When Pastor Umo Eno Empowered Crawling Jones
By Ekomobong Peter
Jones has no foot for shoes, yet he is too creative to allow his stoutly stylish Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Pastor Umo Eno, a step without some pairs of bespoke designs shoes.
Today, eight hundred entrepreneurs gathered after completing months of rigorous business training and certification by IBOM LED.
With this Leadership and Entrepreneurial Development Center,they did not have to travel to Lagos to attend Lagos Business School. Neither did they have to part with hundred of thousands for such sort after masterclasses.
The entrepreneur Pastor Umo Eno has put the structure, makes available funding, and further attract best brains to chisel ignorance and superstition out of the minds of those he would be proud to call my Ambassadors. So the journey for the making of a new community has started with business as the centerpiece.
Each of these 800 graduands benefits from the pool of 400 million naira. To each, a seed of 500 thousand naira is committed to growing their businesses. These Ambassadors from the Entrepreneurship Accelerator Programme (EAP), are ready to leap out of poverty after series of mentorship to set a new paradigm as a community of business leaders and wealth creators.
Amongst those cheerful entrepreneurs is one Jones. Like everyone in that cohort, Jones’ sight refuses to see disabilities. Whether he leaps or crawl is immaterial. He saw a season, and an opportunity with a governor who crawled from a five room to leading a sterling consortium of hospitality brands before public service forced him to step aside.
Pastor Umo Eno whose message remains, “If I can, then you can’ . . says he is committed to lifting five thousand crawling Joneses to enviable heights of business leadership, and a realm of Independence where poverty no longer recognizes their address if they stoop to conquer. . .
Jones could have abandoned his race to success. Competing on the tartan with turbo racers would have curried sympathy. Some would have excused him for dropping out, after all, while some drove or taxied for months to this business school, his was a daily communion with the dust and floods. But as they say, there’s a day for everybody. Today was Jones’s.
On the roll call for different categories of cheque presentation was the CEO JONES SHOE MANUFACTURING. He has raced to the finishing line, and would never let go. He knew he needed a renewed vigor to set new record as another race begins.
Smart and grateful Jones did something instructive while crawling to receive his cheque from a trailblazing governor who humanizes politics while running government as business.
He(Jones) would not pontificate value with nothing, not when EAP slogan is PREMIUM OR NOTHING… with him was his signature bespoke shoes for Mr Style. Of course the ever stylish Pastor Umo Eno receiving his gift, raised Jones’s bespoke with admiration while ovation rain from the crowd.
At that point it was certain for many who follow Umo Eno keenly that an end has come where all Jones does is watch haplessly at the pool of favour whenever the waters are stirred. Umo Eno in his time- tested humility, bend towards Jones, smiling at his new found friend. We have seen him do this over and again.
He again beat the gulf between his towery statue, and Jones’s diminishing height. There, he handed this creative tug a cheque of 500 hundred thousand naira, directed the Health Commissioner to ensure Jones is mobile. Not done, “Mr Compassion”, as he is popularly called, laced Jones’s bouquet of seed fund with extra One Million.
No doubts, Pastor Umo Eno has proved his heartbeat for Akwa Ibom people is entrepreneurship, knowledge transfer and wealth creation. It took Umo Eno’s arrival to Hiltop Mansion for Bank of Industry (BOI) to find their way to Akwa Ibom State where a startup of over two billion went to their vault to support small and medium businesses in the state.
Not done, the governor direct commencement of programmes at the Dakkada Skills Acquisition Center to train and certify youths to skill up Nigeria’s economy.
This center which is affiliated to University of Lagos will start activities on May 20th and is expected to service a number of industries and households thereby empowering their trainees, generate revenue and be self sufficient.
This center’s faculty include Confectionery/Culinary; Fabrication; Animal Husbandry; Production etc. This center will compliment IBOM LED whose fashion faculty is making thousands of uniforms for pupils and students in public schools as well as footwears as school resumes.
With these structures and more, Umo Eno has infused life into the arteries of local businesses thereby strengthening the feeble limps of many Joneses to ARISE above cultural, economic, social and mental limitations through a Special Purpose Vehicle of the golden era called is the ARISE AGENDA
