a retrospective analysis on the issues of Internally Generated Revenues, IGRs, and the on-going agitation by some state governors to have direct control over the deductions of Value Added Tax, VAT, Dahiru called on all state chief executives to show creativity by investing in critical sectors of the economy in order to expand their revenue base.
According to Dahiru, “beyond revenue sharing from the federal government, every other state governor has largely refused to do business, except Akwa Ibom “.
“Akwa Ibom State, today, has an airline, and if you hold a conversation with industry players, and even passengers, they would tell you that the best airline flying the Nigerian skies today is Ibom Air, a state owned airline “.
“For a state government to be able to run an airline like Ibom Air, what that means is that, for every time someone flies the airline from any location, you are paying something into the coffers of Akwa Ibom state government, so the state earns a revenue from the airline outside crude oil revenue, and that is what states should begin to do now, and with time, the states would begin to depend less on crude oil revenue”.
The seasoned journalist further called on other state governments to begin to adopt the same model as Akwa Ibom, which he said would help them to be fully involved in the process of production, in order to generate external revenue without over depending on the federal government for funding.