On Thursday, 23rd of June, Gov. Soludo commissioned a 500m Amansea-Ugwuoba Old road, a road built with the money saved from cutting the cost of facility management after one month.
For proper perspective, the Facility management account is the account that houses money meant for the maintenance of government offices which was placed by the previous administration at NGN137,000,000 (one hundred and thirty-seven million naira) monthly!
With that amount of money monthly, you’d think that Anambra State Government’s offices are on rented spaces or that they built new structures for the offices because what manner of maintenance would cost 137 million naira monthly? That is 1.6B naira annually and (if this atrocity took off on the day Willie Obiano was inaugurated governor) approximately 13B naira for the course of his 8-year rule.
This has been cut down by Gov. Soludo to 11 million naira leaving the state with a 126 million naira. According to him, the money has been deployed to the rehabilitation of failed roads in the State.
It’s no rocket science to infer that the actual cost of running the State’s government offices under Willie Obiano’s administration (factor in the present inflation rate at 17%) was less than 10 million naira monthly!
As a matter of conscience, Willie Obiano owes Ndị Anambra an explanation for what happened to about 127 million naira of taxpayers’ money monthly for God knows how long.
Willie Obiano set back Anambra State to the early 2000s even after all the progress of his predecessor, Mr. Peter Obi, in reducing the cost of governance to the barest minimum.
With Governor Charles Soludo, we can only hope that Anambra State is back on track in cutting the cost of governance for the general good of Ndị Anambra.
It is also worthy of note that Gov. Soludo relieved hundreds of teachers, who according to the Commissioner of Education were dubiously employed by Obiano’s administration without proper screening or data capturing.
The good news for the people of Anambra is that Soludo’s administration will have about 1.5B naira annually which normally goes to the pockets of a few to deploy in the rehabilitation of potholes festered roads that were ignored by the previous administration, and also other sectors like Education, Health, Agriculture.
If deployed only for the rehabilitation of roads, Ndị Anambra will have roughly 6 kilometers of motorable roads added to their road network annually (using the 500 meter Amansea-Ugwuoba Old road as a metric)
A new Anambra awaits!
