Governors Speak On Long Convoys, Cost Of Governance

The Governor of Anambra state, Chukwuma Soludo has remarked that the nation’s political class should take a good look at themselves, especially after the controversial removal of petrol subsidy.

The governor conveyed his thoughts on the topic, specifically mentioning the insensitivity of state governors parading around in large convoys of “20-something cars”.

Soludo shared these remarks with state house correspondents after the lengthy five-hour National Economic Council (NEC) meeting, which took place at the presidential villa in Abuja on Thursday.

He said, “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 recognises that this is an issue that each tier of government should now focus on as an area of concern.

“That we mustn’t live…even the cost of running the state, the way we even live, someone gave an example of a state governor going with 20-something vehicles in a convoy and all these have to be fuelled, and so on and so forth.

“And the fact that even amongst ourselves, almost like in a peer review kind of setting, we are talking to ourselves.

“Hey gentlemen, we would need to be sensitive to the times, we need to live within the average of the people that we’re governing and so on and so forth and knock off the waste and the irrelevancies so to speak.

“I mean, I would like to give you a simple example. We are not going to legislate for everybody, everybody is 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.

“It’s a thing that we’re persuading each and every one of us to look into, that we should check our books and look ourselves in the mirror and move with the times.

“So it is not that the council sat and began to prescribe, you have 12 number of advisors or five, we didn’t get to that but each person will do that.”

He added that the council discussed the possibility of negotiating a new minimum wage, amid spiralling inflation and high cost of living.

He said allocation to be shared among federating units for July will be around N900 billion and not N2 trillion, in order to moderate the impact on the system.