The  Port Harcourt Chamber of Commerce, Industry, Mines and Agriculture (PHCCIMA) was established in 1957 as an interest group with the objective of articulating business interests in the Niger Delta region and its environ in their transitional period to a post-colonial Nigeria, and thereafter.
The Ebonyi story reads much like the text of a modern epic. It is the story of a people who found themselves at the receiving end of history and their heroic efforts to change the debilitating circumstances of their existence by taking their destiny in their own hands. Like Ebonyi River, from which the State took its name, the history of Ebonyi State is the history of motion and movement, whose tidal flow maintained a continuum in and out of seasons. Historically, the geographical area today known as Ebonyi State is formerly a part of the old Ogoja Province which had Abakaliki as a government station for the administration of the surrounding localities in the then Eastern Region. With Nigeria’s independence in 1960, the area attained a Provincial status comprising of three Divisions namely: Abakaliki, Afikpo and Obubara. Following the splitting of the former East Central State into Imo and Anambra States in 1976 by the Federal Government of Nigeria, Abakaliki Province was balkanized into two with Abakaliki Division as an appendage of Anambra State while Afikpo Division was attached to Imo State. In 1991, another State creation exercise took place, giving birth to Abia and Enugu States within the Igbo heartland. On account of that exercise, the Local Government Areas, which constituted the former Abakaliki Division, were placed in Enugu State while the ones in the former Afikpo Division were made part of Abia State. That was the situation until October 1996 when Ebonyi State was created, thereby bringing back together brothers and sisters from the old Abakaliki Province who were scattered in the wilderness by the circumstances of history and politics. Today, Ebonyi has become the proverbial stone rejected by the builders, which turned out to be the cornerstone. Click here to read more