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During the second Republic, Imo State stood out as a beacon of the selfless industry doggedness and sheer willingness to succeed in the face of odds - all which are attributes with which the average Igbo man is known. In the Nigerian context, it meant even more. Its citizens suffered undue deprivation because the area had suffered two concurrent forms of marginalization - one from the federal government and the other by a systematic oversight by previous administrators of the area. What this means was that Imo had no industries, it had not modern infrastructure, no federal presence nor did it have any viable revenue generating institution of worth.
This writer was a university student during Nigeria's second republic. What conspicuously stood Imo indigenes out from the rest of the student populace was our poverty of material well-being. Our only solace was that we were scholarly and brilliant. While students from the north enjoyed free education augmented by obvious wealthy parental intervention and a patronage sustained by the zone as the producers of majority Nigerian ruling class, students from the then LOOBO states - Lagos, Ogun, Oyo, Bendel and Ondo states enjoyed bursary awards that made the pursuit of the academe a thing of joy. With Chief Awolowo on the driver's seat, students from the Unity Party-ruled states were the envy of all. Students from Imo and old Anambra states earned none of this till much, more lately.
But people from Imo state and its student-populace understood. Why because our leadership under the auspices of Chief Samuel Onunaka Mbakwe made us aware that we were a thoroughly disadvantaged and deprived people. He explained that our unenviable precarious situation stemmed from the fact that he was doing a lot while at the same time investing in industry and modern infrastructure to build a modern Imo state in order to make the lives of future Imo indigenes better than it was then.
He explained that he was building a university to accommodate majority of Imo qualified indigenes who were not admitted into federal universities because of quota system - a system that had effectively deprived Imo state University bound students from being admitted proportionally into federal varsities, Imo being the greatest producer of potential university materials in the whole nation. We understood when he lamented that there were not industries in the state and that he was busy building industries to make Imo State the Taiwan of the nation; that we should take solace that after our graduation, we will have factories to employ us. He said he was building the Amaraku Power Generating Plant and that of Izombe, to provide electricity, since the federal government had effectively marginalized us, Imo people. He pledged that he would build the aluminum extrusion plant in Inyishi and the Avutu poultry farm. He begged us to bear with him because he had put a lot of money in rehabilitating the roads of Aba Township to provide Igbo traders a fortress from where to attack the burgeoning global mercantilism. Above all he promised he would build us a modern color television station with Outside Broadcast (OB) Vans and satellite stations to assuage our appetite for news, information and entertainment which the highly regulated and partisan NTA Aba, Nigeria could not provide. He told us to be studious as he was also busy building a new Owerri capital, which he then likened to "our own Abuja." For a start, he was busy building a five star hotel to be name "Imo Concorde," where we (every Imo citizen who can afford) would all meet during evening hours after a hard days job. In the end he approved for us a 300 Naira bursary for every Imo university student and a 200 Naira award for those in colleges of Technology. He assured us that before long most of us studying in other states would be flying into Owerri after he had completed the Imo Airport. By the time the Shagari regime was overthrown in 1983, Mbakwe had wrought near Economic Miracle in Imo state. He had accomplished in four years what he had set out to achieve in eight Years!
Enter the Military:
The all conquering, lo, rapacious military administration that ruled Imo state from 1983-1999 collectively seamed to have one mission in mind - to dismantle all the well programmed and well articulated people-oriented achievements of the civilian administration of Samuel Onunaka Mbakwe. Today, the Amaraku and Izombe power stations are no more. They were dismantled and sold into exile by a military administrator that happens to be Igbo. All the industries set up by Mbakwe were inexplicably allowed to rot, die and decay. As a matter of fact none of them survived the military era. Coupled with this, was the neglect with which the administrators of the Petroleum Trust Fund handled the state. While federal money were being pumped into the education and rehabilitation of infrastructure in many states of the federation especially in the north, Imo and almost all Igbo states trudged along as if they were not part of Nigeria
