IMO AT ALMOST 50: THE STATE THAT NEVER BECAME WHAT IT COULD HAVE BEEN
Imo is almost fifty years old. A child of the 1976 state creation exercise, carved out of the old East Central State, it came into the federation with some of the brightest human capital in Nigeria and a reputation for hard work, education and enterprise. Yet if we are honest with ourselves as Ndi Imo, the state today is operating at perhaps half of its real potential. The infrastructure, industry base, education system and public institutions we should have built by now exist only in fragments. The one era that still defines our imagination of what good governance can look like is still the short but intense period of Sam Mbakwe in the early eighties. That is both a tribute to his vision and an indictment of those who came after. Imo began under military administrators from 1976 to 1979, then moved into the golden benchmark of the Second Republic under Sam Mbakwe. Military rule returned from 1984 to 1999, interrupting civilian experiments. Since 1999 the state has been gov...