Buhari, Ihedioha meet in Aso Rock

President Muhammadu Buhari on Monday met behind closed doors with the Imo State Governor, Emeka Ihedioha, at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

Briefing State House correspondents at the end of the meeting, Governor Ihedioha said that he came to pay a courtesy call on the President and to solicit his intervention on infrastructure decay in the state.

According to him, he also discussed the issue of agriculture and how the state would benefit from federal government agricultural projects.

He said, “We need the Federal Government support in all facets of the economy. Government would need to support us in agriculture because government we succeeded didn’t take advantage of government policies in agriculture.

“So we are working towards agricultural revolution to ensure that that becomes a source of revenue. So we need federal government support in that regard. We need government support in education, we need government support in the area of healthcare, we need government support in area of building institutions. ”

He said that he introduced the Treasury Single Account, TSA, to improve the Internally Generated Revenue, IGR, instead of overburdening the poor masses.

He said “When I came in I found out to my shock that there were accounts in the number that was reported in the media and of course so much leakages and we were not as a state making significant progress from the IGR.

“The IGR base of the state was very weak and when the IGR base is weak without having a productive economy that obviously meant that we depended essentially from what came from federal allocation and of course other agencies being an oil producing state.

“Like you may have found out in my state was something obviously in the breach of what it should be. It became necessary that we should find a way out and I set up a Financial Advisory Committee and Financial Advisory Committee recommended that in view of where we are and because of our decision to instil a regime of fiscal discipline and a regime of transparency and accountability and of course to reduce the level of corruption in the state, we had to introduce the Treasury Single Account, TSA, which is not very ideal in many places.

“But for us, we felt we needed to start a new, we needed to confront the issues and begin to reposition our state as a state that will be alive to the demands expected of us by our people.

“When the electorate voted us in, they believe in our ability to come and transform the state, to reign in a regime of transparency and accountability, that is what we are trying to do. So we have done that.

But apart from that, we are strengthening the Bureau for Public Procurement in the state. If check through the what is the ranking in ease of doing business, Imo finished 34th out of 37 and in several ways we have been lagging behind, we have fallen back, deteriorated from where we used to be.

“Ours used to be a very civilized state, so we have a duty and conviction that we need to take it to that level. So we have taken steps, closing the gap and we have enjoined the MDAs to work with the authorities to ensure that we can have an account to have a more accountable system of running the affairs of the state.”

He said that as a result of the rot in the previous administration, there have been pressure from the people to take action against the past government, adding that his interest was not to talk on the past government but to be focused and bring sanity to governance.