By James Udemba
What Hope Uzodimma set out to do in Imo State was easy to promise and punishing to achieve: Change the narrative of the state. Quicken its economy. Turn its politics around and restore the capital city to its status as the hospitality capital of Eastern Nigeria. He put his word on it, promising a government that would account for itself and hide nothing, and he gave the whole design a name. The Shared Prosperity Agenda, built on three plain words, reconstruction, rehabilitation and recovery, the 3Rs that Imo people now recite like a creed.
Awards were never the object of the exercise. He did not take office dreaming of a citation at the House of Lords, or of an American legislature rising to pass a motion in his name. Those came later, and they came for a single reason. The work was there to be seen, and men and women of consequence, at home and abroad, went and saw it.
In 78 months, Uzodimma has turned a manifesto into concrete, asphalt and steel. More than 135 roads now run across the state where potholes and abandonment once did the talking. The dualised Owerri-Orlu Road. The Owerri-Okigwe Road. The Owerri-Umuahia Road. And rising over the state capital, the Assumpta Twin Flyovers – a piece of engineering that has become the symbol of a city on the rise.
The economy has moved with the asphalt. Imo sits on the largest proven gas reserves in West Africa, and Uzodimma has turned that endowment into production rather than rhetoric, pressing the drive for energy self-sufficiency, opening the Orashi Special Energy Free Zone to serious investment, and pushing the dredging of the Orashi River towards the Atlantic to give the state its own window to the sea. Where land disputes once frightened investors away, the Imo Land Information Centre replaced a fraud-prone paper system with a clean automated one, so that people can now buy land and go to sleep. Where darkness stalled every ambition, the Light Up Imo Project set out to put round-the-clock power behind the state’s industrial hopes, an effort the Minister of Finance, Wale Edun, standing on Imo soil, called “the real game changer.”
Then there is the matter of the young. While other states are still losing their argument with youth unemployment, Uzodimma went at it with a plan. Through the Imo Digital City and the SkillUp Imo initiative, more than 60,000 young people have been trained for the digital economy. Some now write code for employers overseas and earn in foreign currency without leaving Owerri. Others have built enterprises of their own. Imo has quietly become one of Nigeria’s digital hubs, and it did so while the doubters were still asking whether it could be done.
The same instinct runs through OKOBI – the One Kindred, One Business Initiative – a homegrown idea that asks families and communities to pool what they have and co-own a business rather than wait for a saviour. More than 600 businesses have grown out of it, creating some 20,000 jobs, and the model has now travelled beyond the state’s borders. The Federal Government studied it and adopted it, holding Imo up as a template other states might follow. A governor set out to change the fortunes of his own people and ended up handing the country a method.
Their children have opportunities their parents never had. Four universities, a polytechnic and a college of education now sit within reach of Imo students, with colleges of nursing and midwifery beside them, so that a young person’s future no longer depends on the cost of leaving home.
For the workforce, the change people feel most is the plainest one of all. The salary comes. Uzodimma restored workers’ pay to first-line charge, which means it is settled before the government spends on anything else, and the anxious end-of-month waiting that families once endured has ended. Pensions and gratuities are also paid promptly. Workers and pensioners are carried under a health insurance scheme, and hospitals across the state have been rebuilt, equipped and staffed to catch them when they fall ill.
None of this was won on easy ground. The first three years of his tenure were shadowed by a security crisis that made parts of the state ungovernable and gave Owerri a name no capital wants. Uzodimma refused to accept it as fate. He confronted it, and he outlasted it, and the recovery tells its own story. The city that people once avoided is now the city they choose. When the Nigerian Army, the Nigeria Police, the Nigeria Union of Journalists and the local government employees’ union pick Owerri for their national gatherings, they are ratifying, with their presence, a turnaround that once looked impossible.
Recognition, when it came, simply followed the results. Nigerian newspapers and broadcasters that make a profession of doubting governors, among them The Sun, Vanguard, Channels Television, Silverbird, Leadership, New Telegraph and Independent, named him among their leaders of the year. These are not houses that flatter for free. They sent people to assess, and what those people found in Imo made the argument for them.
The world arrived in December 2025. For the first time in the state’s fifty-year history, Imo hosted an economic summit, and the guest list read like a gathering of the age. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, represented by Vice President Kashim Shettima. President Joseph Boakai of Liberia. Ameenah Gurib-Fakim, the first woman elected as President of Mauritius. Prime Minister Americo Ramos of Sao Tome and Principe. The former British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson. The former United Nations Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon. Aliko Dangote. Wale Edun. Prof. Benedict Oramah of Afreximbank. They came to Owerri, a city some of them had been warned against, and they came because Uzodimma asked them to come and see things for themselves.
What they saw moved them to say so out loud. Boris Johnson told the hall that Nigeria remained one of the most exciting investment prospects in the world, praised Uzodimma’s economic vision without reservation, and answered the security whisper head-on, telling the room he felt perfectly safe in Owerri. Aliko Dangote pledged that his group would partner with Imo in any area the state chose. President Boakai of Liberia, finding in Imo a mirror of his own country, said innovation could become the engine of the state’s transformation. Uzodimma, for his part, rebranded the very letters of the state’s name, telling investors that IMO now stood for “Investment Meets Opportunities”, and that Imo was ready to house their money. It was the day the state stopped asking to be taken seriously and simply was.
From that platform, the honours began to cross oceans.
On July 2 and 3, 2026, in the gilded edifice of the House of Lords at Westminster, one of the oldest seats of power on earth, the story of Imo State was laid before a global audience. The African Leadership Organisation, publishers of African Leadership Magazine and chaired by the former President of Tanzania, His Excellency Dr. Jakaya Kikwete, had chosen Uzodimma for its African Inspirational Leadership and Good Governance award, and it chose that historic building to confer it.
The words the Lords heard were his own. “From Vision to Velocity: Driving Africa’s Next Wave of Growth and Leadership, The Imo State Experience” was Uzodimma’s argument and Uzodimma’s evidence, a governor from the South East of Nigeria making the case for African renewal in the mother of parliaments, and making it well.
In the letter conveying the honour, the Founder and Executive Chairman of African Leadership Magazine, Dr Ken Giami, wrote that Uzodimma had earned it through the design and delivery of the Shared Prosperity Agenda. He credited the Governor with repositioning Imo and standing among Africa’s most forward-looking sub-national leaders, pointing to stronger infrastructure, better public services and wider opportunities for young people and women. The award placed Uzodimma in a small circle of leaders the magazine has honoured and put on its cover, alongside President Julius Maada Bio of Sierra Leone, President Évariste Ndayishimiye of Burundi, President Adama Barrow of The Gambia, and Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia. It is company few sub-national leaders anywhere in Africa can claim.
The second honour reached him in that same hall, and it came from across the Atlantic. The South Carolina House of Representatives in the United States had passed a formal motion commending Uzodimma for his 3R agenda, recognising his investments in roads, urban renewal and digital transformation, and his reforms to ease the business of doing business in the state. The motion named the Assumpta Twin Flyover and the Orashi Energy Free Trade Zone among his signature works, and described him as one of Nigeria’s leading sub-national reformers. Signed by the Speaker, G. Murrell Smith Jr, and the Clerk, Charles F. Reid, it was carried personally to London by the legislator who moved it, Representative Rosalyn D. Henderson-Myers, who presented the plaque in his honour at Westminster. Two continents, an African institution and an American legislature, had reached the same verdict on the same man, and delivered it in the same room on the same occasion.
Reacting to the honours, the businessman and long-time friend of the Governor, Chief Tony Chukwu, called them well – deserved. He said Uzodimma had worked without rest to lift Imo’s infrastructure and its people from the state he met them in, and that a governor who put the economy first had, in doing so, secured the state’s future for a generation to come. Few who have driven on the new roads, or watched the world file into Owerri recently, would argue with him. Similarly, those who have experienced the uninterrupted power supply in and around the capital city of Owerri will admit that Hope Uzodimma is truly a transformative leader who deserves all the recognitions that have come his way, as well as those that are yet to come.
• Udemba is an Owerri based public affairs analyst.
(The Sun)