Senator representing Owerri zone at the upper legislative chamber of the National Assembly, Sen. Samuel Anyanwu, has said he is interested in the governorship of Imo state because the governance experiment in the hands of the incumbent has failed the expectation of the people, making the need to rescue the state imperative.
Speaking in a press statement he issued in Abuja, Tuesday, ahead of his formal declaration for the 2019 governorship election in Imo state tomorrow, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) stalwart said the state has, rather than grown exponentially in accordance with its potentials, suffered untold bastardization in the hands of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) party.
According to him, Imo state has the potential to rank number one in Nigeria’s Human Development Index but mismanagement of its human and material resources has estranged it from real development.
Sen. Anyanwu, who was a two-time chairman at Ikeduru local government area, and also an ex-lawmaker at the Imo State House of Assembly, said his experiences as both council chairman and legislator, empowers him with a deeper understanding of the demands of development and resource management for the good of the people.
He said the development of a state should not only be about building perimeter fence around schools, but what is inside the school itself.
According to him, “our people see the construction of school walls as ‘development’.
“The real development is about what is inside the school and not just about the walls. If you have a beautiful wall but without equipment and other necessary facilities that will help in developing human capital, you have achieved nothing,”he said.
Sen. Anyanwu, who said his mission to the state was to rescue it from the mess created by the outgoing government, noted that “Imo has been in the news since the present administration took over, for only the wrong reasons. That means we have been portrayed negatively by the government and as such the government that said it came to rescue us also needed to be rescued before it collapses the state totally.
“We have the resources to manage and develop Imo state. But for lack of quality management skills and inability to select from a pool of quality human capital, those who will help drive development, we ended up with a situation where a family became the next best thing to happen to the state after its creation.
” It is not true that Imo lacks human capital to navigate it through development. What has been lacking is vision and purposeful leadership.
“Therefore, I have found it imperative to offer myself to go on this all important mission to rescue our dear state from the abyss that APC has thrown it. Our focus shall be to create wealth and expand the economic base of the state so as to make sure that Imo is able to generate enough revenue to manage its affairs by investing health, education and infrastructure development,” Sen. Anyanwu said.
He urged Imo people to remain steadfast in their support for the PDP stating that “the years eaten by locust shall be restored.”
