By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

When he presented his budget proposals for 2024 to Nigeria’s National Assembly, the first full year of appropriations under his presidency, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu identified as his priorities human asset development, poverty reduction and fighting insecurity. Last week, his official spokesperson, Bayo Onanuga, appeared to forget or renounce that policy direction, when he acknowledged that 133 million Nigerians were multi-dimensionally poor but claimed that had nothing to do with the Federal Government. According to Mr. Onanuga, the states and local governments were responsible for that.

On the same day, 450 kilometres away, Vice-President, Kashim Shettima, provided a full rebuttal of Mr. Onanuga’s escape into sovereign abdication. The occasion was the launch of the Stakeholder consultation of the South East Development Commission, SEDC for its regional development plan called South East Vision 2050 (SEV2050). At the event, the Vice-President went beyond merely reaffirming the leadership and responsibility of the Federal Government in eliminating poverty. He also underscored that this had to be “inclusive, sustainable, and anchored on peace and productivity.”

This was not an unveiling of the SEV2050. Rather it kicked off the process to evolve one. It was also the coming out promenade of the SEDC.

The Commission is one of the four regional development commissions established by President Tinubu under the Ministry of Regional Development. The others are in the north-central, north-west, south-west. Preceding these, the Niger Delta Development Commission, NDDC, has been in existence since 2000; and the North-East Development Commission, NEDC, since 2017.

The Stakeholder consultation in Enugu was a credit to the Board of the SEDC chaired by Emega Wogu and the management led by the Managing Director, Mark Okoye. It was clearly a pitch for political support and constituency building for the Commission. The SEDC achieved the significant feat of lining up the public support of the governors of all five states of the south-east. By contrast, when its counterpart for the north-west organized similar event last month, none of the seven governors of the zone attended.

Imo State Governor, Hope Uzodinma, coincidentally the Chair of the South-East Governors Forum, was the only one of the five who did not attend in person. He sent the Speaker of the Imo State House of Assembly in his stead. It appears the Commission will not be short of goodwill as it sets out on its mission. Quite clearly also, it will not be short of human obstacles in its path.

As its primary mission, the SEDC Act of 2024 charges the Commission with responsibility to “receive and manage funds from allocations of the Federation Account for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of roads, houses and other infrastructural damages suffered by the region as a result of the effect of the Civil War….” The SEDC is the only regional development commission with an explicit mission of post-war reconstruction. One question that the consultation put before the Commission was: reconstruction from which war?

Anambra State Governor, Chukwuma Soludo, addressed this question in his remarks arguing that the region was in recovery from not one war but “two major wars”. One was the Nigeria-Biafra war, which was supposed to have officially ended on 15 January 1970. The second was what he called “an internal war of self-destruction that has been on since 2021.” Some people may argue that his dating of this second conflict to 2021 is either artificial or unrealistically recent.

It was notable that Governor Soludo failed to say who the parties were to this second war. Pointedly, however, he noted that “after the (first) civil war, there was a promise of rehabilitation and reconstruction; and…. this is yet to happen.” What he left unsaid was that the failure to fulfill that promise made what he described as the second war all but inevitable.

Whether that was deliberate or inadvertent is immaterial.
Even as it sought to project an ambition over the next quarter century, the SEV2050 consultation could not escape the enduring backdrop of reconstruction that frames its search for a mission. The mistake will be to focus on brick and mortar and forget to prioritise a reconstruction of minds, memories, and mentalities.
Vice-President Shettima acknowledged as much with some deftness in his opening remarks when he paid tribute to “a region defined not only by memory, but by motion.” Like Governor Soludo, what he left unsaid was even more eloquent. It was impossible to miss that he felt unable to say that this motion led to movement or progress.

How to transform motion into movement and ultimately to regional progress more than half a century after the end of the conflict that continues to define independent Nigeria is what the SEDC seeks.

On show were early signs of constructive competition among the states of the south-east. It begs to be harnessed. Abia State offers a vision for energy transition to inspire value-added processing and industry. Anambra State is willing to lead in enterprise and innovation.
Ebonyi State’s value offer is in food security and agriculture value chain. Enugu State offers a secure home for a shared mission of co-ordination for regional prosperity. These reassure. But the event equally advertised the daunting challenges that confront the Commission along its path. Three were evident.

One is a crisis of mismatched expectation. This was best illustrated by Governor Soludo. Having advised the Commission to be realistic in its ambitions, he nevertheless asked it to lead the delivery of a “Marshall Plan” for the south-east, a reference to the US-led plan for Europe’s reconstruction after World War II. According to Governor Soludo, this regional Marshall Plan should include a regional security framework, and “super inter-state infrastructure” such as regional railways and regional highways. The problem, however, is that an SEDC that purports to lead on the former is likely to antagonize the state governors and a Commission that claims to lead on the latter will be on a fool’s errand.

Two is the problem of evolving a viable business model for the SEDC. For long, the NDDC has defined the business model of the regional development commissions. Under this model, these commissions operate largely as front offices for extortion which holds the fate of citizens of the concerned region(s) hostage in carve ups by political insiders sharing development funds as private loot. By 2022, according to one report on the NDDC, “12,000 out of 13,377 projects were abandoned after paying trillions of naira for them.” As development agents, they have been largely ineffectual. The SEDC can’t afford this.

Three, therefore, SEDC will face pushback from the usual species of greedy political grubbiness. The event in Enugu had in attendance the Vice-President, the Governors of all the south-east States, and the Speaker of the House of Representatives who was represented by Majority Leader, Professor Julius Ihonvbere. But it was impossible not to notice the absence of the Chairman of the SEDC Committee in the Senate and former Governor of Abia State, Orji Uzor Kalu; his counterpart in the House of Representatives, Chris Nkwonta; and the man who refers to himself as “Number Six Citizen”, Deputy Speaker, Benjamin Kalu. Senator Orji Kalu reportedly sent one of his daughters to represent him. She holds no relevant public office. Anyone who thinks the near collective absence of the National Assembly caucus of the region was a coincidence misunderstands how the place works.

As a convening, the SEV2050 event in Enugu has been arguably as successful as its planners could have hoped. In terms of its symbolisms and optics, it may indeed have exceeded expectations. The Commission will not be short of ideas as it goes forward; nor will it be short of determined antagonists.

Post-war reconstruction is an existential undertaking. The SEDC has neither the budgets nor the latitude for the errors that have become the habits of the NDDC. If the Commission can confine its mission and secure protection against baleful political extortion from predictable sources, it may lay durable foundations under its current leadership for a business model suited to its unique and historic mission.

* A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

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