By Obi Nwakanma

On Thursday, a friend of mine called to verify that I was in Enugu for the South-East Economic Summit. I had been billed on a panel with Dr. Okey Ndibe on the “Diaspora.” He saw this on the website of the planning committee for the summit. He wanted to be certain that I was there. First, it was news to me. I was neither aware, nor had I been contacted about the summit.

But it was nonetheless welcome news to me, and much to my regret, I was not in Enugu. I have some – but only some inkling –about the admirable work done in conceptualizing the South-East Economic Commission by the likes of the economist and poet, Dr. Ukwu I. Ukwu, former Director of the Center for Development Studies at Enugu Campus of University of Nigeria and former Professor of Business Development of the University of Nigeria Business School at Enugu.

It is an initiative long in the offing and could not have come at a more auspicious time of the nation in transition and in the background of global developments that must challenge the South-East as an economic region in the strategic Gulf of Guinea to begin a strategic revaluation of its economic future. I hope steps were taken towards creating a coherent economic and social agenda out of that summit.

I will in that regard, quickly dispense with a personal feeling of unease with the reported statements made at the opening of the summit by Mr. Kenechukwu Nnamani, former President of the Nigerian Senate to the effect that the Igbo were the “architects” of their misfortune.

These are worn and dated sentiments often calculated to shock, blame the victim or, in fact, do worse. The Igbo are not the architects of their situation in the Nigerian polity and it is important for politicians like Nnamani to rise above generalities and street lore to more rigorous and informed turns of speech. First, Nnamani premised Igbo condition to “disunity” – and it is a wonder what this actually means. Tougher facts suggest the contrary.

The South-East region had been, from the 1970s, victims of federal economic policies that have impacted heavily on them and virtually wiped out the economic and social gains of the immediate post-colonial years under the leadership of the first generation of thoughtful politicians like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Mbonu Ojike, Michael Okpara, Akanu Ibiam, and so many others.

The only other time the South-East experienced some economic resurgence was in the second republic under Governor Sam Mbakwe, for instance, in Owerri and in some ways also in Enugu under Jim Nwobodo. The period between 1983 and 1998 was the darkest 15 years of economic and political leadership for the South-East.

It was a period of stark low investment and extraversion; the economic hubs of the region at Aba and Onitsha, especially suffered the worst forms of divestment as a result of policies from the central government that were implemented with military fiat by military proconsuls which reduced the East to a dependent and minion state in the Nigerian federation. We must look back at those moments and shudder.

It would reveal a number of very troubling facts: one is the shift of the economic balance in the East which has decentered its capacity. One clear evidence is that today, the South-Eastern economic zone is not a banking hub. There is hardly a bank operating today in Nigeria with its operational headquarters in the East.

Two banks at least – African Continental Bank and Cooperative Bank of Eastern Nigeria all once headquartered in the East – were at the centre  of Eastern Nigerian post-colonial economic renaissance. Azikiwe’s banking policy and Mbonu Ojike’s protectionist policies (remember “boycott the boycottable”) instigated the rise of indigenous entrepreneurial initiatives at a massive scale in the East from 1953 to 1983.

The destruction of these banks and the policies that forced other banks operating in the East to close shops and relocate to Lagos is the economic equivalent of suicide. Businesses go where the banks are. The stretch of time it takes a normal business in the East to enter and negotiate credit and loans with banks headquartered in Lagos already places the Eastern business man or woman in a serious disadvantage and makes potential investment fraught.

Investors do not invest out of charity, they invest where there are grounds for it. The South-East of Nigeria as facts continue to startlingly reveal is a bankable region but with weak social infrastructure.

Second, the inexplicable absence of a powerful media presence as a tool of dissemination, and as the novelist Chinua Achebe would say, for “a balance of stories,” makes the Eastern media axis the most anemic in the federation.  This is surprising for a region that has the most literate population in West Africa.

The public broadcasting systems and the state newspapers in the East currently lack the power and the credibility to create the kind of region-wide discourse necessary for any economic and social development. Again, divestment in this area and in publishing generally has reduced the capacity of the East to activate an organic epicenter of economic action, for linked to every economic development, is cultural development – the mare on which desire rides.  Again, this is the result of years of attrition under the military. Far more telling is the ghettoization of the South-Eastern human resources. With the highest number of university graduates in Nigeria, the South-East presents a unique problem.

At my last count, we have wasted three generations of highly- skilled manpower by attrition: young men and women who graduated from the universities and colleges of technology in their 20s and who are now in their 30s and 40s and still looking for their first jobs. Many naturally have been drawn to a life of crime and easy gratification.

Ken Nnamani discerns this as an “Igbo symptom.”  No, it is a symptom of policy failure. Societies that fail to implement their ends of the social contract create moral distortions and cultural negation. The South-East continues to exist within the anxieties which under years of military dictatorship positioned it as the “Nigerian other.”  The conditions have not been strategically alleviated since the return of elected governments in the East, simply also because, the civilian administrations in the East since 1998 lack institutional memory.

I want to point them to Nnamdi Azikiwe’s “Eastern Nigerian Economic Reconstruction plan, 1954-1964” – the 10-year plan which, under the strict compliance of M.I Okpara as premier, transformed the East into the fastest growing economy in the world by 1964. I’d like in the light of the limits imposed on me by a newspaper column to summarize with the following suggestions: the South-East Economic Summit must think within a global framework that must see the South-East as the operative hub of the Central African economic corridor encompassing contemporary developments from Sao-Tome & Principe down to Angola. That is its natural backyard.

Two, it must restrategize  its school system; rebuild its most strategic educational infrastructure from the primary to the tertiary level as a means of preparing the next generation with 21st century skills equivalent with their peers elsewhere in the world today.

The South-East must work with the incumbent president towards the reactivation of the ports at Warri, Sapele, Port-Harcourt and Calabar, and to develop the in-land ports along the Imo, the Orashi, the Njaba, the Otamiri, and the Qua-Ibo rivers for easier internal and international trade.

They must also seek with the contiguous states of the south-South, to develop a Metroline system that would make for a 24-hour trans-regional movement and a 24 hour economy in these zones. The potential is enormous. Industry goes where the skills are properly mobilized and primed. To the summiteers, fair wind.