Ahead of May 29 commencement of the second term in office, Delta State Governor, Senator Dr. Ifeanyi Okowa on Tuesday held valedictory executive council meeting.
The governor who thanked members of the state executive council for their collective efforts and determination which ensured the execution of government programmes and policies to the satisfaction of Deltans, urged them to handover to their permanent secretaries before the close of work on Friday, May 24, 2019.
“In the last four years, I have had a working team; an executive that realised that we are together and that our success story will be told together and I am proud to say that it is the collective efforts of each and every one of us that has given us our success stories which also resulted in the resounding victory we recorded at the elections,” Governor Okowa said.
“God’s grace was obviously with us but I believe that if each and every one of us had our own different beliefs, working in different ways, I believe that we will not have been able to achieve what we have achieved thus far; so, I will first of all want to thank each and every one of you (members of the state executive council) for the wonderful comments that you have made this afternoon and appreciate you more for the commitment of each and every one of you in your previous offices in the last four years.
“There is no doubt that you have all been very loyal to the deputy governor and myself and that loyalty has kept the team together; i want to thank each and every one of you; I can rightfully say that none of you betrayed the confidence that I have in you.”
He continued, “in our executive meetings, we have had discussions and debates and I want to thank each one of you for being very frank, I have learnt a lot from individual comments, from ideas that people have which I may not have thought of and I am proud that there was room for us to debate issues.
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“We talk about an open-door policy and I have had at a point in time to learn that if you are well tutored as a politician, you will have no choice than to run an open-door government; I also realised that my commissioners never abused that opportunity and I am glad to say that you all handled your duties with integrity and decorum.
“I must thank you all for agreeing that as an EXCO we will run a realistic budget; I thank God that we have tried to stay within the limit, so, when I looked at our papers and I saw that in the year, 2018 that our performance rate was at 98 percent, I was very pleased, because realistic budget is important so that when we explain to the people that with this budget this is what we are expected to do and the people at the end of the day see you doing nearly all the things that you said you will do, it is better than to raise the hopes of our people and then dash their hopes at the end of the day; so, I thank you as an EXCO for not allowing our budget to go beyond what was realisable for that year,” Governor Okowa disclosed, and used the occasion to call for internal democracy within the political parties to ensure well qualified candidates contest for elections.”