Dear Mr. Onwuka, I read your op-ed on the back page of Tuesday’s edition of The Punch newspaper.
By way of introduction, I am the current Special Adviser on property and investments and concurrently the Managing Director of the Ogun State Property Investment Corporation.
As you rightly stated, we are fully aware of our proximity advantages to Lagos State and the current administration has done a lot in the areas of infrastructure and urban development to maximise these advantages.
Contrary to your assumption, OPIC, which is the largest public development corporation in Nigeria, has over the last eight years been enabled to maximise its full potential and this has resulted in several notable achievements.
For example, during this administration and for the first time in almost 24 years, we built and rebuilt over 20 kilometres of road network within the OPIC Agbara/Igbesa Industrial Estate. Currently, the state government is working with limited resources to rebuild the badly decrepit Igbesa Road to further enable us unlock trapped value.
Similarly, the Ogun State Government invested in over 100 km of roads traversing the Sango -Ota axis to unlock the development potential there. These efforts led to the development of the Palm Ota Mall.
Let me hasten to note that the Ojodu-Akute- Alagbole axis was also opened up with ongoing, albeit unfinished, road networks and grade separator flyovers.
Coming back to the popular Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, a new state road opening up the Mowe-Ibafo axis bypassing the expressway and leading to Papalanto was built by the Ibikunle Amosun administration.
We built the award-winning 750-hectare New Makun City at KM 53/55 along the expressway. This new city was promptly sold out and it is home to 1,020 affordable houses currently under development in partnership with the Federal Government-sponsored Family Homes Funds Limited.
In Isheri, we are also developing the Isheri commercial city with an arterial road network and a pilot phase of 180 apartments called MTR Gardens, which are already almost sold out to the public.
The state government has also encouraged a zoning and redistricting of communities across that axis and concurrently commissioning and /or building roads linking many of such communities.
Essentially, in eight years, a lot has been done to attack and stop the degradation of Ogun State and aggressively encourage investment in it. These efforts have attracted so many companies, as you rightly noted, and it is only through such efforts that the state becomes a place of choice.
We have done our part to reframe the Ogun success story and it would be nice for you in the media to do same with a more objective assessment of progress made.
Let me end by personally inviting you to visit any of these locations or join me for a luxury drive one of these weekends.
Babajide Odusolu,
Special Adviser/Managing Director,
OPIC, Ogun State
END
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