Being Founders’ Day Lecture delivered at the Western Delta University, Oghara, Delta state on April 29, 2023.It is easier to run for office than to run the office“It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
In times past, it used to be the case that political parties had a common manifesto which stands as the political agenda of the party and the general principles of governance for all the candidates elected on the party’s platform. That’s when the parties were strong and process driven. In the Second Republic we had UPN with its free education, and NPN with its mass housing, etc.
There are three major ways you make money in government: You make, beg or borrow. What you make from your IGR and investment holdings is what you make. Your receipts from federation account and what you may get as grants from international development agencies are unearned incomes, which I classify as begging. Then the loans you are able to obtain are your borrowings. In all categories, Ekiti at the time I took over was in dire straits.
Like a business, the state also has to continue to find new ways of reducing the cost of governance and also of plugging leakages. We refrained from sacking workers because of the obvious political and social cost. Instead, we left exits to natural attrition. By introducing a biometric integrated payroll system, we successfully eliminated the scourge of ghost workers and reduced waste in payroll management.
Although the fiscal headroom for borrowing was significantly reduced by the time I left office, it would have been most difficult, if not outrightly impossible to have accomplished all that we did in Ekiti if we had not adopted this complex mix of financial strategies to fund capital projects that were most needed for the growth and development of the State.
In the end, one can argue that we didn’t completely eradicate poverty in the State, and no one could in the period of two terms in office; independently verifiable evidence however points to a state that has significantly reduced multidimensional poverty. By the time we were leaving, Ekiti ranked fifth out of 36 least affected states by multi-dimensional poverty in the NBS study on multidimensional poverty.
Source: Education Headlines (educationheadlines.net)
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