The Governor of Enugu State, Peter Mbah, has challenged the South-East stakeholders to build critical regional infrastructure like railways and roads to create a common market and boost socio-economic prosperity in the region.
According to a statement on Thursday, Mbah canvassed a multi-dimensional approach to tackling insecurity, including a common security command and control centre, inter-agency cooperation, and non-kinetic approaches such as economic transformation, and employment generation, among others.
The governor, who gave the charge at the South-East Economic and Security Summit held in Owerri on Thursday, identified transportation and logistics as some of the key enablers needed to transform the South-East economy and thereby reduce poverty, unemployment and consequent crimes.
“How do we ensure that we have a road network that moves across the various cities in Anambra, Abia, Imo, Enugu and Ebonyi?
“How do we build a ring road that connects all the major cities in the South-East so that we can seamlessly encourage those who are producing and those who are providing services to distribute their products and services across the different cities of the South-East seamlessly?
“These are things we must be intentional about if we are going to deal with unemployment and insecurity in the South-East.
“Since we now have railways on the Concurrent List, there is nothing stopping us. So, if we pick one or two projects from this summit that we can say as a people of the South-East, we want to make sure that we execute them, I believe we can achieve them and they are going to have a huge spillover effect on our economy and security,” the governor stated.
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