By Nefishetu Yakubu
Benin – The Edo commissioner for Communication and Orientation, Paul Ohonbamu, on Wednesday said that the ministry had taken delivery of 38 crates of equipment for the Bendel Newspapers Company Limited ((BNCL), publishers of The Observer newspapers.
Ohonbamu stated this when he appeared before house committee on Information, Orientation, Youths and Sports to present his briefs on performance of 2019 budget and also defend 2020 appropriation.
He said that the equipment were bought as part of state government’s plans to reposition it for efficient service delivery.
He noted that the ministry was expecting another batch of equipment from the contractor to complement the first batch to have a complete assemblage of a state of the art printing machine .
He added that the digitization of the Edo Broadcasting Service (EBS) was underway
“Government is poised to repositioning the state-owned media for efficient service delivery as regards dissemination of information to the members of the public.
“There are radical plans to revamp EBS, as government is thinking along the line of digitilization for this purpose.” he said.
The budget performance of both the observer newspapers and EBS according to the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry, Mr Joses Sede, is 34.8 per cent based on the N1.5billion earmarked for capital expenditure in the 2019budget.
Mr Sede said that only N100m was released out of N779m allocated to EBS for its digitization project.
The chairman of the committee and speaker of the house, Francis Okiye, in his submission after the briefing by the ministry said government was committed to overall repositioning of the state-owned media.
The speaker further revealed that in the 2020 budget efforts would be made to ensure that the budgetary allocations to carry out the total digitilization of EBS would be made available.
Meanwhile, the Director General of the Edo State Sports Commission, Dudu Orumen, and members of the commission have been directed to present themselves for budget defense on a later date.
The commission members were asked to come with a comprehensive list of the performance of the various sporting activities in the 2019 budget.
The Speaker, Francis Okiye, noted in his submission that soccer events could not be treated in isolation from other sports currently under the supervision of the commission.
(NAN)
