Delta State Governor Ifeanyi Okowa says the state has spent over N4 billion as counterpart funding within few months of his administration, to enable the state access different funds for developmental programs.
Okowa told journalists in Asaba on Thursday, that the dwindling resources of the state, have contributed to low productivity, especially in areas of providing funds to execute projects.
According to him, “When we came on board, we met a backlog of partnership funds that we did not meet up with, we had the 2013 programme which the state had not participated in, the 2014 and 2015 at the time we came in, because we were not able to raise the counterpart fund, but, in the course of last year, we were able to raise about N2 billion (a billion naira each) for the 2013/2014 partnership fund and a lot of projects have been awarded for the development of our primary schools in the month of December”
He said that the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), would execute projects worth more than N4 billion because of the counterpart fund paid by the state to the education sector alone, as he disclosed that other counterpart funds were also been processed.
“UBEC will be spending about N4 billion in our schools and we are going to stay on course to ensure that things are done properly because, with that level of money coming into the system, we want a lot of schools to be rehabilitated and reconstructed and we want circulation of additional funds within the state, which will help improve our economy” he said.
In the breakdown, the Governor disclosed that his administration spent more than N4 billion on skill acquisition and farmers’ support programmes and that the ventures were already yielding the desired results.
He also stated that his administration was committed to the construction of roads in the state, disclosing that while N1 billion have been released “for the purpose of construction of roads within ode-Itsekiri”, another N1 billion have been released to the contractor handling the Section A of the Ughelli/Asaba road project, while the Director Labour Agency has embarked on massive rehabilitation of roads in different parts of the state.”
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