By Teta Ezekwesili

When the controversy  as to whether Governor Chimaroke Nnamani of Enugu State manipulated the pictures of the projects he has been splashing in national dailies broke, some of us who had paid several facility visits to the state were simply amused at the naivety of the opposition. 

We were amused for two reasons.  One is that the opposition in the state must be so blinded by hate that they are prepared to go to any length to push their opposition, including turning facts on their heads.  Second is that the governor must have performed so marvelously that by insisting that his projects are computer-generated they admit albeit unwittingly that the governor has literally transplanted computer images onto the soil of the famous coal city.

For how else can one indeed explain the technical quality of those projects?  They confound the mind.  On each visit to Enugu, even while those projects were ongoing, my fascination had always been with the quality of what was being done, besides its massive size and scope.

Nnamani’s projects look like something out of this world.  They do not look like your ordinary Nigerian projects.  They could equally be pictures of projects executed elsewhere in the western world, where technology has turned full cycle and where those who hold power in trust for their people actually use it to work for them.  Is this not the concept of accountability envisaged by the founders of democracy itself?

That even President Obasanjo admittedly lapsed into some self doubt when Nnamani’s vicious opposition attempted to stop him from making his recent official visit to the state is still a further testimony of the quality and novelty of those projects. 

As he looked at the pictures of the various projects – the teaching hospital, college of medicine, judicial headquarters complex, ESUT permanent site, Nza Street link road, Ebeano tunnel crossing, the ongoing International Conference Center, among others -  submitted to him, he must have wondered to himself whether truly projects of this magnitude could be accomplished with such finesse and panache. 

This was even more intriguing in the light of the fact that he, the president, had expressed doubts about the governor’s ability to complete the projects before handover, when he flagged them off about a year earlier.

But the president’s visit is just one argument settled.  As he told his excited audience at the commissioning of the various Nnamani projects, the President had indeed seen the projects with his koro koro eyes.  What else could anybody say? 

Nnamani’s opponents would have to return to their laboratory of lies and phantom musings if they still need some tissues of spins for their gullible and collaborative audience. 
What that visit did bring out rather poignantly was that all the insinuation of profligacy which the opposition had laboured over the years to create was mere hot air. 

And the president robbed this fact in when he intoned that the fact that the Enugu State Government was investigated recently by security agents does not impugn the governor’s integrity in anyway.  And neither does it affect his relationship with the governor in anyway, as the visit has shown.

If Enugu is about third or fourth from bottom as the governor explained to us, and had been explaining for over two years now without any contradiction in the revenue allocation from federation account, and if his internal revenue is as meager as he has painted it for years without contradiction from any quarters, then some financial brinkmanship had happened in Enugu these past seven years. 
I think that rather than vilify the governor, again to borrow from Mr. President, the people of his state should count themselves lucky, and then join hands with the governor to, in the popular Nigerian parlance, move the state forward. 

After all, the president rightly diagnosed that Enugu is a state that is yearning for development.  That was not an idle talk from the president. 

Obasanjo is in a position to know that since the devastation of the Nigerian civil war, this is the first real attempt to give Enugu a thorough sprucing, with new infrastructure, a new lease of life and an accompanying new level of awakening and confidence amongst its people. 
And the people really know they needed it, especially at this time when talk of reintegrating the Igbo into the Nigerian mainstream is in the front burner.  And they showed their appreciation for all the governor had done for them. 

The Enugu people indeed need to seize the moment generated by the president’s visit and his wise admonition to the Governor Nnamani camp and the opposition alike. 
What the president did in releasing a petition from the opposition publicly was to bury the ghost of opposition politics in the state and to invite all concerned to bury the past and rally behind the governor to place Enugu in its rightful place in the scheme of things in Nigeria.

Chimaroke Nnamani has shown leadership in seven years.  He has displayed adroit resource husbandry.  Having traveled widely in Nigeria, I can say that the people of Enugu State do not know how lucky they are.  Not many governors in this dispensation have achieved one tenth of what Nnamani has inflicted on the skyline of Enugu in buildings and road development, including of course resource control states.

With the president’s visit sounded the beagle that the battle for the soul of Enugu is over.  The battleground has shifted to the national turf, where Nigeria is in dire need of a performer of Governor Nnamani’s genre. If the Igbo and their South- south neighbours are serious about the Nigerian project this time around, this is the time to get their acts together.  This is not the time to hate and cast aspersion or to dissipate energy on local quarrels.  This is the time to recognize what needs to be done, and to set about doing it.

*Mr. Ezekwesili, a public commentator and analyst, lives in Lagos