Our Governors Buried the Factories, Buried the Jobs, and Now Celebrate an EFCC Office as “Federal Presence”
An Oblong Media Global Intelligence Commentary
Let us stop deceiving ourselves.
The unemployment crisis ravaging the South East did not begin with IPOB or insecurity, nor can it be blamed entirely on Abuja. A substantial part of the disaster is home grown: decades of industrial abandonment, political mediocrity, misplaced priorities and leadership without economic imagination.
Since 1999, the South East has produced governors, senators, ministers, commissioners, legislators and political godfathers in abundance.
But where are the factories?
Where are the industrial estates, manufacturing jobs and great industries inherited from the old Eastern Region?
We have spent 27 years producing thousands of politicians instead of factories and products. We built political empires while allowing industries to become forests. Now we wonder why graduates become commercial drivers, young people flee abroad, and kidnapping, cybercrime, drug abuse and desperation recruit among unemployed youths.
What exactly did we expect?
A society cannot destroy its productive economy and then be surprised when unemployment becomes a social emergency.
LOOK AT THE INDUSTRIAL GRAVEYARD
Across the old Eastern heartland, the evidence is unmistakable.
NIGERCEM, Nkalagu, Ebonyi State. Once a symbol of Eastern Nigeria’s industrial ambition, the plant is moribund. Even in 2026, Ebonyi State is discussing a new cement factory because reviving the old NIGERCEM remains difficult.
Standard Shoe Company, Owerri. Once capable of producing footwear at scale and employing thousands, it became another monument to neglect. As recently as March 2026, the Imo State House of Assembly still listed it among moribund enterprises requiring revitalisation.
Imo Modern Poultry, Avutu, Obowo. This 177 hectare integrated poultry complex was designed for production, processing, marketing and feed milling. Governments have repeatedly promised its revival. Investors and funding were announced. Years passed. The poultry remained a campaign promise.
Other abandoned or weakened assets include:
Imo Rubber Estates.
Resin and Paint Industry, Aboh Mbaise.
Paper and packaging industries.
Aluminium industries.
Ceramics and tile industries.
Modern Ceramics, Umuahia.
International Glass Industry, Aba.
Star Paper Mill, Aba.
Across the wider Igbo economic space, textiles, glass, ceramics, agro processing, poultry, rubber, paper, packaging, footwear and manufacturing capacity have disappeared, declined or failed to reach their potential.
These were not merely buildings. They were employment ecosystems.
A functioning factory supports workers, farmers, transporters, engineers, mechanics, distributors, caterers, contractors, suppliers, landlords and thousands of families. Kill one major industry and you cripple an entire economic community. Multiply that across decades and five states, and the structural roots of South East unemployment become clear.
MBAKWE UNDERSTOOD WHAT HIS SUCCESSORS FORGOT
Our leaders invoke Chief Sam Mbakwe at ceremonies and during campaigns, but they appear to have forgotten the philosophy of his government.
Mbakwe understood that government must create the conditions for production. His era was associated with aluminium, paints and resins, packaging, poultry, ceramics and other industrial ventures.
Whatever shortcomings those enterprises later developed, the governing philosophy was clear:
BUILD. PRODUCE. EMPLOY.
Much of what followed after 1999 was the opposite.
Politics became an industry. Government became the biggest employer. Appointments became economic policy. Monthly FAAC allocations became development strategy. Young people were reduced to waiting for political appointments, empowerment schemes, temporary contracts and election handouts.
Instead of factories, we created aides. Instead of production lines, motorcades. Instead of economic independence, dependence on government.
That is the tragedy of Fourth Republic leadership in much of Igboland.
AND NOW WE ARE CELEBRATING AN EFCC OFFICE?
On 2 October 2026, political dignitaries gathered in Awka to commission a new EFCC Zonal Directorate serving Anambra and Imo States. The governors of Anambra and Imo attended, and Governor Charles Soludo welcomed the development.
Nobody disputes the EFCC’s legitimate statutory role.
That is not the point.
The point is what our leaders celebrate as evidence of political relevance and federal connection.
Our political leaders stand before the ruins of an industrial civilisation and then celebrate another enforcement bureaucracy as though a new automobile plant, railway hub, technology city or manufacturing complex had arrived.
Where is the equivalent excitement over a functional Eastern railway, globally competitive ports, industrial revival, export processing zones, manufacturing clusters or reliable electricity for industry?
Where is the South East industrial development bank, regional logistics masterplan and coordinated programme to restore abandoned factories?
Where is the strategy to connect Aba, Nnewi, Onitsha, Enugu and Owerri into manufacturing and technology corridors?
Where is the production?
Yet an EFCC office arrives and our leaders sycophantically assemble for photographs. It is an extraordinary commentary on our political condition.
“CONNECT TO THE CENTRE”, FOR WHAT?
For years, politicians have lectured Ndigbo about being “connected to the centre.”
What exactly is flowing through that connection? What?
Meaningful federal engagement should produce infrastructure, investment, transportation, security, industrial capacity and economic opportunity. Federal presence should not mean merely another office occupied by officials. Governors should not present an anti corruption agency as an extraordinary dividend of political alignment.
If connection to the centre produces more bureaucracy while factories remain dead, the problem is not only the centre. It is also the calibre of those negotiating on our behalf.
Our leaders must stop mistaking access for achievement.
A photograph with the President is not development.
A handshake is not industrial policy.
A political appointment is not a factory.
A federal office is not an economy.
OUR GOVERNORS CANNOT ESCAPE RESPONSIBILITY
Abuja deserves criticism, but our governors also control substantial resources. They control budgets and land, formulate economic policy, establish industrial parks, enter public private partnerships, provide infrastructure, rehabilitate or privatise state enterprises, attract manufacturers and coordinate across state boundaries.
What prevents the five South East governors from declaring a South East Industrial Emergency?
They should commission a professional audit of every abandoned industrial asset:
Who owns it? Why did it collapse? What remains? Is the machinery obsolete? What raw materials and markets exist? Should it be revived, concessioned, privatised or replaced? How much investment is required, and how many jobs could it create?
Those are the questions serious governments ask, not endless rallies, defections, praise singing and succession battles.
WE DO NOT HAVE TO RECREATE THE OLD FACTORIES
Industrial revival does not mean pouring money into obsolete machinery.
If an old ceramics factory is outdated, build a modern one around the same raw material advantage. If a poultry complex is unviable, concession its land and infrastructure to credible operators. If a paper mill cannot compete, convert it into modern packaging for e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, food processing and consumer goods. If government cannot run a shoe factory, bring in private manufacturers and create a footwear cluster.
The objective is not nostalgia. It is production and jobs.
THE SOUTH EAST DOES NOT HAVE A HUMAN CAPITAL PROBLEM
We have entrepreneurs, engineers, traders, technicians, manufacturers, diaspora networks, capital and commercial links stretching from Guangzhou to Dubai, Johannesburg, London and Houston.
We have Aba, Nnewi and Onitsha. We have some of Africa’s most entrepreneurial communities.
What we lack is political leadership capable of converting private energy into regional industrial power.
Our people built businesses despite government. Imagine what they could build with competent government.
ENOUGH OF POLITICAL POVERTY
This generation of South East governors must be judged by different standards, not roads commissioned, opponents recruited, proximity to the President or appointments secured.
Ask:
How many factories became operational under your government?
How many sustainable private sector jobs were created?
How much manufacturing did your state gain?
How much private capital did you attract?
How many abandoned assets returned to production?
How much did your state export?
How many young people moved into productive work?
Those are the measures of economic leadership.
REVIVE IGBOLAND
Our governors should jointly audit every abandoned major industrial asset across the South East and adjoining Igbo economic areas. Publish the findings. Open the assets to credible investors. Bring in the diaspora. Create industrial funds. Establish reliable embedded power. Build rail and road logistics around manufacturing clusters. Demand federal infrastructure where Abuja is responsible.
Above all, stop begging for appointments and start negotiating for economic infrastructure.
An EFCC office may perform an important national function.
But an EFCC office will not manufacture shoes, produce cement, process rubber, make tiles, raise chickens, manufacture glass or create tens of thousands of jobs.
Factories do that.
Twenty seven years into the Fourth Republic, Igboland’s industrial ruins stand as witnesses against successive political leaderships.
Every rusting factory gate asks:
AND WHERE IS THE “CITY BOY MOVEMENT” IN ALL THIS?
Then there is the irony of the so called City Boy Movement confusing our youth.
Its leaders and members parade their access to power. They advertise their contacts. They proclaim their closeness to the Presidency. They run around the South-East campaigning, mobilising and selling political alignment with the centre as though proximity to power were itself an economic achievement.
Yet while all this political courtship is going on, what has just been brought into their own backyard in Awka? An EFCC Zonal Directorate.
Funny, innit?
With all the connections, all the access, all the political networking and all the declarations of loyalty, where is the major federal industrial investment they have attracted to Anambra and Imo? Where is the railway transformation? Where is the manufacturing complex? Where is the major logistics infrastructure? Where is the federal intervention capable of putting thousands of unemployed young people to work?
Instead, an anti corruption enforcement office arrives, and this is somehow presented as evidence that the South East is finally being “connected to the centre.”
The symbolism is almost too extraordinary to invent.
You promised connection to power; the tangible connection arriving in your backyard is the EFCC.
That should embarrass rather than excite any political movement whose central selling point is its supposed access to the corridors of power.
This is precisely what is wrong with our politics. Too many politicians measure influence by who takes their telephone calls, rather than by what their relationships deliver for their people. They boast about photographs, access, appointments and presidential proximity while young men and women remain unemployed and abandoned factories decay around them.
And our governors are even less excusable. They should be negotiating collectively from a position of economic purpose, not competing with one another to demonstrate who is closest to Abuja.
There is something profoundly wrong when politicians can mobilise enormous energy to campaign for those in power but cannot mobilise comparable energy to resurrect the productive assets lying dead in their own states.
Our youths cannot eat political connections.
They cannot feed their families with photographs from Abuja.
They cannot build careers from slogans about being connected to the centre.
They need factories.
They need electricity.
They need infrastructure.
They need capital.
They need jobs.
So yes, the irony deserves to be stated plainly: while the City Boy Movement is running around advertising its connection to power, the newest conspicuous manifestation of that federal presence in its own backyard is an EFCC office.
Funny, innit?
But beneath the humour lies a devastating indictment of the poverty of political ambition in today’s Igboland.
WHAT DID YOU DO WITH 27 YEARS?
Our politicians should answer.
A people renowned for enterprise should never be reduced to celebrating government offices while factories that could employ their children rot behind locked gates.
If this is what our politicians call connection to the centre, Ndigbo are entitled to demand a better connection, one carrying railways, ports, international airports, power, industries, investment and jobs.
Enough photographs.
Enough slogans.
Enough political sycophancy.
Open the factories.
Build new ones.
Create the jobs.
Give our youths a future.
Anything less is another betrayal of Igboland.
Duruebube Uzii na Abosi
Chima Nnadi-Oforgu
For
Oblong Media Global Intelligence
Leave a Reply