Peter Mbah:

In an era where leadership is increasingly measured by foresight and impact, Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State is charting a course that looks far beyond his tenure. With an ambitious education reform anchored in innovation and sustainability, Mbah is reshaping the learning landscape through his flagship Smart Green Schools initiative—designed to expose children as young as three to modern skills like artificial intelligence, robotics, and experiential learning. His goal is clear: to equip a new generation of Enugu children with the tools to compete in a fast-changing global economy. But beyond bricks and curriculum, Mbah is laying the foundations for long-term institutional strength. Determined to build a system that thrives beyond any individual, the Governor is investing heavily in human capital development—particularly among civil servants—while embedding transparency and digital governance across all MDAs. His administration’s emphasis on training, automation, and team-driven execution is designed to ensure that policies and reforms are not only impactful today but sustainable tomorrow. In this interview, he speaks about how his dual strategy—developing globally competitive youth and building resilient institutions—is shaping a legacy focused not on political cycles, but generational transformation. brings  excerpts:

Having toured various parts of the State, we’ve observed a number of completed projects as well as several others currently ongoing. Many are curious to know — how has your administration been able to mobilise the funds to execute these initiatives?

The truth is that we don’t have to rely on third-party funding to do what we are doing. What we have done since we came in is that we have raised our Internally Generated Revenue (IGR). When we came in, the highest the State used to do was about N25 billion in terms of IGR annually. This year, our IGR projection is about N600 billion, and we are likely going to achieve, if not exceed, that figure. At some point, there was the misconception that we increased the tax rate, but that was not true. What we simply did was to expand the tax base. We brought in those who were not captured and who were not in the tax net, into the tax net.

We also ensured that our processes are automated by eliminating collections through manual or cash transactions and ensured that payments are made directly into government accounts via electronic or digital platforms. So, just largely stopping the leakages and expanding the tax net, we are able to grow our tax base by over 200-fold, from N25 billion to about N571 billion that we are expecting this year. Now, if we have a gap in our funding, we could also get a bridger, and that bridger is what is referred to as an overdraft or short-term funding. Because of the scale of what we are doing, sometimes we could get bridger, but we have not done a long-term bridger. We came up with three transformational objectives before we assumed office.

We actually set out a blueprint of what we are going to do in Enugu. The first was to grow the economy of Enugu exponentially, by growing it from $4.4 billion when we took over, to $30 billion in eight years. If you calculate it, that will translate to a 27 percent compound annual growth rate in eight years, which is a seven-fold growth rate. I think that is quite ambitious. But that was a promise we made to the people of Enugu State, and we are going to accomplish that by industrialising the State and bringing in the private sector.

The second thing we said to our people in Enugu is that we are going to eradicate poverty and achieve a zero poverty headcount rate. We know clearly what it means to get to a zero poverty headcount rate. That means that we are going to invest hugely in social services, education, health-care, employment generation, and enhancing capacity for our youths so that they can become employers.

How sustainable are these projects in the long term and regarding your land banking initiative, what measures are in place to guarantee land security, so that farmers can be confident that future administrations will not revoke their access or rights?

We think that we need to build strong institutions, institutions, stronger than any individual. So, a lot of the things we are doing, we are focusing on how do we sustain the projects we are doing, whether it is the smart schools, how do we ensure that successive governments continue to fund it and that the infrastructure and the programmes we initiated are sustained. Beyond bricks and mortar, there are other soft issues like training and making sure that there are pipelines through which these programmes and initiatives are sustained.

So, we are very conscious of that and we are building the capacity of our civil servants, who obviously will continue to remain here. That is why we have a programme, for instance, that ensures that all our civil servants have access to digital training and makes sure that our processes are instituted. All the MDAs, we have over 111 of them in Enugu, are included in our e-governance platform. Of course, our financial manual is something I have to speak about. A major part of our governance philosophy is transparency and accountability. We have a system whereby whatever accrues to the government as revenue is accurately captured. It is not something anybody can alter, so there is a digital trail. When we came in, a lot of those things were done manually, but we had to digitalise them. So, even our financial reporting is something that you don’t have to wait till the end of the year.

You get a monthly report of what accrued to the government. So, by building the capacity of our civil servants and strengthening the institutions, we can sustain this. Now, that takes me to the issue of the land bank. Land bank is a programme designed for commercial farming. Beyond the farm estate we are building for smallholder farmers, which is going on across the 260 wards in the State, we want to scale up production, so we are inviting those interested in investing in agriculture to come to Enugu. In terms of the structure, it differs. For example, with one of the companies we are working with, we have a structure where the State can take 40 percent and the investor has 60 percent share in that business. We also have a structure where if the investor wants to go in all alone, we just provide him land and depending on the impact of the investment, we can help the investor to de-risk the investment and if there are areas of the investment that can create problems, we step in. Most times we try to have our skin in the game so that it will become bankable and the numbers will make sense to investors. So, we adopt different strategies. We don’t have one-size-fits-all strategies.

Now, what is the drive behind the Smart Green Schools initiative?

The Smart Green School, again, is not knee-jerk. If you look at our manifesto during our campaign, in the sector, we dealt with this. We referred to it as a cut-off point. We knew the challenges with our educational system. We didn’t think it was something we needed to do better; we felt it was something we needed to do differently. So, the cut-off point was designed to cut off from that old system and to introduce a new learning system. To do that, we also felt that the environment must be right, and the infrastructure must also be right.

The reason was that we felt that the true wealth of any State is not measured by the value of what it has beneath the soil. We may have huge quantities of coal and other solid minerals, but that will not be the right measure of our wealth. We believe strongly that the true measure of our wealth is based on the quality of our human resources. We also recognise that the rest of the world will not wait for our children. We understand that the evolving skills of the 21st century require that we get our children ready and be prepared to have a fighting chance in the world. Take, for example, it is projected that five years from now, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to contribute $20 trillion to the global economy.

The question now is: How are we preparing our children to acquire the skills to be relevant in this new world order? So, we felt that the best thing to do was to capture them at that very young age. The smart green school is designed to have provisions of early child learning, which begins at age three. At age three, beyond teaching them, we are also dealing with their health profile. We know a number of them may not have adequate medical records. So, the first thing we do is to make sure that the child’s health is okay and that they are up to date with their vaccination and all that. When there is a deficiency, we step in to ensure that we regularise that and get them up to date. In terms of learning, we have completely changed the way the kids are taught. We have moved away from the old system of teaching these kids to what is referred to as the experiential learning system. Just recently, we won the Spencer Foundation Vision Grant, in recognition of what we are doing at the basic education experiential learning. What we have done is that there was a lot of research that went into this system of education, and well documented.

I am talking about extensive research, not research done overseas. We have the Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation, a pipeline that all the tutorial staff must go through to be qualified to teach at a smart school. Currently, we are training about 18,000 of our educators through the Centre for Experiential Learning and Innovation. The idea is that these kids would be exposed to all modern skills from a very young age. From Basic one or what you know as Elementary one, you get exposed to robotics, AI, and Virtual Realities (VR). If they are learning Biology, for example, you can visualise how the blood moves through the veins.

Most importantly, we are getting the kids to see their classrooms beyond where they memorise or repeat what they were taught. We are getting them to see their classrooms as a creativity hub and a place where they have to solve compelling social problems. Some of these initiatives we have introduced are not so fashionable because the impact may be felt long after we have left government. We are looking at the future. But essentially, if we don’t get it right today, we may not be able to have that vision for hope for the future.    

How are you addressing the challenge of rural-urban migration, because we see people are moving from rural communities to the cities, how are you addressing the issue of infrastructure that comes with such movements?

Part of what we are experiencing in Enugu is the opposite, where we have a lot of people from urban areas migrating to rural areas. That is largely because the style of leadership we have here is all-inclusive. We are not taking any part in the State out. For example, our programme in education is where the 260 electoral wards have project of over N1 billion going on at the same time. Somebody was telling me a few months ago that the amount of earth-moving equipment they have seen move into Enugu in the last two years has never been experienced anywhere.

We didn’t have enough of that, so people who are coming here to work now have to bring in earth-moving equipment from other States to come here to work. I have also been told that hiring artisans and labourers in Enugu is now the most expensive. That is because you have activities going on across the State. In each ward, there are major projects going on, including the Smart Green Schools. We are also doing the panel healthcare centre, and we are building the farm estate, and we have a lot of our young people constructively engaged instead of turning to criminality. So, even if we have an influx of people into the city, we realise also that when we came in that the last master planning we had when we came in was designed over 60 years ago.

So, when we came in, we did a new master plan to expand the city. We are currently building a brand new city, which would take about 300,000 households, and that is because we are planning for the future. If you are going to grow the economy to $30 billion, you must provide access and infrastructure. We are already thinking about that. This brand new city is going to be fully service – your water, electricity, sewage, telecoms, fibre optics, internet access, the gas line- would all be fully provided. You just move in and you don’t need to go in there with your generator, and of course, the roads are all designed. So, it is carefully planned to be a smart and modern city. Lastly, the light rail is going to be on the right-of-way.   

For the Command and Control Centre which is to support your fight against insecurity, what is your plan for the different local governments to ensure that you cover the entire State?

We have phase two of the security surveillance system that is actually ongoing. Part of what we did with the security system was to ensure that we don’t use satellite, so that it is not weather-sensitive and when it is raining we are not worried whether the cameras will work or not. We use fibre optic cables, so all our cameras are connected through the fibre optic cable. What we have commissioned is the first phase; we are now in the second phase. The second phase was designed to capture all the gateways. Not just the known gateways, but other gateways are informal. We currently have coverage beyond the cities. We have about seven strategic local governments that are captured in this first phase, and the second phase will capture the additional nine local governments that were not captured. So, there is plan for full coverage.

You are in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and we have seen some of your friends who are Governors defect to the ruling party and they have cited the crisis in your party as one of the reasons. How confident are you that the PDP is going to resolve its dispute, because I anticipate that you want to contest for a second term and you need a platform?

It is clear to the people of Enugu State that we are in this to serve them. We are focused largely on governance. But just as you mentioned, we are also a product of politics. Our constitution does not have provisions for someone to run as an independent candidate. Which means you have to be sponsored by a political party.

That means you must be involved in politics. So, our platform is the PDP, and behind me here is the PDP flag. That means we are still in the PDP. As you are aware, just like any other party, we have our challenges and we are dealing with them, and hopefully we shall resolve them. Our objective is not to be distracted because if you lose steam and you are not able to deliver on the promises you made to your people, I believe that at the end of the day, the people will have to decide whether they want to renew our mandate or kick us out. So, that decision will be made by them.

I must commend the team spirit I have seen among your team. So, how are you enhancing the skills of the civil servants in the State to ensure the sustainability of your projects and programmes?

We are proud of our team, and we see that as our major competitive advantage because we were very intentional in making sure that the right team was put in place. A lot of these people that I work with are people who have distinguished themselves in their private or professional endeavours. What I say to my team all the time, and something that you must always have as a skill in order for you to be successful, is team spirit. If you look at the survey or research done by McKinsey, and has been repeated severally times, giving the same result.

The top 500 CEOs were asked what would be their most valuable skill in an employee and what always stood out is an employee who has a team-building spirit, not technology or intelligence, but a team-building spirit. So, it is extremely important to have the spirit to work as a team. So, the modest achievement we have recorded in the past two years could not have been possible if not that team spirit.

Now, for the civil servants, we don’t even have a choice in terms of making sure that the civil servants are part of everything we are doing. We are only here for few years and we are done. Whether what we are doing now will be sustained is going to be a function of how strong the institution or the system is. So, we are deliberate in enhancing their human capital, and capacity is very important. In fact, in our next year’s budget, we are going to have a major structure where we train the civil servants, just like what they have in Lagos. We are trying to have the same thing here – a training centre for our civil servants, so that we don’t have to be sending them out for training.

The 2023 elections ended almost 28 months ago. There are States where there are still disagreements between contending forces. But suddenly, after the battle and the legal fireworks, your closest rival is now in the same camp as you, which means you will have to focus on governance as hostilities have ended. What was the magic wand?

What we have also experienced post-election is that the political actors in the state have also come to recognise our sincerity of purpose, that we are just here to serve the people. Those of them who also meant well for the State and were largely driven by service, see us as partners in progress. Which was why my opponent in the last election, we are working today as one. He feels that the idea was to serve the people, and since he has seen someone doing it, why not join hands with him and do the same thing? So, we are working together as one. That has also brought a lot of peace as we are not spending money to deal with all sorts. Today, we are a group working together. We believe that if we have to collaborate or partner with an institution or a person to achieve our common goal, it is something we are open to. Immediately after the election and the court processes, we extended an olive branch, and we are open to working together as a team to build our State, which is really what the objective is.