Govt alone can’t fund community dev’t projects, says Olesin

An All Progressive Congress chieftain and chairman of the Tajudeen Olesin Foundation, Mr. Tajudeen Olesin has said the government alone cannot sustain funding of developmental project.

He spoke, on Tuesday, at the kick-start of the grading of the road linking Kankatu-Amule-Shamsudeen road in Ilorin East LG, funded by his foundation.

Olesin noted that the government alone cannot be left to do assignment of community development and that is why the foundation is doing this to help the community and the government.

He said, “Grading of roads is not the first project we have been doing to the community, we have been involved in other projects. This particular road is just and additional work to what we have been doing.

“The choice of this road is because of it’s deplorable condition, this road is meant to serve as an alternative link to Gambari because of the unavailabity of this road, that’s why we experience traffic at the Gambari junction. The reason why this road is chosen is because I am from this community and we can’t leave it alone for the government to do, this is a collective responsibility. We are doing the first part by grading this road and we would be leaving the rest to the government to complete.

“There was no controversy on this road as the road belongs to the government and the government has interest in rehabilitating this road. We only want to help the government as we can’t leave it to them alone, so we wrote a letter to the commissioner, and we were called to defend our proposal unfortunately, the permanent secretary of the Kwara State Ministry of works told us that the commissioner did not approve our proposal due to the fact that government is having interest on the road. Later in the day, we received a call from the commissioner stating that we should disregard the permanent secretary’s statement saying he was doing what he was not sent to do and he was not aware of it. The Governor also called to express his displeasure over the permanent secretary statement and immediately the governor gave his approval.”

He however promised the foundation would embark on more projects which would bring joy to communities and different households, such as road rehabilitation, providing infrastructural and educational materials to schools and dolling out scholarship to indigenous students.