Akwa Ibom governor, Pastor Umo Eno has decried the sorry state of Ibom e-Library seen to be abandoned by the past administration and the premises overgrown with weeds.
Eno, who spoke this during media parley with journalists at Banquet Hall, Uyo on Friday, was sad that the multi-billion Naira project was allowed to rot and be underutilised.
The Governor said his recent unscheduled visit to the project opened his eyes to the abandoned facility, but commended some young men who renovated the project and were using it to forestall complete rot.
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He pledged to compensate them for taking the risk in maintaining the project that would have depreciated beyond that without their effort in taking care of it.
The Governor, however, promised to constitute Assets Management Committee to maintain government assets.
The Ibom e-Library was launched in Uyo state on the 25th September, 2007.
The library, lying on a sprawling unit along Ibrahim Babangida Avenue, Uyo, was fitted with state-of-the-art 1,000 person capacity conference centre, with language translators, apart from board rooms and offices.
A children multi-media resource centre, 1,260 educational games for children; 1,000 simulations and mathematics practice tools were also ready at the time of inauguration.
It has a large external playground, open and private reading areas and children reading areas with story-telling/play facilities as well as 80,000 question and answer series for tertiary examinations.
The facility had digital collections for users to access to about 16.5 million e-documents, over two million electronic books and 14.5 million electronic research e-journals, did not have a functional website, a core component of electronic libraries the world over.
Meanwhile, the Governor has denied any rift between him and his predecessor, Udom Emmanuel, describing such reports as misleading perpetrated by those who were not informed.
He said reports about the monthly allocation being shared were also inaccurate, adding that the monthly allocation from the Federation Allocation Account Committee was barely enough to pay contractors, settle civil servants’ entitlements, pay pensions and gratuities.
The governor said it was wrong to insinuate that the former governor who left office in May this year was getting part of the monthly allocation, adding that such a notion was disrespectful to a former leader who had made personal sacrifices in running the state.
“This month, I got N11 billion as monthly allocation from the federation account; we spend between N9 billion and N10 billion for monthly salary, pensions and gratuity and N3 billion for the payment of old and new contractors, you pay old and new contractors, the state government cannot fund every project. I don’t want to put money into a waste pipe,’’ he said.
He further said that it was incorrect to say that the state has received N22 billion in a month from the federation account, adding that though he had received threats for not doing the biding of some politicians, his focus was on getting development to the rural areas of the state by establishing one project per local government.
According to him, “this is a new government; every governor has his style. We need to cut costs; the political class should give me up to December to settle. I receive threats about not spending money as they wish; they say that I won’t get a second term if I don’t spend according to how they want.”
Explaining why he is focusing on rural development, he said it was meant to create jobs and that “we are sitting on a time bomb if we don’t create jobs for the youths as the local government councils have donated not less than 50 hectares of land each for pilot agricultural schemes.”
He maintained that the rural communities in the state would need to receive more attention from the state government
