By Ugo Aliogo
The adoption of direct labour in the execution of projects in Ebonyi State by Governor Dave Umahi, has curbed wastage and stemmed corruption usually emanating from inflated contracts.
Speaking in Lagos recently, the Ebonyi State Commissioner of Information, Mr. Uchenna Orji, explained that the governor would not have achieve half of what he has done if he had adopted the same old ways of executing projects, arguing that this approach has saved the state huge sums with added value.
“The state governor understands prudence, and due process. The governor is a man of great accountability and probity. The Budget Office said that governor Umahi’s administration has no debt record and that is why we have opportunities of accessing grants from donor agencies and development partners whether nationally and internationally,” he said.
“Of course, if there are relevant financial grants from the federal government, we access such grants because we have no debt record because it is part of the laurels that he got. This has also helped us. When the World Bank assessment programme, Safe Tax, assessed states on budget performance, we were among the four best states in budget performance, and we got N2 billion as a grant from the World Bank,” he added.
According to the commissioner, it is all about ingenuity, noting that the governor has zero tolerance for waste, embezzlements, and corruption. “But above all, his passion to supervise his work. To carry out any construction work in Ebonyi state, you must commit to doing a good work, and anytime the work collapses or fail you must come back.
Of course there is commitment where you sign a post-dated cheque, where you state that if you don’t do the work very well it will count against you (retention), so that has helped our governor. Again, the issue of monitoring and evaluation is very perfect,” he said.
Speaking on a recent report released by BudgetIT, which ranked states according to their budget performances, Orji noted that “a look at the performance index by the Budget Office, Office of the Federal Ministry of Finance, shows that the governor and the government of Ebonyi State took the first position in the implementation of capital projects, among the 36 States of the federation.
“In the area of prudent use of scarce resources, our dear governor took the first position among the States of the federation. In the area of transparency and accountability in budgeting, the governor took the first position. In the area of general performance among the States of the federation, the governor took the first position,” Orji said.
On the heightened insecurity in the South-east region, the commissioner pointed out that “Before now, we use to hear about communal clashes, but today, it has come to a total halt. Ebube Agu is the main secret behind it. So what was reported in the media was a case of clamping down on hoodlums who were terrorizing the community, and if they were people that got gun shots or were casualties, whose faulty was it?
“What is important here is that Ebube Agu has given the security architecture a new phase and dimension. Do you know that our governor does not joke with the security of the state. I want to state here that Ebonyi state is the calmest place among the States of the South-east. Even in the face of violent agitations, Ebonyi remains the calmest among five states of the zone. But the governor had to fortify the security architecture,” he pointed out.
