Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki weekend assured the people of the state that his government will not play to the gallery in the implementation of government policies and programmes.
BusinessDay reports that the governor made the assurance in a remark to mark the end of the three-day strategy dialogue workshop with permanent secretaries, political class, members of the civil society among others in Benin- City.
“What we are doing here now is very deliberate and I want to make it abundantly clear that your government under my leadership we will not indulge in frivolities neither will we play to the gallery. Let me assure all and sundry that your reports will be comprehensively looked into, studied with actionable projects and programs extracted for implementations”, he said.
Obaseki also promised to evaluate those that would be fortunate to be appointed into state executive council and other political appointees no matter how highly placed such person would be as he will be evaluated and assess by the people of the state at the end of his first tenure in office.
The Governor further promised to cut out wastefulness and untargeted expenditure through efforts at running a transparent, accountable and prudent government to free up resources to enable the implementation of most of the projects identified by the participants at the workshop.
He explained that efforts will be intensified in revenue collection which he noted was a strategy that will be pursued with a human face to make the tax liability friendly.
He opined that the objectives of the strategy dialogue workshop was to build consensus assuring that in the next six weeks each of the recommendation of the thematic group will be prioritized.
The governor added that all the recommendations will be comprehensively looked into and studied with actionable programmes and implementation plan.
“Our promise from the beginning was that we are going to stop and desist from a situation where contractors and service providers will be the one defining government agenda and policies, noting that before the last year’s government policies were driven by the wishes of contractors because they wanted to promote their business interest rather than governance”, he stated.
The plan was to build consensus. So we have built general consensus at high level across six thematic areas. Over the next six weeks we will like need to prioritize each of those thematic areas.
He reeled out four critical consensus of the resource persons at the workshop to include the need to invest in data collections, planning, enforcement of established government laws and implementation and execution of government policies and programmes.
