Peter Mbah and the Enugu He’s Building 

When Peter Mbah took office as governor of Enugu State in May 2023, he announced an ambition that sounded, on first hearing, like campaign arithmetic: grow the state’s GDP from $4.4 billion to $30 billion. Two years in, the infrastructure he is putting in the ground suggests he is not using that figure as decoration.

The most visible expression of that ambition is his Smart Green Schools programme. His administration has delivered 267 of these schools across the state’s 260 political wards, each equipped with interactive smart boards, science laboratories, and a renewable energy supply. Mbah deliberately set the distribution at one per ward, which means that a child in a rural community and a child in the heart of Enugu City now walk into the same quality of classroom.

This is no small thing. Public education in Nigeria has historically reproduced the very inequality it was supposed to address. This program is structured to do the opposite. Education currently takes more than 30% of the state’s annual budget, and the administration is targeting 40,000 young people for digital skills training to sit above the schools as a second tier of the same investment.

The physical transformation of Enugu extends well beyond school buildings. Over 90 urban roads have been reconstructed within the metropolis, and more than 100 compressed natural gas buses are now running, supplemented by new transport terminals being established at Holy Ghost, Garriki, Abakpa, and Nsukka. The state is also working to revive landmarks that had decayed into symbols of arrested potential: the Enugu International Conference Centre, Hotel Presidential, and Sunrise Flour Mills are all on the rehabilitation list.

Mbah has also initiated a New Enugu City project, an urban expansion designed to take pressure off the old metropolis as population and economic activity grow.

The GDP target is large. But the logic connecting schools, roads, transport infrastructure, and revived commercial landmarks to economic growth is not rhetorical. It is a sequence. Mbah appears to understand that sequence, and he is building it ward by ward.