Government offices in Anambra were spending N137 million each month to clean public offices until recently, when the current government took immediate steps to drastically reduce the cost of cleaning.

Governor Charles Soludo revealed the huge amount of money that went into the cleaning.

“We need to be sensitive and move with the times. We need to live within the average of the people we’re governing and knock off the wastes and irrelevances,” stated Mr Soludo.

The Anambra governor disclosed this while briefing State House correspondents at the end of the National Economic Council meeting, chaired by Vice-President Kashim Shettima, on Thursday at the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

He said when he assumed office, it was costing about N137 million every month to clean up public offices, among other things.

“Today, in Anambra, we’re doing N11 million a month from N137 million. This is just an illustration. And it’s a thing that we’re persuading each and every one of us to look into, check into our books and look ourselves in the mirror and move with the times,” Mr Soludo explained.

Regarding the hardship brought about by the removal of the petrol subsidy and the attendant pump price hike, the Anambra governor said the council considered the possibility of negotiating a new minimum wage through the appropriate structures.

In a related development, Governor Dapo Abiodun said the NEC meeting was “engaging and robust discussion today and it centred around the steps that we should take as a country towards cushioning the effects of subsidy removal and the unification of the naira.”

Mr Abiodun explained that “we also proposed accordingly that each state should begin to plan toward implementing a cash transfer programme that will be based on a social register in the states because the states are better positioned to do the enumeration to ensure the integrity of the social register.”

(NAN)