HUMPHREY BEKAREN, Port Harcourt

At last, Dakuku Alor Peterside has been nominated by the APC to step into the really large shoes of Governor Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, the unfortunately misunderstood father of the NEW and EMERGING Rivers State, an entity that is bound to be the envy and role model to other states in Nigeria.

Before we move on with this discuss, two important pegs should be firmly dug into the ground to serve as mental-markers. Those to whom the criticism of Gov. Amaechi has become both a pastime and traditions, has two major traits.

These people have never travelled out of Rivers State, so they are, no doubt, hostages to only what they have seen Amaechi do and therefore lack the relevant parameters for balanced critical comparison with what other Governors are doing in other states.

An illustration of this matrix is that they gleefully point to the Akpabio Stadium in Uyo against what Governor Amaechi is planting in Port Harcourt. Those who really know these two sport infrastructures will so quickly dismiss the unnecessary comparison. While Governor Akpabio built a beautiful stadium, hyped as a world standard, Governor Amaechi is erecting an all-encompassing and unequaled SPORTS COMPLEX.

It takes only a visit to the two facilities to know that there is a significant difference between a cow and an elephant. And Governor Akpabio knows too well how he developed his idea from the Governor Amaechi’s dream which he did not keep to himself. He has been one who shares his sweet dreams.

The second set of Amaechi’s traducers are those who have had the benefit of travelling out of Rivers State but have remained blind and deaf to what is happening out there in the larger world. These are those who perhaps know that Lagos State has factored seventy-five percent of its 2015 annual income to emerge from the internally-generated revenue and Rivers State is readily in this senior league of states that will soon be depending less on federal allocaions.

They may not know this but they should do so now. In the seven-plus years of Amaechi’s visionary leadership, he has slowly but surely been building income-generating projects that will have income-bearing benefits to the people of Rivers State while fetching revenue to the state coffers.

The exact audit of these projects can be found in several literatures so it will suffice to do a rather perfunctory mention here:

Songhai Rivers. This expansive agro/allied facility has been the foremost of all of its type in Africa. It is a practical experimentation ground for world’s best practices in this sector which ought to be promoted over the oil sector if our tomorrow is to be assured. It is a veritable training ground for the legion of farmers that will take Rivers State beyond oil, not on paper but practically.

Further on the list of the Rivers State Sustainable Development Agency, RRSDA, is the expansive Banana Plantation in Ogoni. See this modern farm-place and you see the wonderful future Amaechi has laid before his people. This is a project that is not on paper but one already on the living soil of Rivers State.

Next enters the Agro-City Project, modeled after the Israeli Moshav concept, in Etche. Here is a complex dream reeling out before the eyes of the people. When completed, it will host about one hundred farmers in each of its three modern villages. Nearly everyone can speak on the geometric progression this will impart on the state’s development.

It will be a cluster complete with accommodation right on two thousand hectares of land per farmer. These farms will grow grains and other crops especially cocoa and plantain with a central processing facility and other modern facilities for education, health and so on.

This project is under the care of the Rivers State Bureau of Public Private- Partnership, BPPP. Another significant project under the BPPP, amongst others, is the RIVTAFF a massive building complex that have been rooted successfully in other countries.

Added to the enviable list of projects, which are expected to make Rivers State first-among-equals, are the fish farms at Ubima and Degema. For instance, the Ubima fish farm is reputed to have the most technologically advanced systems in the whole of Africa.

Built to initially produce about seven hundred tons of catfish and tilapia, this Ubima fish complex has equaling been resuscitating the old facility of the RSSDA and is set to build local participation in order to take the state to the weighty expectations of Amaechi.

Before we are tempted to overload this otherwise non partisan political discuss that is attempting to fix Dakuku in the Amaechi equation in determining what the state should be after 2015, one more success story needs to be added.

There is hardly anyone in Rivers State who does not know the sad story of Risonpalm as at 2011 when Siat Nigeria Plc took it over as a running business concern. The battle for the soul of this sprawling business edifice is quite historic.