Federal and State Government have made move to reduce the cost of governance.
Responding to questions at a news briefing shortly after the meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) at the Presidential villa, Abuja, today, July 20, the Anambra State Governor, Professor Charles Soludo said however that discussions on it would continue.
“I think it’s an omnibus concept, and it’s not something you sit down in a meeting to legislate for each and every state.
“But the fact that the council recognizes that this is an issue that each tier of government should now focus on as an area of concern. That we must look at the cost of running the state.
“The way we even live, some gave an example of a state governor going with 20 something vehicles in a convoy and all these have to be fueled, and so on and so forth.
“And the fact that we’re even amongst ourselves almost like in a peer review, kind of setting to talk to ourselves is a good development.
“We would need to be sensitive to the times; we need to live within the average of the people that we’re governing, so on and so forth. We need to knockoff the waste and the irrelevances so to speak.
“I will like to give you a simple example and I’m going to legislate it for everybody (Governor) to go and look into his mind.
“When I assumed office, for example, it was costing about N137 million every month to clean up public offices, and so on. Today, in Anambra, we’re doing N11 million a month, from N137 million on a monthly basis. This is just an illustration.
“And it’s a thing that we are persuading each and every one of us to look into. “Check into our books and look ourselves in the mirror and move with the times.
“It’s not that the council sat and begin to prescribe. We didn’t get to that but each person will do that.”
