Kamarudeen Ogundele, Abuja
The governors elected on the platform of the All Progressives Congress have inaugurated a Governance Programme Steering Committee to ensure implementation of uniform policies in their states.
The Chairman of Progressives Governors Forum and Kebbi State Governor, Atiku Bagudu, inaugurated the committee on Friday in Abuja.
The committee is co-chaired by the Plateau State Governor, Simon Lalong.
In his speech, Lalong said priorities would be accorded areas including revenue mobilisation, funding for security, education, and health.
He said, “Given the challenge of ensuring that we achieve the vision of making our party, the APC, to emerge as a distinctly social democratic party, the policy initiatives of all APC governments, particularly at the state levels, will be the defining credentials. In addition, ensuring uniformity of policy initiatives among the APC states is a fundamental requirement.
“Between 20l5 and 20l9, as Progressive Governors, we have made quite some efforts to adopt common initiatives. Based on the assessment of initiatives from our states and critical assessments of the challenges facing our states, Forum has already agreed to some priorities, which include revenue mobilisation, funding for security, education, and health.
“We need to aggressively ensure that we are able to settle all public debates around the distinction between APC, on the one hand, and PDP and other parties, on the other. It is not a theoretical issue but concretely about the initiatives coming from APC governments, especially the states.
”With the experiences, we had between 20l5 and 20l9, we want to ensure that we are able to speed up actions to produce these common initiatives.”
Inaugurating the committee, Bagudu said the APC governors would strife to achieve greater developments in their states despite the prevailing economic difficulties.
