Enugu State stood out at the BusinessDay States Competitiveness and Investment Readiness Awards (SCIRA) 2025. The state won the Infrastructure Development Competitiveness Award and the Outstanding Performance in Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) Award.
Governor Peter Mbah was represented by Ben Okoh, the Commissioner for Works and Infrastructure, and Mr Emmanuel Nnamani, the Executive Chairman of the Enugu State Internal Revenue Service (ESIRS). They received the awards on behalf of the state government in Abuja on Thursday night.
While presenting the awards, the Publisher and CEO of BusinessDay Media Limited praised Governor Mbah for making a real impact on public infrastructure. He said this goes beyond just playing politics.
"In the last six months, I have had the opportunity of travelling to Enugu three times. The first time I visited in January, my taxi driver was eager to take me around. That caught my imagination. I began to ask questions and I began to look around.
"One thing I found especially quite interesting was that Governor Mbah did not set aside everything that he met, which could have been a waste of public resources. He looked at what is good and he rebuilt them; the ones that were not completed, he completed them.
"Two things that struck me because I had to ask a question, where does he get the money? I saw good roads, and I don’t mean good roads in the major highways, I mean good roads even in the communities that are far away from the prime areas of the state capital, Enugu.
"I thought that is a very good example of a private sector person, who knows what to do with resources, because if you use resources well, you get more from little and that is what the governor has done. And for that, Governor Mbah is receiving this award. He has impacted public infrastructure in a way that goes beyond just playing politics," he stated.
Mr Okoh expressed gratitude to BusinessDay for recognizing the Mbah Administration’s work in changing the narrative of the state. He emphasized that Enugu has many success stories in just three years.
He described the awards as a motivation to do more, saying, "As the governor always says, you ain’t seen nothing yet."
Mr Okoh shared some achievements of the administration. He said, "Enugu State has witnessed an unprecedented infrastructural revolution, the type we have never seen since the advent of this present democracy in 1999."
He pointed out that projects left unfinished by previous governments have been completed. For example, the International Conference Centre is done. The Hotel Presidential, the flagship hotel of the old Eastern Region, and the Nigergas Company, which had been dormant for over 30 years, have also been revived.
"Being the commissioner for Works and Infrastructure in the state, I can stand here confidently to say that no government since 1999 achieved what Governor Mbah has achieved in three years.
"I can say that in terms of road construction, in just three years, we have done far more than double what any other government did in eight years. No government in Enugu since 1999 did up to 600Km of roads in eight years.
"Under Governor Mbah, we have 267 smart schools across the state and 260 Primary Healthcare Centres to our credit.
"We are building a new Enugu City. The present Enugu City is about 14,000 hectares; the new Enugu City is about 10,000 hectares, which is the size of Bahrain. It is bigger than the entire Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja.
"This is the first time a state in Nigeria would be undertaking an integrated infrastructure development, which is what we have in the FCT where all the facilities in the modern city are underground, and telecommunications lines, the fibre optics, the electrical cables, water pipes, everything is underground. It is not just a vision; the projects are already ongoing.
"There is no particular sector that Governor Peter Ndubuisi Mbah has not touched, be it tourism, security, agriculture, education or even transport sector where the administration floated Enugu Air, built five ultramodern transport terminals and launched over 150 CNG buses," he said.
The Mbah Administration has transformed the state’s IGR. They used reforms and technology to boost the state’s IGR from N26.8bn in 2022 to N37.4bn in 2023, N180.5bn in 2024, and N406.7bn in 2025. Tax revenue accounts for just N51.5bn or 12.6 percent of the 2025 IGR proceeds.
BusinessDay is Nigeria’s leading business newspaper. The SCIA celebrates states that show great performance in governance, economic development, infrastructure delivery, investment promotion, and creating a friendly environment for businesses and citizens.
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