A Few Strong Words for Soludo

Congratulations is in order of course and I believe he has had a belly full of it already. I want to think he would wish people would just stop what I love to call the banality of good willing. It can get quite boring… worse, it’s quite distracting and disruptive of serious work.
But I am here to hammer Chukwuma Soludo, the new governor-elect of Anambra State, not to hail him. Having passed this agenda-setting route ad nauseam, there are over a dozen points bursting my cranium right now. But a few hard words would suffice today.
SHUN ELABORATE TRANSITION COMMITTEE: I dare you Sir to chuck that charade called transition committees. It the worst farce civil rule foisted on humanity. You are going to start making your first mortal enemies from that joke.
Form a small and efficient INAUGURATION COMMITTEE that would manage a low-budget but carefully choreographed inaugural ceremonies. But not that raucous crowd of largely charlatans and posers who think they are handing you a magic wand for running a state.
But the truth, as I have found out from working with two governors, is that you may never open that unwieldy tome of a Transition Report after it has been officially presented to you.
Many will hate you for this; it will reinforce the generally held notion of you are a haughty head. Pay them no mind. Live with it!

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YOUR JOB IS WELL CUT OUT FOR YOU; DUMP YOUR DUBAI BRAINWAVE! The buzz phrase in everyone’s mouth is that Soludo would turn Anambra to Dubai. Please go out there from day one (put it in your inaugural speech) and debunk that nonsense talk. Tell them it’s a metaphor; a manner of speaking.
They will call you names from the outset; live with it!
Your job is cut out and VERY SIMPLE: MAKE THE LGAs WORK! Here I am shouting, but I guess I have to shout because I have said this to every governor I know. Not even Peter Obi and Babatunde Fashola (our two best since 1999) were able to achieve this feat.
If you can pick great men and women – retired professors, justices, venerables, editors, etc., to run your LGAs in wholesome competition among themselves, the results in two years would be your Dubai, our Dubai. You wouldn’t have to run helter-skelter from one end of your State to the other pretending to run a state… remember that the very Government House you live in is part of a local council.
Your job is to channel their allocations and even more revenues down to these centres of development. Draw budgets with them… then keep a keen eye on them. SIMPLE!
THE TOUGH TASKS: You must chase revenues aggressively. From the first day in government house, pick a calendar, tick the planting and harvesting cycle for your major export crops. The following get out and look for them wherever they are situated in your state. Anambra should earn huge forex from cashew, palm oil, maize, beans, cocoa, rubber, (please draw your list). By your second anniversary you should be earning huge forex from exporting some of these crops either raw or in processed forms. It would be the real Dubai if by your 3rd year, Anambra is self-sustaining without federal allocation. Of course, it’s tough work that would make you gaunt and haggard like Abraham Lincoln but your soul would have been lifted by all the paradigms you would have pulled down and reconfigured.

THE TOUGH TASKS OF MANAGING DISTRACTIONS: Get a few tough minds to manage the politicos and their expectations. Remember they put you in power, manage them, sort their needs as much as possible.
Cut the ceremonies. You could spend the entire four-year tenure attending silly ceremonies yet you won’t exhaust them. Don’t get sucked into such inanities. Charge your deputy and select aides with that. You can’t run away from them but farm them out from day one to lay the marker how you want to roll. If you are seen more at your burgeoning farm plantations, at your construction sites and among multilateral development partners, they will stop expecting you to personally grace their burial ceremonies and synod programmes.

SOME DOs and DON’Ts: Don’t let anyone cajole you into setting any 7-point agenda. If you get you LGAs right, quality work would be going on in all sectors of your economy and all corners of your state.
Of course, budget may tilt towards education and agro- development, but every sector is as crucial.
Don’t jettison the Centre. The federal train is overflowing with gravy. It’s our commonwealth, make the best if it. The federal MDAs are gold mines…
Give APGA some fillip: The entire southeast would rather be APGA if it shows character. APGA needs pan-southeast leadership to fly. Peter Obi missed it there. You may want to give it a shot, though it’s not a walk in the park.
Finally, account, account and give account some more. Your people have sent you to the market, buy better stuff for them and declare their change

LAST WORD: Never tell us you are jetting out in search of foreign investors. The onus is on investors to find their destination…