In his inaugural address on May 29, 2015, Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi roused the state with the promise that his tenure would be defined by the development trajectory he would diligently pursue. Of the many facets he reeled out, two stood out. The first was the promise to pay special attention to Nsukka by giving the area a face-lift befitting a university town. He also told the people that “Ninth Mile is an economic hub that we need to harness to enjoy the benefits of our newly-acquired status as a free trade zone…to create fresh economic opportunities and reduce pressure on Enugu metropolis”.
For each of them, there was a well-deserved applause; nobody would begrudge Nsukka the face-lift that the State’s second largest city rightly deserves. And there was no denying the fact too that 9th Mile occupies a key position in the state’s industrialization plan. But while he may have delivered substantially on the uplift of Nsukka, the promise to upgrade 9th Mile as the state’s major commercial centre was, to all intents and purposes, empty.
Successive administrations in Enugu state have, by acts of omission or commission, systematically jettisoned the initial vision of 9th Mile as an industrial hub. Nothing better indicates this than the fact that all roads leading into the area have, for most of the last 10 years, been impassable. Once a converging point for travelers from Nigeria’s North, Middle Belt, Southern Igboland and Enugu State’s eastern neighbours, 9th Mile has become an isolated settlement with all the traffic now diverted to the capital city. Whether you are coming from the East, West, North and South, commuters no longer have access to the good old 9th Mile where roads from all cardinal points once converged.
The promise of restoring the roads that will benefit 9th Mile and save Enugu metropolis the avoidable traffic build-up that Ugwuanyi spoke of at his inauguration was not kept. At a time calls were rising for the state government to undertake the remediation of the Obollo-9th Mile federal highway, the state government famously chose to rehabilitate only the portion from Obollo Afor to Opi for what one official called ‘VIP movements’. While this effectively cut off access to 9th Mile, it funnelled more vehicles into Enugu metropolis through Ekwegbe.
In the end, rather than develop an alternative road network, it was more convenient for the government to undertake the construction of ‘the State’s first fly-over’ at Nike to manage the exponential build up in vehicular traffic, instead. For a project that was largely seen as vainglorious, only the Ebeano tunnel under the rail line at Asata received a bigger media hype.
The systematic neglect of 9th Mile has been showing negatively in the balance sheets of the giant companies that operate in the area. As the once busy highways became quiet, drivers of articulated vehicles who have severally been promised a ‘trailer park’ that was never built, turned the roads into parking lots. Those companies that could not survive the harsh realities, including the multinational Coca-Cola, closed their factory and moved out. Ecobank, one of the first banking institutions to open office in 9th Mile, also shut down and moved out. Years earlier, Guinness Nigeria Plc that had acquired a 19-hectare land for their first Eastern brewery, decided to invest in Aba instead. Only the Ama Brewery – the highest such investment by Heineken in West Africa – and a few others, continues to brace the odds.
The Lion Business Park is a private concern packaged by the administration as a quasi-government project. It facilitated the acquisition of over 2,000 hectares of farmland from Imezi Owa, Eke and Akama Oghe communities for the project, which was promoted as an economic game-changer that would accommodate hundreds of small and medium-scale Chinese businesses. Eight years down the road – apart from the controversies surrounding the underhand land acquisition – the business park has not moved from the grandiose plan it is on paper. Not much has come by way of the Free Trade Zone whose approval was well celebrated.
Governor Ugwuanyi is not alone in this litany of woes for Agbajaland and 9th Mile. The promise to restore the Anambra Vegetable Oil Products, AVOP, in Nachi has lasted through the two preceding administrations of Dr. Chimaroke Nnamani and Mr. Sullivan Chime. The International Market that was already under construction at 9th Mile since 2005 was allowed to die, just like the Ebeano bye-pass, the dual carriageway that took off from the old toll gate on the Enugu-Onitsha highway. Flagged off in 2007 by President Olusegun Obasanjo, the by-pass which signalled a future East-North highway, was motorable for all of 3 years before it was abandoned.
The two kilometer Toll Gate – Ameke Ngwo bye pass and the rehabilitation of the 12-borehole water project started during the administration of Chief Jim Nwobodo as governor of the old Anambra State, remain the only footprints of Ugwuanyi’s administration in the area. While the byepass has helped in easing traffic flow, the fact that the water project – the critical factor in Governor Peter Mbah’s 180-day timeline he gave on assumption of office for taps in the state capital to come alive again – has not benefited 9th Mile and the host communities of Nsude and Ngwo, leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
The sorry state of 9th Mile, especially its bad roads and decayed infrastructure, is for the present administration, food for thought. For an administration that has done so well in attracting investments, creating jobs, and promoting commercial activities, there must be a deliberate policy to restore the once-bustling commercial centre of Enugu State. Once promoted as the third leg of the South-East’s commercial triangle, after Onitsha and Aba, 9th Mile should not be abandoned to the vagaries of past administration’s wrong-headed policies. The commercial centre deserves more than the attention it presently receives.
