A man lay under theatre lights in Umuguma, Owerri, on Friday, 21 August. He carried a diagnosis that would once have forced him onto a plane abroad.
He left that same day without a single drop of blood lost, the latest beneficiary of a robotic surgery procedure that would have been impossible in Imo only a few years ago. Every nerve controlling his bladder and his intimacy remained intact, as Professor Kingsley Ekwueme told journalists at the Imo Robotics and Oncology Centre.
Ekwueme led the robotic surgery himself. He is the UK-based surgeon who returned home to perform Imo’s first robotic-assisted surgery.
It was, by every account, a genuine first. No robotic surgery had ever been carried out in Imo State before that Friday, and Vanguard reported that the procedure, performed on a man diagnosed with prostate cancer, unfolded without a cut, without blood loss and without nerve damage.
Ekwueme described the outcome to the newspaper in language rarely heard inside a Nigerian public hospital. Patients, he insisted, should never again endure incontinence or lost intimacy simply because a state lacked the tools to spare them.
That robotic surgery operation says more about where Imo has arrived than any campaign speech could. The centre sits inside a rebuilt Specialist Hospital Complex that now houses expanded intensive care units, modern diagnostic suites and a dedicated oncology wing, according to a statement from the governor’s media office carried by ThisDay.
The success of the robotic surgery programme has immediately placed Owerri among a small number of locations in Nigeria offering such advanced procedures.
Ekwueme, an indigene of the state who built his career in Wales, told The Sun the project was delivered through a public-private partnership. Its purpose, he said, is to stop patients from ever needing to leave Imo for treatment Owerri can now provide.
None of this happened by accident. Governor Hope Uzodimma has spent his tenure pushing healthcare as a central plank of his wider 3R agenda of reconstruction, rehabilitation and recovery.
Channels Television reported that the governor personally briefed newsmen at Government House before the surgery took place. He framed it as one strand of a broader push that also covers MRI and CT scan capacity, mammography services and an internal medical oxygen system for when the grid fails.
He has tied much of this to the state health insurance scheme. New machines mean little, he argues, if ordinary families cannot afford to use them.
The arrival of robotic surgery is only the most dramatic example of a wider pattern visible across Imo. Roads once abandoned to potholes and floodwater have been reconstructed. A digital economy programme has pulled thousands of young residents into technology training, device assembly and online enterprise.
Aides now point to that programme as evidence that Owerri can compete for investment beyond agriculture and the civil service. Aviation and power projects have followed the same logic, treating infrastructure as groundwork rather than a photo opportunity.
That phrase, a decade from now, is where the harder political question begins. Roads need maintenance long after ribbons are cut. A robotic surgery unit needs trained staff and spare parts for years after the first patient goes home cured.
Sustaining a robotic surgery programme requires far more than purchasing equipment. It demands long-term planning, specialist training and consistent funding.
A digital economy scheme needs universities and technology firms to keep partnering with government long after the cameras leave. None of this survives on one administration’s enthusiasm alone. It survives on whoever comes next understanding what has been built, and why it must not be allowed to stall.
The Ohakim Question
This is where the conversation naturally turns to Ohakim, the former governor whose name keeps resurfacing whenever Imo people discuss who should carry the state past 2027. The case for Ohakim rarely rests on nostalgia.
It rests on something more practical. Ohakim has already sat in the Government House chair. Ohakim has already dealt with the Imo bureaucracy, and already learned how difficult it is to keep a development agenda alive once the initial excitement fades.
In recent years, Ohakim has positioned himself less as a rival to the current administration and more as someone urging that its projects be finished rather than abandoned. That posture matters more than it first appears.
Nigerian politics has a tired habit of governors dismantling whatever their predecessors built, sometimes purely to prove a point. A candidate who explicitly rejects that habit, and who has the administrative memory to know which projects deserve protection, offers something Imo cannot take for granted.
There is also the question of readiness for complexity. Running a robotic surgery centre, negotiating with international medical partners, sustaining a health insurance scheme and managing a digital economy programme all at once demands a governor who understands how government machinery actually moves.
That is a different skill from sounding good at a rally. Ohakim’s years in Government House, whatever their imperfections, gave Ohakim exposure to precisely that machinery.
His public statements since leaving office suggest a man who has spent the intervening years studying what worked and what did not. That kind of reflection is rare in Nigerian politics, where second acts often repeat first mistakes.
None of this settles the argument on its own. Imo voters will weigh Ohakim against other contenders, and they should weigh Ohakim carefully.
But as the state moves from laying foundations to defending them, the question changes shape. It stops being who can promise the most, and becomes who can be trusted not to let Imo’s first robotic surgery breakthrough in Umuguma turn into another abandoned facility.
For a growing number of Imo people, that question keeps pointing back to one name: Ikedi Ohakim.
