From Owelle Rochas Okorocha to exuberant Frank Nneji, a leading business mogul who has, from a humble background of industry and enterprise, redefined service delivery in the transport and tourism sectors of the economy. He eminently founded ABC Transport PLC that changed Nigeria’s transport topography and institutionalized, for the first time in the country’s history, best practices in road transport business.

Nneji revolutionized onboard accountabilities vis-à-vis online booking, entertainment, free feeding, speed limiter in all his buses long before it became a statutory issue, cargo express and opened the floodgate of shuttle movement  into Ghana from Nigeria. Our subject today was equally president of Luxury Bus Owners’ Association and a council member at the Nigerian Automotive Council.

This prospective governor is also involved in power, tourism, and agro-industrial processing and mentoring. ABC Transport PLC is also a key strategic partner in the ANAMCO rehabilitation project as the assembling plant is now rolling out notable brand new trucks into the market.

A philanthropist of note and intellectually driven corporate czar, Nneji holds a bachelors degree of zoology from the University of Nigeria Nsukka and has attended several management courses in Ivy League institutions in Europe and the US.

The ABC Group has not less than 10,000 direct workers and about 30,000 indirect employees who are benefitting from this Lion’s ingenuity. He started ABC Transport with one Hummer bus after his NYSC and today the Group has grown to be a reference point in the transport industry in West Africa.

This governor-in-waiting is a leader who has not only contributed to the economic growth of Imo State but to a large extent shaped the good part of the future with his business concerns. Imo State certainly needs an entrepreneur of his clout to halt the present anarchic descent.

You can never give up on a quintessential thing. I declare today that Chief Frank Nneji, a superlative transporter, will, next year, seamlessly clinch the governorship election in Imo State on grounds of his inimitable land flight project popularly known as “ABC Transport”—an unparalleled road facility that is more organized, better administered and clinically managed more than some fledgling airlines (“molues” on flight!).

Some hypercritics of my writings are waiting in the wings to slam me for playing God! They may argue that running a successful motor-line is no guarantee for success in Government House. They could even stretch the argument that owning a highly-successful transport line is utterly incomparable to running a state as Imo.

Another tribe of pessimists would ask me if I was the collective symbol of Imo voters to warrant such an emphatic, nay brazen, assertion. My traducers that I know full well will call it journalistic recklessness and abuse of professional privilege owing to their blissful ignorance about Nneji’s robust entrepreneurial antecedents, profound currencies and illuminative prospects.

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Yet another reader of this column would have the effrontery to question why a columnist from Abia State should be predicting authoritatively what was going to happen in another state. The anticipatory fellow would equally have the bovine intelligence and wild-cat temerity to advise me to face the leadership decadence in God’s Own State and leave “Imo alone”. On this score, I assure such critics that Dr. Alex Otti, a first-class economist, will redeem Abia next year when he becomes the governor, by God’s grace.

My strong conviction is based on the fact that Nneji’s excellent pedigree in the transport sector and business multi-nationalism has already put him on a good stead, unlike other aspirants whose past that we know is only decade-long surrogate service and loyalty to Rochas! I think that Nneji has the competency, capacity and disposition to revolutionize governance if he becomes Imo State governor next year, hopefully, in actualization of this divine mandate to rescue the state from the brinks of collapse.

It is gratifying to underscore the point that Nneji will not disappoint Imolites, his teeming patrons nationwide and in the Diaspora and this columnist who is sticking out his neck to vouch for his potentialities and sublime tendencies to transform the state. If our subject lacked the substance of growing his state, I would not hesitate to say so.

It gives me joy that all the candidates I supported (and still back) on these pages based on my evaluative inclination and interpretative disposition won and did or are doing extremely well (in no particular sequence): Peter Obi, Willie Obiano, Akinwunmi Ambode, Sule Lamido, Shehu Shema, Udom Emmanuel and Seriake Dickson, just to mention a few.

I cannot use this space-constrained column to trumpet Nneji’s achievements which had been well documented by his digital employees through the instrumentality of new media technologies and deployment of traditional platforms for information dissemination. The records of accomplishments keep elongating even as you are reading this testamentary profile informed by utmost dispassion.

I will not be perturbed by opponents of Nneji who will infer that the transport magnate must have compromised me to root for him. The life of a columnist is an endangered one: if you engage in dispassionate interventions you are considered a hack. If you attack your subject, you are accused of working for his detractors in anticipatory recompense or prefatory “settlement”! It is a no-win dilemma, but the joy, for me, is the innermost satisfaction one gets from not belonging to the scurrilous and vicious clan.

The unfortunate aspect of our politics is that most voters—and, indeed, Nigerians—have short memories and tend to forget the invidious roles some office seekers played at one point or another in their political trajectory precedent to subsequent campaigns for political offices. Most times, we elect people we do not know anything about their past and subsequently run into troubled waters.

Pursuant to 2019, I think we are better off with our own (Igbo) party—the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA)—in terms of everything. Let those sheepishly imploring us to move to the centre go their own way and leave us alone. It is better to be a grassroots champion than swim in national self-deception and zonal delusion in the name of following the crowd and getting consigned to irrelevance and lachrymal marginalization.Frankly speaking, Nneji, your victory next year will be as easy as ABC, I assure you on behalf of Imolites! Let the massive electioneering begin now…the earlier, the better, our incoming governor, by God’s grace. You have a superfluity of goodwill because of your ABC platform. Nneji, “Imo 2019” is a platter for you to render more service to humanity, don’t let it slip.

It is pertinent to point out that the only difference in terms of onboard logistical arrangements between a standard airline and ABC is the air-road distinction. Having flown most airlines, some of them do not have comparable in-flight regime to ABC’s. On Nneji Imolites stand except we want the worsening systemic rot to continue!