Q: For the first time under your watch Imo State capital expenditure now exceeds recurrent. Before we were spending more on recurrent. What informed your reversal of this trend. How is it favouring the state in terms of projects.
Ans: You know our 3R mantra is reconstruction, rehabilitation and recovery. His excellency said we cannot do the 3R without impacting positively on the lives of the people. The way to impact positively on the citizens cum spreading of prosperity is to develop the infrastructure of Imo State, and to develop that infrastructure, through extensive capital expenditure. The governor gave my Ministry mandate that when we are developing the 2021 budget, we should at a minimum do 50 50 (recurrent 50% and capital 50%) as a start, since that is his maiden budget. We used the SFTAS template of the World Bank to guide the MDA's ( Ministries, Department and Agencies) to make sure that they put together their priority budgeting and tell us the direct benefits of those projects and impacts on the citizens of Imo State.
We Systematically analyzed the budgetary items and made sure that a great deal of the budget is going to spread prosperity. We decided to target infrastructure as a strategy for benefiting the people and making the state more habitable and more friendly for business. In the final analysis when we computed the arithmetic, we found out that 70% of that budget now dwells on Capital projects and that is why the 2021 budget was tagged, "The Budget of Wealth Creation".
Not only just building infrastructure, we went into skills Training and Development, engaging our youth and training them and funding them to start their small businesses. His Excellency intends to create over one hundred thousand small and medium enterprises over the period under review.
Q: How effective is the monitoring and evaluation unit of your ministry. Sometimes good policies and programs run into problems if they are not carefully monitored and evaluated over time.
Ans: The monitoring and evaluation unit of this ministry is very effective, and to illustrate this, His Excellency in his wisdom created three Special Advisers on project monitoring for each of the three senatorial zones. We have SA projects monitoring for Owerri, same for Okigwe and Orlu Zones. Each of them constitutes a team that goes out there zone to evaluate all the government projects and then write independent reports as to the progress of those projects.
We then monitor the rate of disbursement and reflect same by using the SFTAS requirement, which is reflected on the quarterly report.
In the month of April; we will publish our first quarter report for 2021. Last year we published all the State’s quarterly reports and the State got 2.5 million dollars for the effort. This year when we complete all the quarterly reports, Imo State will receive approximately 2.5 million dollars for publishing those quarterly reports in accordance with SFTAS requirement.
The project monitoring has to be efficient since we are now answerable to two masters - the Imo State citizens on one hand and the World Bank on the other hand. When we published our quarterly reports Online, the World Bank sends their independent verifiers to come for on the spot assessment, to verify what we have claimed if it’s the true. When the verification process has been completed successfully; that’s when they will qualify Imo State Government for the grants that we have been receiving. The grants represent the money the State is not going to pay back, because, the money is for work already well done and they are rewarding us, that is, the State.
Q: Part of the schedule of your ministry is statistics. In the modern world you cannot do anything without proper and accurate data. Are you making sure that working with accurate data is applicable in all Ministries and Agencies.
Ans: When we got here, the kind of data the State had; are data you cannot verify. To show you how crucial accurate data is critical, there is a World Bank template on how you gather scientific data and it is domiciled in this ministry. For example, We are gathering data, on poor and vulnerable households and there is a gadget that have GPS tracking for accurate verifying by the Ministry’s Enumerators. When workers go to any community to acquire data they can capture the individual’s information or a particular household you want to enumerate. Immediately the Enumerator finishes, that data is transmitted straight to the World Bank database. So there is no fraud in this process and it is domiciled there in their domain.
Accurate data generates revenue for the affected individuals and communities, as a process of alleviating poverty for the poorest of the poor. These transparently collected data bring funds from both Federal Government and World Bank.
Imo State has captured about 30,000 households and each month, Imo State gets about 150 million naira that is distributed to these poorest of the poor families. We are forming these families into cooperatives to attract agric loans from the CBN to enable the alleviation of poverty. This is an illustration of how essential accurate data gives relief to poor individuals. We are doing it through World Bank standard. We are building great 3-R database to cover Imo State comprehensively. The 3-R administration ably led by Distinguished Senator Hope Uzodimma is spreading prosperity to the nook and crannies of Imo State.
Publisher: Don Martyn L.O Nwosu
Ikeduru APC Media Hub
08032950897
Ikeduruapcmediahub@gmail.com
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