Gov. Obaseki of Edo State

Jethro Ibileke/Benin
Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, has assured the people of the State that his government will not play to the gallery in the implementation of government policies and programmes.

This is even as he promised to evaluate those that would be appointed into state executive council and other government ministries, department and agencies, no matter how highly placed such person would be as he will be evaluated and assessed by the people of the state at the end of his first tenure in office.

The Governor gave the assurance while speaking at the end of a three-day strategy dialogue held in Benin, the State capital, with permanent secretaries, political class, members of the civil society organisations and other stakeholders.

He said; “What we are doing here now is very deliberate and I want to make it abundantly clear that your government under my leadership 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.”

Obaseki expressed his resolve to reduce waste 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 also promised to intensify efforts in revenue collection with a human face to make the tax liability friendly.

He said the objectives of the strategy dialogue workshop was to build consensus, disclosing that in the next six weeks each of the recommendation of the thematic groups will be prioritized, adding 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, governor Obaseki said, even as he shocked the audience by disclosing 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.

“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 need to prioritize each of those thematic areas,” he said.

The Governor listed 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.