1. Let me start by wishing us all a Happy and prosperous New Year! We give thanks to God for seeing us through the preceding year. Even though the general economic horizon was hazy and challenging, we have experienced a great lifting up, which reassures us that we are a State that is soaring on the wings of His grace, Arising to His glory and achieving success because of His endless love. We give Him thanks and adoration for the more blessings that await us in this New Year
2. Fellow Akwaibomites, in nineteen months since you gave me the mandate to be your Governor, and in line with our Governance and Economic Blueprint, the Arise Agenda, we have worked twice as hard to translate the vision into measurable and impactful levels. Let me thank you for all your support and prayers, and I am hopeful that we can count on you for more of your support in the New Year.
3. We came with an agenda to engender an agricultural revolution, aimed at ensuring food security for our people. On that, I make bold to say that we are right on course. Let me thank you again for heeding our clarion call to return to the farm. From what I have seen and heard, we are very hopeful that in the course of this year, we will experience a bountiful harvest.
4. The work-free Farm days, observed every first and third Friday of the month, are proving effective. The recently announced Arise Home Farms Scheme where fifty individuals who upload a two-minute video of what they have grown around their homes, stand a chance to receive a grant of 500 Thousand Naira also has been warmly embraced by our people. God has blessed us with favourable weather all year-round, fertile soil. We therefore, have no excuse not to produce enough staple food to feed our population, store surplus, and even export to other parts of the country.
5. The Ibom Model Farm, project is ongoing, the farm signposts our determined efforts to combine food sufficiency and tourism and in the process revolutionize our agricultural practices.
6. We remain dedicated to opening up our rural areas with economically viable roads, potable water, model primary healthcare facilities, all aimed at stemming the rural–urban migration. there is no local government area where there is no ongoing project based on our “One Project Per Local Government” and the second phase of the project has commenced in some Local Government Areas.
7. Our commitment to expanding and maintaining infrastructure has been upheld. Within 19 months of assuming office, we have undertaken 157 road projects across the 31 Local Government Areas. This includes roads inherited from the previous administrations, many of which have been completed and commissioned. Additionally, we launched a zero-polthole campaign, transforming our state into a thriving construction hub.
8. Let me use this opportunity to commend our project handlers and contractors for responding to our call to return to their respective sites and take advantage of the dry season to complete the awarded road projects. Based on the monitoring reports I have received, I am highly impressed by the passion and commitment they have demonstrated.
9. Our State still remains an oasis of peace and tranquility. Many thanks to the robust collaborations with our security agencies, Let me also appreciate our youths for believing in our leadership and for shunning anti-peace tendencies. That is why we have created a stand-alone Ministry of Youth Development, separate from Sports to work with our youths to ensure that the future they aspire is made possible by tangible and concrete programmes we have initiated for them today. I trust and know they will continue to work with us to make that happen.
10. We will continue to commission more model primary schools across the State this year, support our secondary and public tertiary institutions with subventions, pay WAEC fees and other fees for our students, provide uniforms, shoes, and books for our pupils, hire more teachers and conduct regular training to bring them up to speed with modern teaching techniques, continue to pay bursaries to students in public tertiary institutions and prepare our children to be as competitive as their peers elsewhere.
11. The health and well-being of our people will continue to be our priority even as we will pay greater attention to healthcare delivery. In the New Year, we will continue to commission more model primary healthcare facilities across the state, in addition to those already commissioned. We will enroll more people into our Arise Care Medical Insurance Scheme in addition to almost 10 thousand public service employees and some senior citizens who already have been enrolled. Ibom Specialist Hospital will be reorganized to enable it fulfill the mission of its founding. It is going to be run as a stand-alone medical facility in the model of Ibom Air. We hope to flag-off the construction of the Medical Village along the medical tourism corridor between the Ibom Specialist Hospital and the Raffia City of Ikot Ekpene. We will formally launch the State Ambulance Services to complement the Insurance Scheme.
12. In the New Year, in line with our avowed commitment to improve our power sector, we will reinvigorate our power system and also hold a Power Summit which will produce a step-by-step Roadmap on Power for the State. Let me thank the Speaker of the State House of Assembly, Rt. Honourable Udeme Otong and indeed the entire members of the House for the swift passage of the State Electricity Bill into law.
With this development, Akwa Ibom State working with other key stakeholders in the power sector can generate, distribute, transmit and conduct sales of electricity within the state. We are determined to turn around the fortunes of Ibom Power Plant, The forensic audit earlier instituted is expected to submit its reports and we will study and implement some of the recommendations germane to our strategic plans.
13. In our drive to make our state the tourism hub in the nation, we will hold a Tourism Summit and produce a Road map for the sector. Tourism is a critical pillar of the Arise Agenda. The Arise Park, which we hope to commission in the new year, is a testament to the vision and creativity. From a den of miscreants and a gulley erosion-ravaged ravine, we have turned the place into what we hope may be about the best family-themed Park in the nation, complete with children playground, a 9-hole golf course, artificial lakes, accommodation and banquet facilities and other amenities that can compare to any such park the world over. We will also, work to promote our historic tourist sites scattered all over the state. We look forward to receiving from the Nigerian Navy two passenger ferries for our inter-state water travels between Akwa Ibom and Cross River State. We will play big in the tourism industry.
14. In the New year, we plan to flag-off the construction of Ibom Hotels in Abuja in addition to the construction of Ibom Towers in Lagos. These are previously moribund State assets that we are converting into money making ventures. We will continue to think out of the box in our drive to increase our Internally Generated Revenues (IGR.) The AkwaGIS which we also hope to launch in the first quarter of this year will help in this regard.
15. Small and Medium Scale Enterprises the world over are the engines of growth of any economy-it is meant to create a thriving middle class and we will devote our resources in the new year to promote this critical area of development. At our last EXCO meeting for 2024, we approved a committee to work out adequate modalities to release funds to traders/farmers and artisans in the State.
Already, we have trained over two thousand of our youths through the Entrepreneurial Accelerator Programme run by Ibom LED, of which each participant was given 500 thousand Naira seed grant, including the Female Youths that would be given 750 thousand Naira each. The training of over 200 youths at the Dakkada Skills Acquisition centre, DASAC is ongoing and I am happy to hear of the impact the training is providing to the participants and the products they are producing at the centre. That is the can-do spirit of Akwa Ibom people at work and this is deeply encouraging.
16. We will continue to work with the Bank of Industry (BoI) to provide loans at single digits to our traders. We have committed two billion Naira as matching funds for this purpose. We have also converted the earlier two billion Naira loan given to our traders to grants same as the 200 million Naira each, to the traders from Arewa. Yoruba, Igbo and Niger Delta communities doing business in our state.
17. Ibom Air has continued to fly our flag of excellence within the Nigerian aviation space and we will keep our obligations and support to the airline. In the last nineteen months, we have received two Airbus and purchased outright, two brand new CRJ 900 Bombardier Aircraft which has brought the fleet of the airline to 9. We hope to receive more aircraft in the course of the year as the airline gets set to expand its operations and routes into other parts of Africa.
18. Still within the aviation sector, we hope to commence operations at the Maintenance and Repair and Overhaul(MRO) facility this year as well as the International Terminal at the Victor Attah International airport. Last year, we flagged-off the construction of the Aviation Village a one-stop estate that will provide accommodation, school, clinics and other recreational amenities for the airport workers as part of our total investment in the aviation ecosystem. The Taxiway way, perimeter fencing and other projects around the airport will be completed.
19. We will continue our strategic engagements with our partners towards the realization of the Ibom Deep Seaport. Seaport development is a long term investment and I urge our people to exercise patience as we work through the layers of processes to make this happen. We will expedite work on the Oron Jetty, complete with cold room facilities in our efforts to support our fishermen and our blue economy in general.
20. The 2025 Appropriation Law, titled Budget of Consolidation and Expansion, which was recently passed by the State House of Assembly and signed into law by me two days ago, offers significant opportunities for us as a State. As part of our plans, we will organize a Business Summit during the year, inviting our accomplished sons and daughters from across the nation and in the Diaspora. These individuals, who have excelled in their respective professions, will explore areas within the budget where they can collaborate with us. We will also celebrate their achievements, inspiring others to emulate their hard work and determination.
22. We will continue to support our elders, and the vulnerable with social safety net services. The first of the 15 thousand out of 60 thousand youths to be empowered with Arise youths business support scheme I had announced during my youth appreciation rally last September have been paid. We hope to continue with this process in the new year alongside other Business support schemes I had also rolled out during the rally.
23. We will continue to pay down the backlog of gratuities. So far, we have paid nearly N42 billion out of about 93 billion we had inherited from previous administrations dating back to 2012. As soon as the verification exercise currently ongoing is completed, we will commence the payment of the 80 thousand Naira minimum wage we had announced, with effect from 1st November, 2024. I must commend the cooperation we have received from the Organized Labour and I am hopeful of a more robust relationship in the new year.
24. We will continue to build more Arise Compassionate Homes. Currently over 112 have been built and handed over to the beneficiaries while work is ongoing on additional 62 units. Our target is to deliver 400 homes, at least one in all of the 368 wards in our State by the end of our first term in office. I call on others, especially those whom God has blessed –contractors and business organizations doing business in our state to support government efforts in this regard as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility for 2025.
25. We will continue the payment of 50 Thousand Naira monthly to 600 Elders drawn from all the 368 wards in the state in our Arise Elders Care Initiative, our Arise Free Food Voucher programme administered by the Bulk Purchase Agency as a temporary intervention scheme will continue while we expect bountiful harvest in the new year. Let me thank the Agency and all the Loval Government Chairmen, for the orderly manner food were distributed without any casualty. We shall commence the construction of the Arise Elderly Citizens’ Home, which shall comprise recreational and health facilities to cater for the welfare of senior citizens.
26. As we usher in the New Year, I enjoin us to remain united and shun politics of division and personal destruction. We are committed to running an inclusive government, and we have demonstrated this approach in the last eighteen months since we came in. Politics should not divide us or severe our bonds of kindredship, we are first and foremost Akwaibomites before we became members of any political parties. Let us continue to hold aloft our defined identity as a peaceful, prosperous and forward-looking people. I will continue to run the State and involve and consult our leaders across party lines because if we succeed, Akwa Ibom succeeds and succeed, we will!
27. Tomorrow, January 2, 2025, we will hold our Solemn Assembly where we will once again, thank God for his grace and over the affairs of this great State into the Hands of God. I invite you to join us at the International Christian Worship Centre and let us pray and sing praises to the Lord for another great and successful year of deep accomplishments we hope to have.
28. May God bless our dear State and shine His light upon us in the New Year, in Jesus Name.
May God bless Nigeria and continue to guide our President and members of his cabinet aright in the decisions they shall take and partner them to ensure that we provide the right leadership for our for our people
29. Happy New Year once again to Akwa Ibom!
Happy New Year to Nigerians!
