Follow Us on Google
By Oruruo Samuel
On August 4, Chief Ikedi Godson Ohakim turns 69. Somewhere between the candles and the calls that will come in from across Imo State and beyond, it is worth pausing on a question that does not get asked often enough in Nigerian politics: what happens when a state actually follows through on a plan.
In 1965, Singapore was expelled from the Malaysian federation with no army, no natural resources and barely two million people to its name. Its per capita income sat under 500 US dollars. Within a generation, that figure had passed 11,000, and today it stands above 80,000, higher than the United Kingdom, Japan and France. Lee Kuan Yew, the man credited with the turnaround, did not do it with slogans.
He did it with discipline: a civil service paid enough to resist temptation, contracts and infrastructure kept close to the people who would use them, a relentless focus on cleanliness and order, and a habit of planning in decades rather than election cycles. What is now studied around the world as the Singapore model was, at its core, simply governance that kept its promises.
Imo State has never lacked the raw material for its own version of that story. It has land, a famously enterprising population, a diaspora with capital to invest, and a governance culture that, at its best, has shown flashes of exactly the kind of disciplined execution the Singapore model is remembered for. Those flashes came, in large part, between 2007 and 2011, under Ohakim, and they offer the clearest evidence yet that the Singapore model can work in Imo.
It is easy to forget, four terms of governance later, how much was actually delivered in those four years. Roads are the clearest example. Under Ohakim, close to 450 kilometres of road were built or rehabilitated, with the long neglected Owerri to Orlu to Okigwe triangle finally getting sustained attention.
The work was carried out through the Imo Road Maintenance Agency, a body that did two things at once: it kept maintenance decisions close to the communities the roads served rather than locked away in a distant ministry, and it created direct employment for over 30,000 people in the process. That is decentralised leadership in practice, not as a talking point but as the operating model for one of government’s most visible functions, and it is the same instinct that sits at the heart of the Singapore model.
The same instinct showed up in how contracts were handled more broadly, and this is where the Singapore model becomes most visible. Rather than routing major work through outside interests, local contractors and community based outfits were engaged, keeping resources circulating within Imo and building the kind of local capacity that outlasts any single administration. It is a quieter form of accountability than an anti corruption speech, but it tends to be more durable, because indigenes overseeing work in their own communities have every incentive to see it done properly.
Employment did not stop at road maintenance. Ten thousand graduates were absorbed into public service in 2008, and five thousand teachers were hired, at a time when youth unemployment was already hardening into one of Nigeria’s most persistent problems. Water access was rebuilt on a similar scale, with over 1,300 water schemes revived and the Imo Water Corporation brought back to life, restoring something as basic and as often taken for granted as a working tap.
Then there is the environment, an area where the Singapore model is almost uncanny. Lee Kuan Yew treated cleanliness as a matter of national discipline, not aesthetics, understanding that a clean, orderly city sends a signal to investors and citizens alike. Ohakim’s Clean and Green Imo initiative applied that same logic to Owerri, combining public sanitation drives, tree planting and urban renewal until the city was ranked the cleanest in Nigeria. It was not achieved through decree alone. It required the kind of citizen buy-in that only comes when people are actually consulted, which is exactly what the monthly town hall meetings held across the state were designed to do. Government, for that period, was a conversation rather than a monologue handed down from Owerri.
None of this was funded by wishful thinking. Imo State raised 18.5 billion naira through the bond market, a route that depends on investors believing in the state’s capacity to repay, not on federal allocations arriving on time. Whatever became of the individual projects that bond was meant to finance, the underlying instinct, that a state should build its own financial credibility rather than wait on Abuja, was sound, and it is the same fiscal instinct at the centre of the Singapore model, funding its own transformation rather than depending on aid. By the end of the term, Imo held 46.6 billion naira in reserves, a fiscal position few successor administrations have matched.
Agriculture and rural development were part of the same picture, promoted alongside the infrastructure push as a way of spreading opportunity beyond Owerri and into the communities that make up most of the state. It was, in outline, the beginning of the Singapore model here: decentralise decision making, keep contracts and capacity local, professionalise the workforce, discipline the finances, and make the environment a point of pride rather than an afterthought.
No administration is without shortcomings, and reasonable people may differ on aspects of Ohakim’s tenure. Yet even critics often acknowledge that the period was marked by a clear developmental vision and a level of policy coherence that remains rare in state governance.
Yet development stories are rarely linear. In politics, continuity is often the most fragile ingredient of progress. What could Imo have become had the Singapore model been allowed to run its full course? It is a fair question, because the interruption in 2011 had less to do with the record above than with a wave of misinformation that swept through the campaign season, since discredited by the very people who spread it.
Governance rarely gets remembered for its quiet successes when a single manufactured scandal dominates the news cycle. The roads stayed. The water schemes stayed. The reserves stayed. What was lost was continuity, the one ingredient every serious model of national transformation, the Singapore model included, treats as non negotiable.
That is the case for what could still be. Ohakim did not disappear after 2011. He studied, he listened, he ran again in 2019 and came third in a crowded field, and he has spent the years since arguing for a version of leadership built on continuity rather than reinvention every four years.
The five pillars that defined his first term, decentralised leadership, contracts kept in the hands of indigenes, youth empowerment through real job creation, agriculture as a serious economic pillar, and an environment Imo people can be proud of, are not nostalgic ideas. They are the same pillars of the Singapore model that took a resourceless city state to one of the wealthiest economies on earth, and Imo has already shown that this model can work.
Imo does not need to copy anyone. But it would do well to remember that the closest it has come to a coherent Singapore style model of governance was already tried, already worked in measurable ways, and was cut short before its full promise could be tested.
As Imo approaches another electoral cycle, the real question is not whether the state can begin anew, but whether it can recover and complete an unfinished developmental trajectory. A birthday is usually a private matter. This one is worth marking publicly, because the choice in front of Imo State is not really about looking backwards. It is about deciding whether the state is ready to finish what the Singapore model once started here.
Happy 69th birthday, Chief Ikedi Ohakim.
• Samuel writes from Lagos.
