BY CHIDI NKWOPARA

OWERRI—Imo State government  said yesterday that it had within two and a half years built an average of 10 schools at a cost of N27.5 million each and a modern hospital at an average cost of N110 million.
The state Commissioner for Finance, Deacon Chike Okafor, who disclosed this to newsmen in Owerri yesterday, also affirmed that he was presenting government’s score card in response to the challenge recently thrown at Governor Rochas Okorocha by the Minister of External Affairs, Professor Viola Onwuliri.

Okafor said: “This administration has equally constructed 15-kilometer stretch of asphalted roads with drainages at a cost of N60 million each, revealing an average investment of N1.285 billion in infrastructural development in each local government area of the state.”
He said the state government replicated these projects in all 27 local council areas of the state, and wondered why the minister accused Okorocha of  developments not commensurate with federal allocation to the state.

While insisting that  the projects were verifiable, the commissioner also said that in spite of the enormous infrastructural burden before the administration, it had consistently and timely paid the salaries of local government workers, primary school teachers and monthly pensions of retired local government workers, with a wage bill of over  N2.1 billion monthly.
Okafor insisted that the 12-year rule of her party, Peoples Democratic Party, PDP, did not achieve the feat, pointing out that the impulse to unduly malign a government that truncated her ambition to become a deputy governor  was understandable”