By Ayodele Abere
The Executive Chairman of Ajoni Local Council Development Area of Ekiti State, Prince Michael Ogungbeni, pupularly referred to as PMO, said his administration has taken the welfare of the staff of his LCDA as a priority.
Ogungbemi, who was a special guest at the maiden edition of information forum organised by Ekiti Info TV in conjunction with journalists in Ekiti State stated this while rolling out some of his achievements as the LCDA Chairman in the last two years in Ado-Ekiti, the State capital.
According to the Council boss, “we have provided training for management and staff. We have also taken the welfare of the Staff as a priority. We have done this by providing internal training for the management of the LCDA and we have trained a number of career officers. We have provided stewardship account of the LCDA quarterly where we gather the stakeholders of Ajoni LCDA to let them know where we met Ajoni LCDA and where we are taking the LCDA to”.
Still under the human capacity development and job creation for youth, the Chairman stressed that the LCDA has been able to provide social investment and community development as well as infrastructural development in the LCDA.
PMO noted that his administration has organised Health Intervention in partnership with Agbeyewa farms which have provided over one thousand people in the LCDA under the health advocacy, the youths, elderly and women across the ten Ajoni communities
“We have given free drugs, treatment, diagnosis and we have done some minor operations to correct the eyes last year to fulfill one of our advocacy interventions to complement the efforts of the State Government in providing free healthcare to our people at the LCDA.
“We have been in partnership with the Bountiful Children’s Foundation which is a globally accredited nutritional body that has provided free screening to malnourished children in Ekiti State. They did that across Africa and we invited them to Ajoni LCDA to help screen our children and they screened over 400 children including the pregnant women at the LCDA where the results were taken to the World Health Organisation WHO.
“Out of the screened children, about 300 of them were identified to be malnourished and they were given food called rich nutritional food supplement for the period of six months and that has been repeated since last year December and we just finished the first phase in the month of June. We are starting another second phase of that intervention programme for the children in Ajoni LCDA this October and we will intervene for them for the next six months.
Ogungbemi said the free food supplements are the nutritional food supplements that will help brain formation and that will also bring healthiness to the children of Ajoni LCDA. Adding that this is the first of its kind in Ekiti State. “We want to produce healthy babies that will be productive and useful to themselves, their families and to the community at large”, said the Chairman.
To also help complement the good efforts of Mr Governor in terms of job provision and youth development, Prince Ogungbemi said his administration brought in the African Oral Geological History Project, where families of the world would be traced and have a data base of the families of the world in African countries.
“We have noticed that most of our parents keep data in their heads and when they die, they die with the information. So we want to unite families of the world.
The Chairman said they also brought another international NGO from the US, known as Interweave Solutions which according to the Prince, provide self-reliance training modules to market men and women, Small and Medium Scale Enterprise.
“We have seen that the white-collar job is not enough to sustain the rates of unemployment in Nigeria. We brought this to Ajoni LCDA to help develop and lift up rural people by taking them out of poverty to prosperity so that we can have meaningful life style and improved livelihood in Ajoni. Said he.
in realisation of the fact that Ajoni LCDA was porous and open to banditry and kidnapping activities, as part of the achievements so far, the Council Chair explained that they decided to converge and have a security summit at Ajoni LCDA, where Ajoni local security network was introduced to eradicate bandits at the borders of rural Ajoni communities.
“We recruited about 83 local security from the Oodua People’s Congress (OPC), from Vigilante Group of Nigeria and were trained by the police..
“For the past twelve months now, we have reduced the rate of kidnapping and banditry attacks at Ajoni LCDA to zero level. People can sleep in their houses and enjoy the serene atmosphere in the areas”. Ogungbemi boasted.