Fuel Price Hike : It’s Insensitive, Wasteful For Governors To Move Around With Long Convoys — Soludo

Fuel Price Hike : It is insensitive, wasteful for State Governors to move around with long convoys, says Soludo.

Urged counterpart from other States to reduce the number of cars in their convoy to cut back on the money spent on fuel.

Charles Soludo, the Governor of Anambra state, on Thursday at the National Economic Council (NEC), urged his counterpart from other States to reduce the number of cars in their convoy to cut back on the money spent on fuel.

According to him, it is insensitive and wasteful to be riding around town in convoys of “20-something cars” while the citizens they govern groan on the hardship caused by the recent removal of fuel subsidy.

Soludo revealed this while briefing State House correspondents at the end of the National Economic Council meeting, chaired by Vice-President Kashim Shettima, on Thursday at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

“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 think it’s an omnibus concept, and it’s not something you sit down in a meeting to legislate for each and every state,” he said.

“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.”

Soludo also spoke about how the cost of cleaning up public offices when he assumed office went from about N137 million per month to N11 million a month today.

“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.”

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