Edo State Governor, Mr Godwin Obaseki, has charged members of the State Executive Council and heads of Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the state, to step up strategies to boost revenue generation to meet their revenue targets.
Obaseki gave the charge while addressing EXCO members and heads of MDAs during a two-day retreat at the John Odigie-Oyegun Public Service Academy in Benin City.
The retreat is aimed at examining and reviewing the state government’s performance in the first six months of 2022.
The governor reiterated the need to cut down waste and increase the state’s revenue base to enable the government run effectively and deliver on its campaign promises to the Edo people.
He said, “In this retreat, we are projecting the future of the state. Each agency should have been able to develop a scorecard and key performance indicators that are measurable. We have not achieved the revenue we planned to earn in the first half of the year 2022, yet our expenditure has continued to run.
“We need to do something fast or else before the year runs out, we will run out of money. We must ensure that we earn enough to run the government and we need to cut down on waste. We should learn how to save and cut down on our waste and have more available to provide services for the people. The people are the key and we must have their interest at heart.”
Obaseki continued: “Whatever we do now, there is a metric which they will use to monitor our performance and will put it before our face when the time comes. So, we have no excuse not to perform.
“We have six months to catch up. If you can’t deliver, there’s no basis to continue. We will be campaigning in February 2023, and can’t give excuses to the people.”
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Speaking on exploring other areas to boost revenue generation, the governor said, “Moving forward, we are not going to be able to finance the state based on oil revenue from Abuja but will look for other sources of revenue to increase revenue for the state.
“We have identified a few key ones and one of them happens to be tourism. We are working on a tourism master plan and creating a cultural district, focusing on ecotourism. Our tourism strategy will be based on infrastructure.
“We are working on building a tech park that will house up to 5,000 to 10,000 people and our goal is that within the next five years, we should be able to produce between 4,000 and 8,000 software engineers,” he added.
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