Governor Yahaya Bello of Kogi State has said that his administration in the last seven years had succeeded in checking insecurity and tribal, religious prejudices in the state.
Bello stated this in a message to the people of the state as part of activities marking the seventh anniversary of his New Direction administration in the state yesterday in Lokoja.
The governor said he made several far-reaching promises on behalf of his team in the new government in his inaugural speech on January 27, 2016.
“We promised that change had come to Kogi State and that our people were the proprietors of that change while those of us in government were merely chauffeurs employed by them to drive it.
“We promised that the long-standing divisions along tribal, religious and other fault-lines were over and that fairness, equity and justice to all would be guaranteed.
“We swore to eliminate the out-of-control insecurity Kogi was notorious for, back then, and we undertook to make all of Kogi’s resources work for all of Kogi people.
“It has been my privilege and pleasure since that first inauguration to oversee an accelerated and proportional transformation of our state through innovative thinking and prudent management of all resources – human, financial, material and natural,” he said.
He added that his administration did not underestimate the enormity of the work it needed to do to overcome the abysmally low level of socio-economic development it inherited.
“But we also refused to glorify impossibilities. We met great problems but we also mobilised great courage and inventiveness to solve them together.
“We assembled a multidisciplinary team of consultants to develop our New Direction blueprint as a governance roadmap to help focus our efforts in executing the promises we made to Kogites,” the governor said.
He said his administration had worked assiduously to fulfill the mandate the people entrusted to it for two tenures, adding that the regime had executed life-transforming projects across the state.
