New ₦70,000 Minimum Wage to be Funded from Returns on Investments, Cut in Cost of Governance – Obaseki

Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki, has given indication that sustaining the payment of the newly approved ₦70,000 minimum wage to workers in the state would not pose a challenge, disclosing that it would be funded with dividends from government investments, and savings made from cutting the cost of governance.

Speaking to journalists in Benin City, Governor Obaseki explained that some of the monies would come from savings from the state’s fleet management system, the e-gov platform which has eliminated the need for the purchase of papers, and investment in the Ossiomo Power Project which is saving the government millions of naira for diesel purchase, among others.

According to him, “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 office holders 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.

“Also, early in my first tenure, I entered into an agreement with a private company to generate electricity and serve the government, and this has come on stream since 2020. The state government has now been taken off the national grid, and curbed the use of diesel and petrol to run the government because we now have a 24-hour power supply from Ossiomo. So, we have cut down on diesel expenditure and in many other areas”.

The governor further disclosed that “Another area is training. Before, people had to leave the state to get trained, but now, we have the John Odigie Training Centre where all our civil servants are trained at very frequent intervals at little or no cost because we have a training centre in the state. 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”.