Nigeria should look at building a green industrial city

Ayo Akinfe

Which governor is going to bite the bullet and build a green industrial city where he manufactures clean energy equipment such as:

(1) Windmills
(2) Solar panels
(3) Electric cars
(4) Turbines
(5) Constructs a waste-to-power plant
(6) Biomass boilers
(7) Solar batteries
(8) Constructs a faeces-to-power plant
(9) Inverters
(10) Opens an ethanol plant

So far, no country in the whole has a wholly dedicated green city. Why should Nigeria not take the lead on this matter and build a greenfield city where it manufactures nothing but renewable energy products?

My take is that such a city needs to be along the coast so that windmills can easily be transported offshore. They are very heavy so building them close to the Atlantic coastline will save transportation headaches.

Our green city in my opinion has to be in either Lagos, Ondo, Delta, Bayelsa, Rivers, Akwa Ibom or Cross River states. Just imagine the number of jobs such a city will create, the amount of energy it will generate and the way it will boost Nigeria’s international profile.

If we name this city Greenville, it will be a global first. Ultimately, it will need a seaport, airport and railway line linking it with Abuja and Lagos.

It is initiatives like this that will end our dependency on crude oil, address our power woes and create employment. It maybe that the governors of either the southwest or south-south geo-political zones combine their forces to launch such a programme.