Dr. Godwin Maduka is a US based business Tycoon and a great philanthropist who always bring back home .
According to Dr. Maduka ” I have never nursed any political ambition at all in my life. I have always wanted to retire a much fulfilled medical doctor but something happened to me when I first came to Nigeria from the US many years ago, I had started working by then after graduating from medical school in Harvard University, so when I came to Umuchukwu, things were so bad. It was all about poverty, despair, and underdevelopment. I was so sad about that visit and I promised myself that I won’t allow the village where I grew up to remain the same. It was out of “positive anger” that I decided to build a semblance of an American city. So if you go to Umuchukwu today, you’ll see that that “anger” has paid off. I’m worried and sad again, not against anybody, but sad about poverty and underdevelopment in Anambra State. I have clarity of vision of the kind of development; I want to bring in Anambra state. Anambra people are very special people, we are like the heart of Igbo land, and when things are not going very well here, there’s the possibility that other places in Igbo land will be affected. We need the best man for the job now. To be frank, the next couple of years won’t be so easy in Nigeria, so we need leaders who can think outside the box in their effort to provide solutions. I tell people always that people who approach leadership with that kind of angry disposition are always the best. Prof Dora Akunyili (God bless her soul) lost her sister as a result of fake drugs, and when she was made the DG of NAFDAC, she fought the circulation of fake drugs with such a ferocious determination. I call it “positive anger,” the kind of anger that gives you the motivation to go the whole hog, not the one that encourages a person to harm, malign people for selfish reasons. It is not the kind of energy that pushes you towards brigandage or any dastardly acts. It should be a motivation to create new developmental imprints while consolidating and building upon the efforts of your predecessors.
I have a very clear vision of what I want to do in Anambra state. Umuchukwu is a perfect test run of what we want to do on a larger scale in Anambra; it is a progressive experiment. The other day, I was reading an article from someone who came to Umuchukwu to understudy the things we have done. He said that Umuchukwu is simply a replica of the Sustainable Development Goals. What more is governance if not Healthcare, Justice delivery system, Security, Housing, Education, Ease of doing business, and other little but outstanding innovations”.
Excerpts from Dr. Godwin Maduka’s Interview with Newsmen.
