Bauchi borrows N100bn for infrastructure, says gov

The Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, has said that his administration has borrowed the sum of N100 billion which he is using to provide infrastructure in the State.

He said this in a speech at the opening of the third Executive Council Meeting in his second term held at the Exco Chamber on Wednesday.

According to him, over N90 billion has so far been expended in providing the infrastructure across the State.

“You can see the projects and programmes, we are just starting. We have borrowed N100 billion and today, the infrastructure project alone is getting to N90 billion plus. We are not thieves, we are not here to take anything out of the system, we want to take back every Kobo.

“Of course, we are going to save some for education and health. We are saving from the little money we are getting from the Federal Government so that we can leverage this loan to do infrastructure alone. You should be aware of this,” he said.

The Governor, who lamented the spate of ghost workers in the State civil service vowed that his administration would do everything possible to rid the State of the menace.

He said: “The spate of ghost workers and the rest will be out of our way. I met the Minister of Communications, he said he understood we are doing so well and he said he’s ready to come to Bauchi and establish a platform so that we can do away with these ghost workers.

“The beneficiaries of these ghost workers are not us, they are not commissioners, but we allow them. We must be able to check out nominal roll and other data in our hands, we must be able to manage it. It is very easy to manage your ministries and departments unless you don’t want to do it.

“I know there are large places like health and education where we have the prevalence (of the menace of ghost workers) because of the numbers, but we are working very hard to make sure you do it. We have so many activities lined up, we have the education summit just to show you that we are more concerned with services not only infrastructure.

“We have to make sure we produce the human capital in our bureaucracy, in our services like health and education. After that, we’ll have the investment summit because we have been going around the world and the world is interested in us and we have what it takes to woo investors.

He charged commissioners in the state to hit the ground running so that they could provide services and execute projects and programmes that would better the lives of the people.