The chairman of Abuja Municipal Area Council (AMAC), Hon. Micah Jiba, gave a shocker yesterday, when he feigned ignorance of the Internally Generated Revenue (IGR) profile of the area council.
Jiba, who was addressing a pre-economic press conference organised by AMAC Standing Committee on Economic/Stakeholders’ Summit, declined comments when journalists sought to know the how much the area council generates to augment federal government allocation made to it for the development of the area council.
He insisted that he could not comment on the matter as the IGR accruable to the area council was not constant and could be either high or low.
Jiba in his address said that the committee was set up with the hope that it would open new vistas on the economic fronts of the council through maximisation of the various income opportunities available within the council.
He said AMAC had adopted a measure that would change the face of development in the council and the FCT by engaging experts to fashion out ways of
generating revenue to be deployed for the development of infrastructure in the rural communities of AMAC.
He said, “The wisdom of this initiative was to also close gaps of government’s inability to cater for all the infrastructural needs of the electorate due to obvious economic challenges facing the government.”
The chairman observed that the development of any society rested on the shoulders of all actors in the economy, including the government and the private sector, and added that it was the collective responsibility of well-spirited individuals, corporate organisations and multinationals to be socially responsive to the needs of their host communities.
In his remarks, the committee chairman, Prof. Olisa Wulus, gave the mandate of the committee to include creating awareness of corporate social responsibility among the key players in the FCT, especially the ministries and corporate organisations.
He lamented that despite the presence of many corporate organisations among the rural people of the FCT, they had not impacted on the communities as the communities still lacked most basic amenities such as water, healthcare services and schools, among others.
Wulus said part of the strategy of the committee would be to pay courtesy visits to multinational companies and create awareness on their responsibilities to their host communities, with a view to getting them be more responsive.
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