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Emeka Ihedioha, former deputy speaker of the House of Representatives and governorship candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), Imo State, says that he will create enabling environment for businesses in the state, if he wins the gubernatorial election.
Ihedioha promised to work with the Owerri Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (OCCIMA), the apex leader of the Organised Private Sector (OPS) in the state and revamp the abandoned industrial estate which has taken a toll on businesses and livelihoods in the state.
He said his government would create 135 manufacturing industries, emphasising that each of the 27 local government areas in the state would have five different factories built into it to reduce the growing youth unemployment. This, according to him, would help to curtail crimes and other social vices in the state.
To create more jobs, 15 youths from each of the 305 wards would be empowered every year, by training them in specific skills acquisition which would amount to raising up to 4,575 youth entrepreneurs each year, said Ihedioha.
He said that he had already visited to the United States, US, particularly, North Carolina and South Carolina to parley with Imo indigenes to sell his candidacy.
He lamented the economic situation in Imo State, saying that the past seven years of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have been characterised by maladministration and flagrant disregard to the principles of rule of law and that good governance has been neglected.
Ihedioha said Imo was bedeviled by a growing youth unemployment, crippling debt burden of over N100billion from N26billion in 2011, the Onitsha Road Industrial estate established by the government of the late Sam Mbakwe which became the hub of manufacturing industries has been abandoned by the government of Rochas Okorocha.
In his remarks, Nwabueze Jones Anyanwu, chairman Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN), Imo/Abia branch, the Owerri-Onitsha Road Industrial Layout in Irete has over 264 industrial plots which are now lying fallow. Many manufacturers have closed shop and sent their workers back to the unemployment market as a result of access roads to the factories in the industrial layout.
The MAN’s chairman noted that over 10,000 workers have been laid off and about 95 percent of the manufacturing firms and other businesses had been closed.
SABY ELEMBA, Owerri
