Business Summit: A blueprint for Anambra’s future

Tue, Nov 26, 2019
By publisher
5 MIN READ

Business

THE Anambra State Government hosted the Anambra Business and Investment Roundtable on Monday to evolve a roadmap for future development of Anambra State.

The event attracted Ndi Anambra, including technocrats, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, business development experts and Traditional Rulers.

The Business and Investment Round-table, which has the theme: “Beyond Infrastructure: Rethinking the Future’’, is part of continuing effort by the Gov. Obiano administration in charting sustainable course for economic development of Anambra State.

Coming on the heels of a recent inauguration of the Anambra Vision 2070 committee – a committee to steer a 50-year development plan for Anambra State, the summit has been positioned to deal with short term development plans. There is no doubt that this couldn’t have been timelier.

Welcoming the participants, Gov. Obiano noted that the summit is “perfectly aligned to the core philosophy behind the 50-year development plan’’, to bring Ndi Anambra within touching distance of a planned future and to provide a foretaste of what the future holds.

The plan had been on from the beginning of the Governor’s administration. This is evidently spelt out in the vision and mission statement, as well as effectual security model that the administration has progressively sustained.

Recalling his early days in office, he said he prioritised security on assumption of office. “Security is key to everything we wanted to achieve. I was certain that if we didn’t get security right, then everything else will go wrong.

“Our first step was to organise Nigeria’s first International Security Conference at which I hired an Israeli security expert to facilitate the summit. The immediate outcome of that idea is the famed `Anambra Security Architecture’.

“Our security blueprint has evolved through a number of phases and has now become the `Anambra Smart City Surveillance System otherwise Operation Kpochapu 2’’.

The achievement in security has produced multiplier effect in direct investments — foreign and local; and has engendered development in every sector of the state’s economy.

However, the need to sustain key developmental structures and firm up future projections, informed a resort to technologically-based development, driven by artificial intelligence and Information and Communications Technology, ICT.

“Fortunately, Anambra state has introduced Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,STEM, technology into the educational system, but a lot more needs to be done.’’

STEM is an education curriculum that focuses heavily on the subjects of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. STEM schools and programmes approach these key educational subjects in an integrated way so that elements of each subject are applied to the others.

Gov. Obiano emphasised this when he revealed that the “state is fully aware that the indices for measuring development in the near future will no longer be essentially about physical infrastructure, but about the quality of the human capital.

“The human intellect and the quality of human thought will soon become the differentiator between societies. And the only link between today and that dispensation is quality education, created by quality teachers in quality schools.

“Our society missed out on all the stages of industrial revolution up to the present ICT revolution. We cannot afford to miss out on the exploding dispensation of nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.’’

Leo Stan Ekeh, Chairman/CEO of Zinox Ltd., and the keynote speaker at the summit buttressed the need for a technologically-based development in his address.

Ekeh noted that the emerging realities of this century indicate that the world is inclining toward a knowledge-driven society that is largely dependent on ICT and artificial intelligence.

According to him, there is now an urgency more than ever before to move from analogue to digitised systems and the need for government to invest more in education as well as also developing clusters for advancements in ICT, coding, digital entrepreneurship and other areas of development in artificial intelligence.

He stressed that this will form a strong base for viable, achievable and sustainable economic plan.

A former Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, and renowned Economist, Prof. Chukwuma Charles Soludo, said the major problem of our society as it is presently structured, is a prevalence of sequential discontinuity – a system of truncated ideas and programmes as a result of the four year or at most eight year span of any government in Nigeria.

He said that this has given the country an uncertain disruptive future and delayed the general process of development.

Prof Soludo, who is also chairman of the Anambra State Committee on Vision 2070, said that the summit was a short term stimulus that would drive the long term destination of where Anambra wants to be.

He described the summit as timely and lauded Gov. Obiano for the innovative, visionary and legacy plans. “It is planning that can help control the future,’’ he said.

The summit was split into four sessions with panelists who discussed Education and Health; ICT and the Creative Economy; Tourism and Hospitality; and Infrastructure and Housing.

– Nov. 26, 2019 @ 19:35 GMT |

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