By Margaret John
A 2019 gubernatorial candidate of the All Progressives Congress APC in Cross River State, Mr. Upan Odey has affirmed that he will not go into enterprises that are not sustainable as the state already has too many white elephant projects.
Speaking on Sunday during the one hour program ‘The Dialogue With Agba Jalingo’ aired on Hit95.9 fm in Calabar, Mr. Odey stated that “so much money has been wasted on trial and error businesses and government enterprises”, insisting that “he will create an atmosphere that encourages enterprises that will create thousands of businesses for youths”.
Upan Odey whose opinion was that one of the biggest problems Cross Riverians have is lack of capacity, averred that “We’ve not been able to build capacity while the population has been increasing, so what you find is that it’s as if society is not just growing, the number of people being born year in year out, without preparing for that next generation of people coming in.”
“I believe that government should be sustainable. We cannot just be doing things on the whims and caprices of an individual. We need to test anything that government wants to throw at us using the right stakeholders, the right professionals. Well, Cross River State has had too many white elephant projects. So we don’t want to increase the white elephant projects.” He maintained.
Mr. Odey also commented on the bad nature of the roads in the state as well as the need to engage the youths in nation building, saying, “instead of hiring thousands of youths as political appointees with titles, where they don’t even have an office or portfolio, and they are not engaged, I’ll rather have them get involved in road construction.”
He maintained that his vision is to move Cross River state to a point where it becomes the innovation capital of Nigeria.
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