Nigeria: Enugu and the Architecture of Self-Sustaining Development - Building a Future, Not Just a Government
Op-Ed By Chinedu Anarado
Every week, my job requires me to sit with policymakers, development partners, and researchers across Africa wrestling with the same foundational challenge: how do you build a system - an education system, a health system, an economy - when the state is structurally dependent on external transfers and chronically short of the domestic resources needed to sustain it? The answer everyone agrees on, in theory, is domestic resource mobilisation. The gap between theory and practice, across most of the continent, remains wide. Which is why what is unfolding in Enugu State, south-east Nigeria, deserves analytical attention.
Governor Peter Mbah came to office in May 2023, inheriting a state generating N26.8 billion ($21 million) annually in internally generated revenue, placing it in the bottom third of Nigeria's 36 states and structurally reliant on federal allocation transfers to fund basic operations. By the end of 2025, that figure had reached N406.77 billion ($299 million). The trajectory tells its own story: N37.4 billion ($27.5 million) in 2023, N180.5 billion ($132.6 million) in 2024, and N406.77 billion ($299 million) in 2025.
What is important, however, is not the number itself but the story behind it. Of the N406.77 billion, tax revenue accounted for only N51.5 billion ($37.8 million) which is 12.6 percent of the total. The rest came from the recovery of natural resources and the revival of dormant state assets: land, property, licences and levies that had existed on paper for decades. The money had largely already been there. What had been missing was the institutional will and the technical systems to capture it. BudgIT's 2025 State of States Report drew the logical conclusion: Enugu is now the most probable state in Nigeria to finance its operating expenses exclusively from internally generated revenue, without relying on its federal allocation.
That fiscal foundation matters enormously. But fiscal reform without a coherent vision for what the revenue is meant to build is just better accounting. What distinguishes the Enugu story from a narrow technocratic exercise is the scale and coherence of what the administration is attempting to construct on top of it. Enugu is not simply trying to improve services. It is attempting something more structurally ambitious: to reposition itself as a continental city: globally open, economically self-sustaining, and competitive in the industries that will define the next quarter-century. But there is a context to this ambition. Enugu was a colonial city. The colonial economy was built on coal mining. It aggregated skills from the entire eastern region, giving it an indisputable position as the capital of eastern Nigeria. This position is crucial, as it forms the basis for the ambition not just of the city, but of the entire south-east region.
At the onset of Mbah’s government, he stated his goal as growing Enugu's GDP from $4.4 billion to $30 billion within eight years, through private-sector-led growth, industrialisation, digital innovation, and full value extraction from the state's assets above and below ground. To achieve a target of that scale requires removing the structural barriers that have historically made Nigerian states unattractive to investment. Within two years of governance reform, Enugu moved from 36th to 6th position in national ease of doing business rankings, with improvements in land administration, tax transparency, and regulatory predictability. The digitisation of land administration has unlocked dormant capital by allowing property owners to use land as collateral for commercial loans.
The budget architecture reinforces the seriousness of the intent. Of the ₦1.62 trillion 2026 budget ($1.2 billion), 80 percent is allocated to capital expenditure, with recurrent spending held at just 20 percent, an inversion of the pattern that dominates Nigerian public finance, where salaries and overheads crowd out investment year after year.
Behind that budget structure lies a further question that any serious city-scale economic vision must answer: energy. No industrial or digital economy is credible without reliable power, and Nigeria's chronic electricity deficit has broken more development plans than any policy failure. Here again, Enugu has moved structurally. The state became the first subnational in Nigeria to establish an operational electricity market, following constitutional and electricity act amendments that transferred power from the exclusive list to the concurrent list, enabling states to participate across the full generation, transmission, and distribution value chain. Groundbreaking for a 660MW coal-fired power plant, leveraging the state's own high-quality coal deposits, is set for July.
It is within this broader economic architecture that Enugu's education investments take on their fullest meaning. The Smart Green Schools project - 260 schools, one in each political ward, integrating digital classrooms, robotics and artificial intelligence labs, e-libraries, and smart farms designed as complete ecosystems for experiential learning - is not simply a social sector commitment. It is the human capital pipeline for the kind of economy the administration is trying to build. For three consecutive budget cycles, Enugu has allocated over 30 percent of its total budget to education, a commitment maintained consistently even as the overall budget has grown. The administration is also partnering with the Nigerian Communications Commission to establish an Artificial Intelligence Institute, with the explicit ambition of positioning Enugu as a producer, not merely a consumer, of AI-driven economic value. In the policy communities I work across, we often talk about the alignment between education systems and labour market demand. In Enugu, that alignment appears to be a deliberate design principle rather than an aspiration.
Intellectual honesty, however, requires naming the execution gap. As of May 2026, independent assessments found that many of the Smart Green Schools had not yet been physically completed or fully equipped for academic activities, despite several announced opening dates. The $30 billion economy target is a strategic direction, not a near-term outcome. These are not reasons to dismiss what is being built. These are reasons to distinguish clearly between the structural decisions being made and the timeline for their full realisation, and to recognise that the more significant achievement is the ambition and decision architecture itself: the consistent prioritisation of long-term capital investment over short-term political signalling. This is what we are missing in our development drive.
That distinction is what makes this relevant beyond Nigeria. Across Africa, the conversation about education finance, health investment, and economic transformation is dominated by discussions about overseas development assistance, multilateral lending, and external resource mobilisation. These matter. But they are inherently contingent and subject to geopolitical currents, conditionality frameworks, and donor priorities that rarely align cleanly with a country's own developmental agenda. Most African countries are yet to recover from the shock of the shutdown of USAID. But an Africa beyond aid is the sort of future political leadership must now ready itself for. I am glad to see the city I grew up in understands this new normal.
The deeper question that Enugu is attempting to answer is whether a government can build enough internal revenue integrity to make its own choices, on its own timeline, without waiting for external permission to invest in its own people. At the subnational level, the answer appears to be a resounding yes, if the institutional will exists to digitise systems, eliminate leakage, revive dormant assets, and direct what is collected toward long-term investment rather than political consumption.
Nigeria has 36 governors. Most of them operate in the same enabling environment, the same regulatory framework and the same federal fiscal architecture. The variable that explains the difference is not geography or natural endowment but the decision to govern carefully, invest in systems, and resist the capture of public resources by short-term political incentives. Fifty-four countries on this continent are working through variants of the same problem. The question worth asking, as we approach the next cycle of education finance summits and domestic resource mobilisation pledges, is not whether the Enugu model is replicable. It clearly is. The question is whether there is the political will to do so.
Chinedu Anarado is an education policy executive. He works with the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA); a policy forum on education in Africa, based in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire.