LIVE UPDATES
The Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, has said the N70, 000 new minimum wage for civil and public servants in the state will be funded by revenue inflow savings from government expenditure.
Obaseki, spoke to journalists in Benin City on Friday.
He said much of the monies will come from savings from the State’s fleet management system.
The governor said: “I have been a private sector person for most part of my career before I ventured into the public sector. With that training and background, we don’t just make statements without careful analysis of our revenue flow and expenditures and then analyse how we are going to go about ensuring that we are able to live up to our promise.
“We have been very strategic in Edo State. We embarked on a very radical reform of the civil and public service which engendered a transformation exercise that completely turned around our civil service and has made it more efficient and effective.
“We are perhaps the only state government in Nigeria that has now gone totally paperless, we run our government on the e-gov platform and we have made a lot of savings from there.
“We have what we call a fleet management system for our vehicles in the state government so we no longer have multiple vehicles for multiple public officeholders running different expenditures to manage all these vehicles; they are all managed in one single pool called the fleet management system. We have made massive savings from there as well.”
“All of these have resulted in massive savings for government which allows us to be able to take this bold decision which also means that we will be able to sustain it,” he added.
