I came back from Onitsha and Aba where I had gone to seek advertisers for my campus news magazine, FUTO Bubbles, which I edited and published during my undergraduate program in FUTO Owerri. When I returned, I got the message that Prof SOE Ogbogu had been looking for me (no GSM then). I went to see him, and he handed me an offer package, and told me that Bourdex came, and wanted to hire three students.
He negotiated that the best student should be excluded from any interview out of respect for his department [the heritage of FUTO]. He had signed the job offer for me with no consultation, and I was to resume in 9 months in the company.
Nine months later, I defended my final year project on Friday, and on Sunday I moved to Aba, from the hostel, to begin work. On that Monday, the first assignment was to go to Star Paper Mill plant, to help set up a CDMA phone. When we got into the compound, I saw the influence of the legendary Nnanna Kalu. If you want to write The Men Who Built Aba, he will have a big page, in the same way people have written The Men Who Built America.
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But Star Paper Mill was fading and later largely faded. The bad debts company, AMCON, came over….and Star Paper Mill went off the grid! But there seems to be hope, courtesy of Abia State Government:
“As we speak, we know that Star Paper Mill has been taken over by AMCON. Let me announce that the State Government entered into a discussion with AMCON and as we speak, we have made an offer to AMCON to buy back Star Paper Mill. So, one thing you can take to the bank is that under our watch, Star Paper Mill will be back,” Gov. Alex Otti of Abia State.
Yes, Star Paper Mill is coming back. It needs to come back, just as we want those in Ibadan, Kano, etc to return. A producing Nigeria will save Naira because the strength of Naira does not come from the CBN headquarters but from factories and warehouses (modern, old, digital) across Nigeria. If Star Paper Mill, Umuahia Ceramics, etc return, Naira will get more strategic injections. Scale that around the nation, Naira will get the jackets to swim in the international ocean of currencies.
Abia is Working >> Invest in Abia as the state begins the second phase of the playbook which is going to be big as I noted in July here.
Ndubuisi Ekekwe
Member, Abia State Global Economic Advisory Council
Abia State Opens Phase 2 of Governor Otti’s Abia Development Playbook
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