Bauchi State governor, Senator Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed, has inaugurated a committee on COVID-19- Economic Recovery of the state which is to submit its reports within the next two weeks to enable government knows which direction to follow in order to revive the economy after the pandemic.
While inaugurating the committee at the Banquet Hall, Government House, the governor said that the committee was inaugurated to identify alternative sources of funds that will augment the current revenue of the state.
According to him, other terms of reference of the committee include: suggesting ways of developing economic growth measures that will sustain the state during and after COVID-19-crisis and to make any other useful recommendations incidental to their assignment.
The governor then told members of the committee to bring their wealth of knowledge and experience in order to ensure the success of their assigned responsibilities.
He said that the devastating effect of COVID-19 could be measured in terms of the socioeconomic suffocation of all the sectors of the state’s economy and on the daily resources that accrue to the national and the state’s treasury.
He said that “The global oil prices have monumentally slipped below our logical explanations, thus exerting a distraction on the daily lives of our people, especially the vulnerable population of women, children, unemployed youth and more sadly the elders.”
The governor added that ” Bauchi State, on the other hand, being a landlocked state with high level of poverty is worse affected by the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic. This is because our internal capacity to respond to this type of economic shocks is very weak and thus we are left with no option but to chart a new course for creating the impossibilities for the economic survivalist.”
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The governor who stressed the need for all and sundry to put hands on deck for the economic revival of the state, recalled that, before this economic doom, the state budget was over 70 per cent recurrent in terms of implementation.
” But we need to move forward as a state and I believe we can do it. This explains why we carefully selected you to bring your wealth of experience to bear in moving the state out of this quagmire”, he said.
The committee has Commissioner of Budget and Economic Planning, Dr Aminu Gamawa as Chairman, while Commissioners of Commerce, Culture and Tourism, Health, Women Affairs, Agriculture and Rural Development are to serve as members.
Other members are the Director-General of Bauchi SDG, Chairperson of BASOVCA while the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Budget and Economic Planning, Yahuza Adamu is to serve as Secretary.
Meanwhile, Bauchi State Governor, Sen Bala Abdulkadir Mohammed has directed for the State Accountant General and other stakeholders involved in the payment of salaries to state civil servants to with immediate effect stop any deductions of some percentages from the salaries of workers as contributions to the fight against Coronovirus pandemic.
The governor gave the directive on Tuesday at the inauguration of the COVID-19 Economic Recovery Committee for the state at the Government House.
Bala Mohammed said that the directive was after receiving series of complaints from some categories of the workers who expressed displeasure over the decision which they claimed was not done with their consents.
The governor said, “I was told by the Head of Civil Service and the organised labour in the state that workers will contribute various percentages from their salaries for the next three months to support our campaign against the spread of coronavirus, but later, some workers complained that the government forced them to do contribution which is not true”.
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