Dr Kayode Fayemi, the governor of Ekiti State has assured the people of the state that he would leave no stone unturned in his drive to deliver on his campaign promises to them.
The Governor disclosed that his administration would focus more on the rural areas thereby bringing deserved development to the areas through tarring and rehabilitation of roads as well as improvement to the health, education, power sectors and erosion control.
He explained that the meeting was designed to commence the process of inclusive budget preparation for 2020 which was in line with the participatory budgeting model that was established during his first term in office as governor.
Dr. Fayemi, who stated this on Thursday at the consultative meeting held with stakeholders on the 2020 budget held at the three Senatorial Zones of Ekiti North, South and Central assured the people of the state that his government would undertake rehabilitation and tarring of 1000km of rural roads on the Rural Access to Market Programme (RAMP).
He said his administration would also embark on the rehabilitation of 177 Primary Health Centres across the state to strengthen the health care programme adding that he had already got the nod of the World Bank to undergo a number of projects in the state.
Fayemi who disclosed that he had already paid the counterpart fund for 2016 to 2018 to UBEC said that the state already has about N8B in its coffers to embark on the second phase of school buildings renovation and construction for a more conducive teaching and learning environment.
According to the Governor, “I can see that the issue of road came up on the requests of all the communities, these roads are divided into two, the rural roads and township roads. First, I want to assure our people especially, the Royal Fathers that we would work on all the rural roads. We have money to work on one thousand kilometers of rural roads, I have the list here and I’m sure some of the names will be ones that you are very familiar with. We have detail roads in virtually all your communities that we have received significant amount of money from the World Bank to work on in the programme known as Rural Access to Market (RAMP).
“As soon as I came back this time, I have been working with the World Bank team and they visited many of your communities, you may know when they came to your communities, but there is hardly any community that we are not going to embark on a major construction of feeder roads from the farm to the market. And of course on the township roads, we are going to rehabilitate our 5km road in the local governments.
On renovation of schools, building of new schools, I can tell you that there is no community that has a school that is dilapidated or that wants new school block that will not get from this government. Apart from the ones that SUBEB has done, I’ve also gone round myself, so I know the condition of many schools since our last Operation Renovate all Schools that we made during my first term, we would start
Operation Renovate All Schools Second Phase very soon and no doubt, we have the resources to do it. All the counterpart funding that was not paid by Ekiti state government in 2016, 2017, 2018, I have cleared all of it and we have at least 8Billion Naira to work on schools in the state. And we are building four new schools in Ado-Ekiti in 2020.”
Governor Fayemi who also restated his commitment towards ensuring that measures were taken to either prevent or reduce the menace of erosion and flood in the state, said the issue of flood and erosion has affected virtually every community of the state which has caused a lot of unbearable hardship to the people.
“The second issue that came up from all the local governments is gully erosion problem; we’ve seen it in Ado, in Oke Ureje, Omisanjana, but not only in Ado but in our several communities. If you see the topography of Ekiti, it should not surprise us that we have erosion problems in Ekiti because we are in-between hills and valleys and because of that, we can’t cheat nature, we can only prevent and reduce the effect of erosion in our state. But again, we are working hard and we have quite some sizeable amount of money to work on erosion too in the state. So, many of these areas affected by erosion, we would incorporate in the budget 2020 and subsequent budget just as you have highlighted. He said.
“On the issue of poor electricity supply to the state, the governor said he had made a report to both the President and the Vice President and they have promised to seize the license of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company (BEDC). He explained that regular supply of electricity is pivotal to economic and industrial development of any society.
He explained, “Since we came back to office about a year ago, we have done a lot on the issue of electricity, we bought the Managing Director of BEDC to Ekiti and went through all the issues, metering, backlog of payment, transformers, one year down the line, we have not noticed any significant changes in spite of the promise that BEDC made. So for us to take the BEDC matter, the four states covered by them, Delta, Ekiti, Ondo and Edo states. We have to take the matter up with the Vice President and the President, we even asked them to seize some of the equity in that privatized electricity arrangement to us failing which the government should revoke their license and I was happy when I read yesterday that the electricity regulation authority has finally come round to our point and they’ve said they are going to revoke BEDC license. I hope they will do it, we will follow it up.
“And we are exploring other options apart from the national grid; we are looking at solar renewable energy and other alternative so that we can have electricity on a more constant basis.”
On community development, he said at least forty communities have benefited from government’s largess of average of 10million Naira to complete some abandoned projects or start new one in their areas.
The Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning, Mr. Femi Ajayi said the bottom-up approach to budgeting whereby the people were consulted and given the opportunity to suggest programmes and projects gave them the ample opportunity to actively participate in the socio-economic development of the state.
The Commissioner enjoined the representatives of the various communities to make meaningful contributions at the meeting as well as highlight their requests in line with the agenda of government.
Representatives of all the communities in the sixteen local governments commended governor Fayemi for the opportunity and promised him of total support during his administration.
Packaged by Emmanuel Adeniran
