John Kalu, former Commissioner for Trade and Investment in Abia State, has described former Governor Okezie Ikpeazu as an exceptional leader and possibly one of the best things to have happened to the state.
Speaking during an interview on Arise Television’s Morning Show on Monday, Kalu said Ikpeazu’s only major shortcoming was his aversion to media publicity.
He explained that the former governor preferred to focus on delivering results rather than promoting his achievements in the press.
According to Kalu, many of the infrastructure projects currently being credited to Governor Alex Otti were executed during Ikpeazu’s administration.
He specifically mentioned several well-constructed roads and functioning traffic lights, asserting that they were completed before Ikpeazu left office.
Kalu insisted that Ikpeazu’s leadership style was quiet but effective, and that his contributions to Abia’s development should not be overlooked simply because they were not heavily publicised.
He said:
“Okezie Ikpeazu was an exceptional governor, probably one of the best things that happened to Abia State, even though he had this fault that he didn’t want to make noise. He doesn’t like media noise. Rather, he wanted to work and work and work.
“That governor did over 230 road projects in Abia State. As at the time we came to power, there was no single road leading into Aba.
“For instance, all the good roads you see today in Aba, all the traffic lights, all the street lights that most people come to social media to advertise as Alex Otti’s projects, they were done by Ikpeazu. I am speaking publicly now, and I will invite them to say that I’m not speaking the truth because he was in Aba when we installed the traffic lights at Brass Junction with hidden cameras, which nobody knew about.
“Ikpeazu did roads, schools, four modern schools and over 600 new classroom blocks. Ikpeazu did hospitals, apart from the four general hospitals.
“He was the first to link all 700 Primary Health Care Centres via telemetry to a 24/7 call response centre.
“Ikpeazu was assessed by the federal government when they conducted the multidimensional poverty study in Nigeria.
“The independent teams from the World Bank, Federal Ministry of Finance, and other federal agencies that conducted it rated Ikpeazu’s Abia as the third best. What they measured included security, infrastructure, and all those areas of development.”
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cc: Daily Post Ng
