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Labour Party (LP) candidate for the Ekwusịgọ, Nnewi North and South Federal Constituency, Hon Anthony Ikenna Okafor, has called for the sustainability of the Igbo people’s entrepreneurial culture, through the appreciation system.
Hon. Okafor, made the call on the sidelines of apprenticeship in the Igbo lands going into extension, while promising to sponsor bills for the sustainability of small scale industries (SMEs) in Nigeria to enable local industrialists have assets to loan facilities to help their businesses.
The incoming lawmaker pointed out that the system that has produced more millionaires than the education sector in Nigeria must not die out because of youth’s involvement in illegal means of making quick money, while abandoning legitimate means.
Hon. Anthony, who spoke exclusively to Saturday Sun during the New Yam Festival, of the Nzuko Ora Nnewi community in Anambra State, highlighted that the tradition, which used to be a family heritage, seems to be going into extinct.
“I grew up seeing my father and mother attending the same family business, which I also inherited, and that tradition made Nnewi remain historically a town that produced the first millionaire in Nigeria. And also the first town in Nigeria nicknamed Japan of Africa, owing to its upcoming industrial processes. But what we are seeing today is that parents send their kids overseas to study and abandon family businesses that made their parents millionaires. And to worsen the situation is that those kids end up becoming wayward despite all that was spent on them”.
Hon. Anthony further urged businessmen in the Igbo land to should stop transferring knowledge to other people’s children while searching for apprentices that will help them build their businesses, in the face of their own children wasting their lives away as rich men’s children.
