By CHARLES IWUOHA

The gubernatorial candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the 2023 general elections, Mr Peter Mbah, has said that if elected, his administration will work to make Enugu State the data centre of the South East.

In an interactive session with Enugu Professional Online Publishers and on Air Personalities, Mbah said this would make Enugu very attractive to tech giants and provide quantum employment for the people of the state.

“We hope to do a lot with our ICT. We’re looking forward to having Enugu as the data centre of the South East. What that means is that we want to be attractive to companies like Microsoft, Facebook and Google. We need them to be able to site their offices and businesses here. We’re going to build hyperscale tier-four data centre in Enugu.

“From that investment which is going to cost about N100 million we will get there,” he said.

Mbah said what his administration was going to do was government-enabled private sector driven investment and development, adding that his government would provide the critical infrastructure that would enable these companies to operate in Enugu.

“We will provide the enabling environment, but the attraction will be for the private sector to come and invest. Those critical infrastructures that are required for the private sector to come to prefer Enugu to other places will be provided by the government. The growth and development will be driven by the private sector.”

The guber candidate who was accompanied to the interactive session by his running mate; Barrister Ifeanyi Ossai, said he’s not oblivious of the agricultural potential of Enugu State, stressing that he would take agricultural production very serious and would grow it for both domestic consumption and export.

“We’re blessed with arable lands; we’re not going to threat agriculture as a service. For us, agriculture is going to be a serious business. We’re going to have a special agro–allied industry processing zones across the three Senatorial districts in the state.

“There are a lot of things happening in agriculture today that we’re going to scale up. We understand the challenges the sector is facing, we are going to have hyper scale in our agricultural production and we’re not going to produce enough for us to eat as a state, we are going to seek to become a net exporter of this agric produce.

“We’re not going to only produce them raw; we’re also going to process them. We’re going to build warehouses, we’re going to have enough storage for those agric produce. We’re going to process them, there will be people that are going to provide logistics, packaging, marketing, etc., thus we’re going to have a whole value chain in our agric sector.”

He also stated that Peace, Development & Prosperity (PDP) will form the focus of his administration and he hopes to grow the GDP of Enugu State to $30bn from the current $4bn, achieve a zero percent rate in the state’s poverty headcount index.

On insecurity, Mbah said his administration would tackle the root cause of insecurity in the communities, “thus, they’re going to have an accelerated programme that will provide quantum employment for the youths because we understand that unemployment and poverty engender insecurity in our communities.”