Lekan Onamusi, Director-General of Ogun State Government Delivery Office has said that the Delivery Office was established by Governor Dapo Abiodun of Ogun State to curb cases of abandoned capital projects and tackle corruption by effective tracking and coordination of government priority initiatives.
Onamusi, who decried an ugly culture of state projects and programs abandonment by government at all levels in the country, stated that the Delivery Office created by Ogun State Government would check such an ugly incident by managing discord and gaps between government and proposed projects and initiatives across Ministries, Departments and Agencies of Government.
Speaking on the activities and functions of a newly created Delivery Office in Abeokuta on Tuesday, the Governor’s Special Adviser noted that the Delivery Office was created as waste control department that would ensure transparency and accountability in the government programmes and projects, thereby, managing government’s finances judiciously.
He said, “The Government Delivery Unit was set up by an Executive Order to His Excellency Prince Dapo Abiodun (MFR) on the 17th December, 2020 with a sole charge to take high level responsibility for all State Government Initiatives, Economic Programs and Projects, and ensure efficiency across the value chain towards the delivery in order to ensure successful delivery of outcomes.
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“Immediately after his Excellency Prince Dapo Abiodun won the election , he pledged to the good people of Ogun state that he was going to come with a government with different approach, with efficiency, accountability, transparency and change in orientation among stakeholders and that was one of the reasons he set up this Office.
“Our job here is to look at the government initiatives, economic programs and projects and to see how we (government) would support and work together in driving goal synergy and promoting the Ministries, Departments and Agencies of Government in order to achieve enhanced efficiency of initiatives.
“We want to be sure that each project assigned to be undertaken is assigned with the right cost, it’s assigned with the right competency of people undertaking the project, it’s assigned with the right quality of materials that will be used. So, the days of abandoned projects, the days of project not meeting the standards is gone and we try to minimise waste in government and misappropriation and misapplication of available resources.
“Our work is technical and competency- driven, we will need a lot of staff to be able to undertake the various works. We are going to be visiting the MDAs, trying to understand what exactly the MDA is all about, what is their purpose, what initiatives, what projects, do they have.
“The Office of the Government Delivery is about waste control, the Government Delivery Office is about leakage control and management, it promotes accountability, transparency across the value chain. Ogun State in its drive for massive growth and development has had a number of investments in infrastructure, improvements in ease of doing business and effective financial management to block leakages and we must sustain that.
“We will plan our work around the ISEYA – (Infrastructural Development, Social and Wellbeing, Education, Youth Empowerment, Agriculture and Food Security). The reason why we would do that is because we want to be sure that we are reaching each and every expected departmental pillar.
“We don’t want to over-concentrate on infrastructure at the detriment of youth development, at the detriment of education, if we go in line with the projects, we would be able to give coverage to the intentions of his Excellency.”
