As the 2019 elections draw close, Imo State, the Eastern Heartland, is in desperate search of a turnaround manager, someone with track record, competence and character who will set the state on the path of sustainable, inclusive and diversified development. Chidi Okoro, a successful private sector business manager, has offered to do the job. Okoro 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. A man with a passion for excellence, he has had outstanding experience spanning various industry sectors such as consumer, pharmaceutical, healthcare and telecommunication. He has held senior management positions in Promasidor, MTN, Reckitt Benckiser and Emzor Pharmaceutical and has served as managing director/CEO, GlaxoSmithKline Nigeria, and later, managing director/CEO, UAC Foods Limited. Ahead of his official declaration for the governorship race on April 3, Okoro spoke with CHUKS OLUIGBO, assistant editor, on why he is leaving the relatively placid waters of the private sector for the stormy waters of Nigerian politics and his plans for Imo in the next four years. Excerpts:
Why do you want to be the governor of Imo State in 2019 and what experience are you bringing with you?
Because Imo State is due for a turnaround and I am most prepared for the job. My career, exposure and networks have prepared me for a life of service. I have worked across different industries in the private sector – FMCG, telecoms, and so on. I have become managing director of major PLC in Nigeria which deals in pharmaceuticals as well; I have been managing director of a major food company in Nigeria, a Joint Venture between Nigerians and South Africans; I have also become CEO of Africa Region for an organisation. On another side I have also been on the board of a state security trust fund, and that is a testimony to my having done some work in government area. When you look at these roles I have played vis-a-vis how our states and Nigeria are being run, the question should then be, why shouldn’t I be part of the process when it opens up?
In 2013 I wrote a book called Another Perspective. Thereafter I started to work with a couple of people and we built a group called the Imo Arise Group. The group is made up of over 3,000 people directly and another 5,000 indirectly. We did a major research on Imo State, checked out different sectors, the opportunities and challenges, and over time we built an alternative reality for Imo State and I contributed majorly to that. As the political space is shaping up, members of that group are nudging that we have to move in and get directly involved. Some of them have approached me to say they want me to get involved so that we can play out that alternative reality that will lift Imo State. I think Imo people want to see competence, character; they want to see performance, they want to see excellence, they want their lives to be better. Imo presents a fantastic opportunity; at the moment we are not harnessing that opportunity. It is a state that is one hour from major industrial-commercial cities like Onitsha, Nnewi, Port Harcourt, Aba, but has no industries. How can we bring our experience to try to unlock these opportunities and make life better for our people? That’s the urge I have to get involved.
Imo is in dire straits, and so much would be expected of the next governor. So, beyond experience, what are you bringing to the table?
Imo people want track record, they want competence, character; they want better life; they want someone who can move healthcare access from 24 percent to 50 percent minimum, and deliver right and relevant education to their children. That’s what we are bringing. We want to deliver sustainable, inclusive and diversified development in Imo State, and we are going to look at different sectors. Beginning with healthcare, there are less than 1,000 doctors in Imo State. Doctor/patient ratio is about 1:6,000, whereas World Health Organisation (WHO) recommends one doctor to 600 patients. So, we already have a big problem. Imo has 100 registered pharmacy outlets and about 4,000 patent medicine outlets. So, the state is way underserved when you look at the population of 5.4 million. What we want to do is to drive access from about 24 percent now to about 50 percent over a period of 24 months. We are going to apply a couple of things. Technology is key. Imo literacy rate is very high, so we will apply technology to unlock opportunities in healthcare so that our people have more access. We will have a community healthcare strategy, which is public healthcare. It’s cheaper, and it’s more accessible to the people. There are 27 local government areas, so we will make sure everyone is within 1km of a healthcare facility. That’s not complicated to do. Imo has thousands of doctors outside of Nigeria and even outside of the state; we will launch medical village so the guys in the diaspora can deliver healthcare services without having to come in and put in tonnes of cash. That’s a very simple strategy. The medical village will have shared facilities and infrastructure to enable ease of business for people in diaspora to invest in. The other one is preventive healthcare which we can do through mass media. There are six ailments that worry our people in Imo State. One is malaria. It’s shocking to hear that malaria is something we cannot deal with. The others are lower respiratory tract infections, hypertension, diarrhoea. These ailments could be managed. Because we don’t have enough healthcare personnel, we will partner with the medical system to ensure that we deliver community healthcare using community healthcare attendants that will be trained by our doctors and they can help support the management of minor ailments. The other area we are looking at is to launch N20 billion venture capital fund out of which healthcare will get about N250 million. The N250 million will be used to develop hospitals and clinics so private ones could also thrive, open up pharmacy and patent medicine outlets and medical laboratories. These things are possible if we apply the right strategies.
Imo is currently littered with unfinished and abandoned projects. Does it worry you? If you become governor in 2019, what are you going to do with these projects?
I believe in continuity of what is great, because we cannot say that everything that’s going on now is bad; we don’t work like that. There are so many things that are great, and there are numerous that are not right. It is not because the thinking is right or wrong but because it is incomplete. For example, 27 general hospitals. Can you afford to finance them? We can review that. From our analysis we need six general hospitals, and we can make them allies to existing general hospitals so we can furnish and structure them properly. Out of that we need one tertiary hospital for serious ailments in a strategic location; the other ones we can sell them to individuals or communities and convert them to other uses. We will not abandon any of them. There are lots of roads that are being built without good thinking in terms of quality. What we will do is raise the quality and build the right quality of roads in every area. In areas where you have high traffic, we do a different road format; in a village that doesn’t have high traffic and a big road is being built, we can call it back and build the right road for that place. Schools were rebuilt but many of them got abandoned midway. We can look at the schools and see how many students we have today and how many we are going to have in future, which schools we should complete, which ones we should merge with the other. So, that’s the thinking. We will not abandon any project because they were done with Imo State money, so abandoning them is madness on our part. We have a dossier of these projects and at the right time we will lay our strategy to get them working, reduce some of them, consolidate some, expand some and take those forward.
There is an existing free education policy in Imo State. Will you also continue with this policy?
Imo has 97 percent school enrolment, which is good by any standard. As it progresses to secondary education, it drops to about 93 percent. Again, very good, that’s why you have hundreds of thousands in school. Literacy rate is high. Education is what Imo people pride in, and so it is one of those areas we have to be very smart about the decisions we make. Free education is good on its own, but we also think about quality. So we will deliver targeted free education where necessary, but more about affordable quality education will be the strategy. Education is really close to our heart because if you want to tell the future wealth of a state or nation, you have to look at the quality of education they have. Our desire is to achieve 100 percent education enrolment and get Imo back to number one position in WAEC pass rate within 36 months.
The next governor of Imo State will certainly inherit a backlog of debts in the form of unpaid salaries and pensions, 30 percent balance of civil servants’ salaries, unpaid allowances to the judiciary, non-payment of contractors, etc. What would you do about these debts if elected into office next year?
You know, Imo State economy is pretty weak because we have not taken the right decisions to try to build a viable economy. When you don’t pay salaries and wages, you don’t pay contractors, economic activities will slow down. Contractors keep the economy going, and there is nothing wrong with that. What we intend to do is that within the first 100 days we will assess, review and come out with who is owed what. Anyone that is justified and is confirmed, within the first 300 days everybody will be paid to the last kobo. And there are different instruments to apply. Imo State’s debt is roughly N80 billion. That’s not unsustainable, it is not something we cannot live with; so we can restructure some of those debts and be able to pay the backlog. If we do that, we motivate the staff to go back to work, contractors get back on site and start paying people, and the economy begins to thrive again. We are coming to Imo to build, not to pull down or destroy.
Unemployment is rising, coupled with widespread poverty. What plans do you have to address these issues?
I think Imo is in a hard place. Unemployment/underemployment is at 34 percent. Youth unemployment is 58 percent. Every year we churn out about 50,000 people ready to work, only about 15,000 get jobs, so you have 35,000 overhang, meaning that in another 10 years you will probably have 500,000 people in the job market. At the moment we do have about 300,000 people seeking jobs. How do we unlock jobs? Imo is equidistant – an hour from major industrial-commercial cities. Literacy rate is very high, average age is 19/20 years, very young and educated people. So, we are going to do a few things. Number one, our blueprint has six industrial clusters for light manufacturing, so we want to make Imo State a light manufacturing hub. There is another strength Imo State has which no one talks about. Imo is number 7 in consumption of packaged goods in Nigeria. If you can consume, it means that if you produce you can sell. So, there will be six light industrial manufacturing clusters located across. Orlu and environs will have pharmaceutical cluster, Okigwe will have food processing cluster, in Owerri we will have beverage cluster, in Mbaise we can have building materials, and in a place like Ngor Okpala, Akokwa and Arondizuogu we can have ceramic cluster. We will provide land and shared basic infrastructure like power, water, security and investors will buy up and pay after 24 months of starting off operations. What this does for us is that jobs spring up. Imo economy is so diaspora-dependent; we have so many Imo people outside who send money home for us to buy foodstuff, why can’t they send money home to build light industries so they can employ our people? Imo is known as a hotel city and has about 1,300 hotel rooms. That’s phenomenal, but they are all low-level and midlevel hotels. We can transform Imo from hotel city to conferencing, hospitality and entertainment city. That’s when you unlock value, and that creates thousands of jobs that are fairly good-paying.
If you look at education, we have five higher institutions. Every year about 100,000 Imo children register for UTME, and 140,000 register for WAEC. Education can be made an industry. We can invite more private sector players to set up universities and in that way we also create jobs. We want to achieve relevant education that prepares our children to compete in the new world.
Our strategy in agriculture is farm to shelf; you produce foodstuff, package it and put it on the shelf. I told you Imo consumes, and we do have big industrial-commercial cities around. We plan to build an ICT Innovation hub in Owerri to fast-track inventions to market. We also plan urban cities’ renewal scheme in Owerri, Orlu and Okigwe to enhance life quality.
Entertainment is huge for Imo State. If we play that well, jobs will spring up and over time people will finish from school at whatever level and they get jobs. We also plan technical entrepreneurship. Nigeria is always looking for plumbers, electricians, carpenters. One of the things I did before was set up a not-for-profit organisation, Southern Business Academy, where we trained electricians, plumbers, tilers, etc and I saw that six months after they start training, majority of them get jobs and move on because we also equip them with skills to set up a business. The Imo Arise Group is planning that Imo will have about three of these institutions that will produce about 2,000 technical entrepreneurs every year. In that way we will create jobs because if you say that there are no jobs today, tomorrow will even be worse because you are pushing out more and more people into the job market.
Public utilities are almost nonexistent in Imo, especially potable water. How would you solve this seemingly intractable challenge?
We have done extensive research and have actually linked something like water to our preventive healthcare system. If you look at what ails Nigerians, one of it is infectious diseases, many of them water-borne. If we could take care of water coming to the people of Imo, they would be healthier. If they are healthier, we save money on healthcare because we are currently pumping billions into healthcare for basic things like diarrhoea. We will adopt a cluster-based approach to water provision because at present virtually no part of Imo has water. The number is insignificant; probably below 2 percent penetration. So, we will cluster areas and provide good source of water. We will do it in a way that is sustainable. Our plan is that within our first 18 months every community will have water no further than 500 metres away. And it is not complicated to deliver.
Security is also a big issue. What plans do you have to secure the lives and property of Imo people?
In 1993 I formed a company called International Maiguard Limited. Also, a state government in 2011 appointed me into its security board. So, I have been in that industry for a while. Let me tell you about Imo State. Landmass is about 5,000 sq. km; it has about 13 exits and entrances; it is not very complicated to secure. We are going to do a number of things. Technology is one of them. We are going to throw a security cordon so you cannot move or get around without us seeing you, and technology does that. We will have a special security for schools, for hospitals, for markets, and that will be done in alliance with those running the sectors. We will to set up CCTVs in likely places. From our research, Imo has 400 clusters that we intend to drop the cameras so we can record what happens. Once you can secure these 400 clusters, you have Imo on a lockdown. We are not saying it is going to be 100 percent effective, but we will work with communities, especially the traditional rulers and town unions, to make sure that security of lives and property in their communities is solidly in their hands. We will partner with the police to execute all these. That way we can deliver security because if you have security, it encourages investment; with more investment jobs are created and security issues go down. So, it’s a cycle we are looking at making sure that we work on.
Building a greater Imo State entails a lot of money. With shrinking federal allocations to states, you will surely need a lot of IGR. How are you going to raise IGR without overtaxing the people who are already suffering?
Internally Generated Revenue is an outcome of actions we take, not an end in itself. In our discussions we never spoke of IGR as something we will go out with a stick whipping people. Imo IGR today is about N6 billion per annum, so we make roughly N500 million every month. Imo is transforming from a civil service, agro state to a commercial state with many hotels; it can transform to become hospitality, entertainment and conferencing state to unlock value. The challenge Imo has is productivity, people have no jobs. Average salary across the hotels is way below N20,000 per head, so with that consumption is very low. Commerce hasn’t been supported. If you close down markets in a state where people are struggling, if you break roads every day and stop people from trading, you are not going to get IGR. So, the way we will get IGR will be civil, we are not going to go with sticks, we will create opportunities for businesses to thrive, for industries to come in, for commerce to thrive. We will have a clear system by which IGR is collected; it is going to be transparent, and everything will go into one account. There will be no 50 accounts, there will be no 50 consultants doing that; we are going to have one or two consultants, but it has to be structured in a way that people know how much to pay for everything. If we get our medical people in diaspora to invest in medical village, we are going to earn money from higher-earning people. If we get more private universities so that our people go to better universities, they will be better equipped, and they will get bigger jobs so they can pay higher. If businesses are doing well, they will pay. We will open up more markets. Some of the markets we have in Imo have been the same size for the last 30-40 years. Population has doubled in the last 20 years, you have more people in the state, activities have doubled, and yet you have the same size of markets. Many of the industries have shut down. We can get the industries back. When you do these things, IGR will evolve and emerge, but it has to emerge in a civil way. Imo will be open for business if we do have a chance to get into office. More business means more IGR if we enable them to thrive, and we will facilitate them to thrive.
Imo has not known rural development in over a decade because the local governments are not functional. The last local government election in the state was held in 2010. If you become the governor in 2019, how would you ensure the local governments function optimally?
We will hold local government election within the first 90 days, and it has to be free, transparent and credible. We will nudge competent people to go in. You can’t imagine a state running without strong local governments because local governments will be responsible for a few things. Number one, basic education will be in their hands. Number two, community health care will be in their hands. Security in the communities and the markets will be controlled by the local governments. We are going to run a very strong and virile local government system that will be well funded, and we are going to fuse the traditional leadership and the town union leadership with the local governments to make sure that the organising boards of these activities are very strong.
On a final note, as someone who wants to govern Imo State in 2019, what is your message to Imo people?
My dear Imo State is due for a turnaround and there are few people better prepared than myself. So, the message is simple. Imo has to arise to its true potential; that’s critical. Imo has to vote in its best when the time comes because Imo is a wonderful state, one of the best placed states in Nigeria; we can play to that potential. We have high intellects; we are very close to major industrial-commercial cities. Imo is one hour flight away from Lagos and Abuja. We have very good literacy rate. We have good penetration of telecom/internet services, meaning that we can play technology to our full advantage. Imo in diaspora is strong, Imo at home as well. Our plan is to lay the foundation for people in diaspora and at home to really get Imo to arise to its true potential. Our plans are firm, they are very simple, they are time-bound, and we put numbers to these plans, meaning that we can be held accountable. So, as we get into this race, we have well-informed plans with deliverables and timelines that Imo people can touch and feel. Let’s work to enable Imo arise to its true potential. Imo will truly arise when we create 500,000 jobs over four years through manufacturing clusters, investments in hospitality and entertainment, sports, medical city, urban renewal projects, ICT innovation hub, and so on. I am ready, let me do the work to lift Imo to greatness!
