Frontline governorship candidate of Enugu State, Barrister Peter Mbah has said that he intends to develop a 21st century, modern Enugu State, which will exploit its own natural and human resources to make impacts.
Mbah, and who is the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), was speaking at an interactive session between him, Barr Ifeanyi Ossai who is his running mate, and media experts.
The media professionals include online publishers and on-air personalities, with Jungle-Journalist.Com represented.
In his speech, Mbah explained that Enugu State is long overdue for information and communications technology (ICT) breakthrough, and he intends to make the state a leader in the field in the South East geopolitical zone.
He explained that his planned intervention will make Enugu a darling of tech giants across the globe, and provide quantum employment for the people of the state.
“We hope to do a lot with our ICT. We’re looking forward to having Enugu as the data centre of the South East. What that means is that we want to be attractive to companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google. We need them to be able to site their offices and businesses here.
“We’re going to build hyperscale tier-four data centre in Enugu.
“From that investment which is going to cost about one hundred million naira (#100,000 000) we will get there.”
On private sector development, Peter Mbah revealed that his government will engage the private sector to become a major driver in investments, and economy, and pledged to provide the needed critical infrastructure to enable smooth flow of business in the state.
“We provide the enabling environment, but the attraction will be for the private sector to come and invest. Those critical infrastructures that are required for the private sector to come to prefer Enugu to other places will be provided by the government. The growth and development will be driven by the private sector.
On Agriculture, Mbah argued that as a people whose mainstay is agriculture, his government would take revolutionary steps in agricultural investing, in order to produce, process and export these agricultural products to other states and countries across the world.
“We’re blessed with arable lands, we’re not going to treat agriculture as a service. For us, agriculture is going to be a serious business. We’re going to have a special agro–allied industry processing zones across the three Senatorial districts in the state.
“There are a lot of things happening in agriculture today that we’re going to scale up. We understand the challenges the sector is facing, we are going to have hyper scale in our agricultural production and we’re not going to produce enough for us to eat as a state, we are going to seek to become a top exporter of these agric produce.
“We’re not going to only produce them raw, we’re also going to process them. We’re going to build warehouses, we’re going to have enough storage for those agric produce. We’re going to process them, there will be people that are going to provide logistics, packaging, marketing. Thus, we’re going to have a whole value chain in our agric sector.
He also stated that Peace, Development & Prosperity (PDP) will form the focus of his administration and he hopes to grow the GDP of Enugu State to $30bn from the current $4bn, achieve a zero percent rate in our poverty headcount index.
On insecurity, Peter Mbah said his administration will tackle the root causes of insecurity in the communities, and develop accelerated programmes that will provide quantum employment for the youths because he understands that unemployment and poverty engender insecurity in the communities.
Peter Mbah is a product of the Universities of London, Oxford, Navarra, and the Lagos Business School.
He is a Nigerian maritime lawyer, financial analyst, politician, and founder/Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle Oil and Gas Ltd.
Mbah hails from Owo in Nkanu East Local Government Area of Enugu state, Nigeria, and will be the fifth civilian governor of Enugu State, when elected into office.