President Bola Tinubu has described the 100 million dollars Southeast gas pipeline project as a strategic investment that would strengthen manufacturing and unlock economic opportunities across the five states.
Tinubu made this at the investment signing ceremony of the project on Tuesday in Enugu.
The president, represented by Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Benjamin Kalu, said the project will also boost industrialisation, attract investments and create jobs in the South East.
themomentng reports that the 400km pipeline is designed to connect gas resources to industrial and commercial centres across Enugu, Anambra, Imo, Abia and Ebonyi .
“The Southeast’s entrepreneurial spirit is one of Nigeria’s greatest economic assets. I have always believed that the prosperity of the Southeast is inseparable from the prosperity of Nigeria,” he said.
He said the project aligned with his administration’s commitment to building an integrated regional economy, stressing that gas infrastructure should support industrial development across state boundaries rather than serve isolated markets.
“Gas infrastructure must therefore serve industries and markets, not stop at political boundaries. That is the economic logic of regional integration,” he added.
He said the pipeline would benefit manufacturers in Aba, strengthen industrial clusters in Nnewi and Onitsha, attract productive enterprises to Enugu, expand agro-processing and manufacturing in Ebonyi and connect Imo’s gas resources to the wider regional economy.
He, however, said the ambition extended beyond supplying existing factories to creating the conditions for new industries, industrial parks and investments that had stalled because of unreliable energy supply.
“Our ambition is not simply to deliver gas to existing factories. It is to make possible factories that do not yet exist, industrial parks yet to be developed, and investments that have remained on the drawing board because reliable energy was unavailable,” Tinubu said.
He described the South-East Development Commission (SEDC) as an institution established to deliver measurable development outcomes, urging it to assess its performance by the investments it mobilised, infrastructure it enabled, opportunities it created and lives it improved.
The president said the South-East Vision 2050 development framework, supported by Vice-President Kashim Shettima and the governors of the region, provided a foundation for coordinated economic growth.
He commended the SEDC for committing three million dollars to the gas project and establishing a framework to mobilise additional investments from state governments, institutions and private investors.
He said the project’s initial phase required approximately $100 million, describing the partnership between public institutions and private investors as essential to developing sustainable infrastructure.
Earlier, Gov. Peter Mbah commended Tinubu for establishing the SEDC, describing the commission as the institutional vehicle needed to realise the Southeast’s longstanding industrialisation aspirations.
“Tinubu loves the Igbo people. The SEDC is a commission whose time has come. It was an idea conceived many decades ago, but it took President Tinubu to establish this long-awaited dream of industrialisation of the Southeast,” Mbah said.
He described the signing of the investment agreement as the commencement of the investment process, adding that the initiative would help realise the region’s aspiration for a common market and coordinated industrial development.
Mbah, who said he was excited that the project was advancing less than 13 months after he publicly advocated the idea, praised the commission for adopting an innovative financing model that brings governments and private investors together.
Also speaking, Imo Deputy Governor Lady Chinyere Ekomaru, who represented Gov. Hope Uzodimma, commended Tinubu and the SEDC for initiating the project, noting that Imo’s substantial natural gas resources placed the state in a strategic position to benefit.
Uzodimma said the project was coming at an opportune time, particularly as companies were seeking to become offtakers of gas from the Assa North–Ohaji South development.
He urged residents to consider the Federal Government’s infrastructure investments in the Southeast in making their political choices ahead of the 2027 general elections.
Anambra Deputy Governor, Dr Onyekachukwu Ibezim, representing Gov. Chukwuma Soludo, commended the commission but stressed that its success would ultimately be determined by its impact on the people.
Soludo noted that states across the region had gas resources that could support industrial growth if properly developed, calling on communities along the pipeline route to embrace the project and cooperate with its promoters.
Similarly, Ebonyi Deputy Governor Mrs. Patricia Obila, representing Gov. Francis Nwifuru described energy as fundamental to industrial growth, lamenting that inadequate power supply had contributed to the decline of several enterprises in the region.
Nwifuru expressed the Ebonyi government’s readiness to support the project, promising to provide the necessary cooperation to facilitate its implementation and help moribund companies resume operations.
“We will give you all the support needed to operate in Ebonyi to ensure that our moribund companies return back to operations,” he said.
In his address, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of SEDC, Mark Okoye, said the commission had conducted technical, financial and legal due diligence before committing funds to the project, which received approval from its governing board.
Okoye said the commission was targeting aggregate regional investment participation of up to 30 million dollars, including its initial three million dollars commitment, as part of efforts to mobilise the private capital required to advance the project.
He said the initiative aligned with the commission’s industrialization program and its commitment to developing infrastructure that would benefit the entire region.
Representing GasSync, the project promoter, Callistus Mba said the pipeline would connect gas resources close to the Southeast to industrial users across the five states.
This, he said, would reduce dependence on the expensive transportation of compressed natural gas (CNG) and liquefied natural gas (LNG) by road.
Mba said the proposed network would originate from the Ohaji area of Imo, run through Owerri and branch towards Aba in Abia State and Onitsha in Anambra, with extensions to Enugu and Ebonyi.
He said the company planned to begin construction at two points simultaneously to accelerate delivery, following concerns raised by Enugu State Mbah that constructing the entire network sequentially from Imo could delay gas supply to other states.
“We are going to start at Ohaji and Onitsha at the same time,” Mba said, explaining that the approach would allow construction towards Enugu and Ebonyi to progress alongside work on the Imo and Anambra sections.
He said the company had identified about 150 prospective customers across the region and was engaging industries to secure demand for the gas, including manufacturing companies, power-generation facilities and agro-processing businesses.
Mba cited Geometric Power in Abia among the companies with which engagement was already underway.
He added that the pipeline would support efforts to revive moribund industries in Enugu and develop agro-processing facilities in Ebonyi.
On the project timeline, he said procurement activities had begun, funding arrangements were advancing towards financial close, and preparations for engineering, procurement and construction were progressing.
