…From The Stables Of Proponents Of “Wait-And-Take” Governance

By David Okpokwasili |Opinion

Must every governor who thinks beyond four years be accused of daydreaming? Apparently, yes — especially in Anambra, where ambition is now a punishable offence. Governor Chukwuma Soludo commits the unforgivable sin of imagining Anambra with a second airport, a functioning investment corporation, and infrastructure that outlives his tenure, and suddenly he is a fantasist who should instead be filling potholes with his bare hands and photographing each one for social media likes. Never mind that no state ever developed by permanently staying exactly as it was found. The critics have spoken: dream small, or don’t dream at all.

Why exactly does Anambra need a second airport when the first one is right there? Because, as any serious economist will tell you — right after they finish laughing — one airport serving an entire commercial nerve centre of the South East is obviously more than enough, the same way one borehole is enough for a city of five million people. Who needs redundancy, capacity, or the mere possibility of not allowing the future happen to us again? Certainly not the critics, who have clearly done the aviation feasibility studies from the comfort of their timelines.

Isn’t the airport just another “legacy project” for Soludo to inflate his name with, as the critics insist? Absolutely, because nothing says “corrupt legacy-chasing” quite like planning and executing an infrastructure that prepares the state for its future. Meanwhile, the previous approach —micromanaging resources that only support election-cycle economics — was, of course, pure selfless statesmanship with zero legacy motive attached. It is remarkable how “legacy project” only becomes an insult the moment the legacy in question might actually work.

But surely the money for a second airport could be better spent on “the people,”? Yes, obviously, because “the people” apparently do not fly, do not trade, do not import goods, do not benefit from investment inflows, and do not exist within any economy that requires functioning transport infrastructure. “The people” are, in this telling, a separate species entirely from the traders in Onitsha Main Market or the industrialists Soludo keeps trying to court. It is touching how “the people” are invoked only when it is time to shrink every government project down to the size of a single wheelbarrow of rice.

What, then, is the Anambra Development and Investment Corporation supposed to be — another one of “Soludo’s fancy acronyms,” as critics love to call it? Precisely. ADIC is clearly just a decorative acronym, the way NASA is just a fancy name for people who like rockets, or the way sovereign wealth funds around the world are just governments cosplaying as investors. Perish the thought that a state finally decided to professionalise how it attracts capital, manages assets, and stops depending solely on federal allocation like a grown man still collecting pocket money from his father. That would require to admit that structure, occasionally, beats vibes.

Won’t ADIC just become another vehicle for “settling boys,” as the usual chorus insists without evidence? Without question, because in Nigeria, any institution built to manage money is automatically guilty until proven guilty again, evidence being an inconvenient technicality reserved for lesser arguments. It matters not that the entire point of a structured investment corporation, with its board, its mandate, and its reporting lines, is precisely to reduce the discretionary “settling” that critics claim to fear. Structure is apparently only trustworthy when it doesn’t exist yet, and suspicious the moment it does. It doesn’t matter that the state is only contributing 30% of its initial 200b capital base and has line out how the chunk 30% will be financed even before the critics woke from sleep.

Shouldn’t Soludo just focus on “quick wins” instead of these long-term plans nobody will remember him for? Of course, because the height of leadership is doing only what fits neatly inside a single news cycle. Long-term planning is for those foolish nations that built railways, ports, and universities decades before they needed them. Anambra should instead adopt the tested strategy of governing purely in four-year sprints, a wait-and-take style of governance that every incoming administration can proudly demolish, or abandon whatever the last one started, and the cycle of “starting from zero” can continue gloriously into the next century.

Isn’t it suspicious that Soludo talks about industrial parks, tech hubs, and diaspora investment schemes all at once — surely that’s just noise? Undoubtedly noise, the same way a farmer planting several crops in one season is clearly just confused about agriculture. A state economy, we are to believe, thrives best when it bets everything on a single sector and prays, the way Anambra once thrived purely on goodwill and remittances from relatives abroad who were too polite to ask what the money was actually funding. Diversification, industrial parks, and structured diaspora investment are, evidently, overrated compared to the tried-and-true method of hoping for the best.

Do critics have any alternative development blueprint of their own, or just complaints? Mostly complaints, delivered with the confidence of ignorance, with total certainty, that every airport is “unnecessary” and every corporation is “a scam.” It is a peculiar kind of expertise — one that requires no plan, no numbers, no comparative state data, only vibes, nostalgia, and a permanent suspicion of anything more ambitious than a road commissioning ceremony.

So what should we conclude about this generous outpouring of criticism? That Anambra is fortunate indeed to have so many citizens willing to oppose a second airport, an investment corporation, and long-term planning itself, purely out of concern for “the people” they otherwise rarely mention. One can only hope that when the airport is finally commissioned, the same critics will be first in line at the check-in counter, boarding pass in hand, ready to fly off to wherever their next complaint is scheduled to originate from.

David Okpokwasili writes from Awka, Anambra State.