Oyebanji’s One Year In Office: Delivery, Malaria Treatment In Ekiti Govt Owned Health Facilities Now Free

By Ayodele Oni

Ekiti state Governor, Biodun Oyebanji has announced that monthly revenue generation of government has witnessed significant improvement since he assumed office.

Addressing members of the state House of Assembly on Monday, as part of activities marking a year in office, the governor disclosed that everything was being done to attain revenue target for the year.

Oyebanji stated that “I am pleased to inform you that due to a lot of innovative ideas and strategies that we adopted, the monthly internally generated revenue of the State has seen a significant upward improvement.

“As an administration that is committed to excellence, we acknowledge that we can do better.

“Rest assured that we have put critical measures in place to improve our performance in the coming months; we have already surpassed our revenue performance for 2022, and I am confident that we will not only finish 2023 with a significant growth, we are also on track to achieve our revenue budget for the year.

“We strongly believe in strategic planning, and have been committed to institutionalizing long-term planning for the development of our state and the good of our people.

“For us, a campaign manifesto is not an empty set of unimplementable promises; but a pledge to be honoured, an actionable plan to be executed, a contract with the people to which utmost fidelity is non-negotiable.

“This is why the six pillars were distilled into concrete policies and program ideas under different ministries and presented as the core of my administration’s inaugural Budget of Strong Beginning.

“Our vision is to have an economy that is dominated by private sector investment and activities. We are currently one of the least industrialized states in Nigeria but we want to change this unpleasant profile.

“A major requirement for industrialization is land availability and regular electricity supply. While we are working round the clock to provide access to electricity and other critical infrastructure.

The governor also highlighted achievements of his administration in other sectors of the economy such as education, transportation and health.

“I have continued to improve the inputs for service delivery. This year, we qualified for World Bank financing to enable our Primary Health Centres (PHC) receive direct facility financing.

“I am happy to inform you all that 177 PHC facilities across the 16 LGAs each received the sum of N4.6m for facility upgrades.

“I’m aware that these funds are now being used to purchase drugs, equipment, data tools and also to carry out minor renovations across these facilities.

“In addition to this, we disbursed the sum of N100,000 monthly to each facility to help with basic operational requirements. A few weeks back, we also distributed antimalarial drugs, color coded bins for separating medical wastes, and other items to 200 PHCs across the 16 LGAs.

“Simply put, no one in Ekiti should pay for treatment of malaria in any of our PHCs any longer. To expand our health insurance program, we scaled our efforts from 25 facilities to one (1) PHC in each ward across the state.

“With this, services such as family planning, ante-natal care, delivery, under 5 childhood illnesses are now paid for by the state. In the last 2 months (August and September) more than 49,000 persons have benefitted.

‘I strongly encourage everyone particularly our expectant mothers to take advantage of our Ulerawa program. No one should have to pay for delivery in any of our PHCs anymore.”