As soon as the elections are over, President Tinubu needs to hold an immediate meeting with all governors and governors-elect and agree a four year action plan that looks like this

Ayo Akinfe

[1] On February 4, 1931, at the beginning of the Soviet Union’s rapid industrialisation campaign, Joseph Stalin told the the First All Union Conference of Leading Personnel of Socialist Industry: “We are 50 to 100 years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this distance in 10 years. Either we do it, or they crush us." President Tinubu needs to read a similar riot act to the new leaders

[2] For starters, Nigeria needs to mandate all of its governors to dedicate a minimum of 40% of their state budgets to education annually

[3] As part of this state development programme, every northern states must pair with a sister state in southern Nigeria and make sure they keep apace when it comes to number or schools, hospital beds, kilometres of tarred roads, etc. These indices should be monitored by an independent body

[4] Every Nigerian state must set itself a minimum target of attracting $1bn in foreign direct investment annually

[5] Every state must scrap spending on religious events like pilgrimages, mass marriages, building mosques, etc and spend that money on opening technical vocational colleges. Nigeria is not a theocracy. Every local government area must have at least one technical vocational college

[6] Every local government area must have at least one food processing plant that processes crops like cocoa, palm oil, coconuts, maize, cassava, yam, groundnuts, millet, sorghum, gum arabic, etc. State governors must be compelled by law to attract private investiors

[7] Every state must have a de-indoctrination centre where misguided and misled youths are offered therapy, counselling and vocational training. These centres will obviously serve as disarmament facilities too

[8] Every state must set itself a 10-year deadline by which time it will become economically self-reliant. The idea is that after 10 years, every state in Nigeria will withdraw from the federal allocation programme

[9] Every Nigerian state must set itself the goal of meeting all its power needs from clean energy within 10 years. Industries that will be built around this include solar farms, panel manufacturing, transformer manufacturing, etc

[10] Each governor is legally obliged to create a minimum of 10,000 jobs a month. A failure to do so for two successive months will trigger automatic impeachment proceedings

ayoakinfe@gmail.com

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