The Kogi state Governor, Yahaya Bello, Friday said the state remained the safest and peaceful in Nigeria.
The governor, who stated this in commemoration of the 30th anniversary of the state’s creation, said his administration took the security, unity, peace and prosperity of the people seriously right from inception.
“Today, our state is arguably the safest in the entire country, we are rated the second most peaceful and our crime rate is second lowest. We have a hugely diverse population that is nevertheless more united now than at any time in our history.
“By aiming at targets we set in our New Direction Blueprint and allied governance roadmaps, we are crushing our goals in reduction of the Multidimensional Poverty Indices here in Kogi State while keeping pace with the five thematic areas we adopted from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)”, Bello stated.
The governor noted that the state had managed the triple mechanism of blocking loopholes/theft, eliminating wastage/loss and proper prioritisation of expenditure to make each Naira and Kobo we have earned go much further than anyone believed possible.
“In between the two terrible recessions mentioned above, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived like the grim reaper from the first quarter of 2020 and began to wreak havoc on mankind.
“It continues till today. This controversial phenomenon impaired governance around the world and by means of lockdowns and adverse restrictions which it engendered managed to frustrate service delivery to citizens around the world, Nigeria and Kogi State not exempted.
“However, with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, we proved to the world that with the help of God, support of the citizenry, leadership sincerity and a ton of political will it is possible for science and common sense as well as good governance and medicine to work together in the service of humanity,” he said.
The governor explained that the state was a major transit hub in Nigeria and makes it easily exposed to anything that fellow citizens carry along while travelling through, which in the past frequently included outbreaks of deadly diseases like Lassa and yellow fever. “Thus we became alarmed at how otherwise respected national public health institutions charged with protecting us tended to proceed on the certainty that no matter what we did here, Covid-19 would decimate us.”
On the major achievement in the state, he said Kogi has never adopted awkward practice of flagging off projects with fanfare or commissioning them after completion with festivities with live TV crews that was so popular in contemporary times, but silently completed and released for the use of the people hundreds of mini to major developments proportionately distributed across the three senatorial districts of our state.
These projects, according to him, range from roads to bridges to rural water schemes to multi-community electrification projects to hundreds of primary, secondary and tertiary health and education facilities, amenities and consumables, to industries, factories and all manners of infrastructure and utilities to comprehensive civil service and pension reforms to tens of thousands of youth empowerment and job creation initiatives both home-grown and partnerships.
“I have deliberately refused to go into the details of individual projects in this speech. Not even sector by sector. There is neither time nor need for that today. They are there on ground for anyone to visit and verify. Many prominent journalists from leading networks and news-houses have come to investigate and they have gone on air with audio-visual evidence.
“We are not expected to do more than that, but bearing in mind that we have a service compact with our people which includes Open Governance, we have further spent and continue to spend great resources to design and maintain a regularly updated platform where anyone can see our progress at the click of a button on their desktop or handheld device.
“Today and henceforth we simply refer every person genuinely or maliciously interested in our stewardship of Kogi state’s resources to our e-Compendium at www.kogipedia.net for undeniable proofs. We welcome efforts to disprove what we have uploaded,” he added.
