Minister calls for teamwork among departments, agencies

Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, has called for team work among departments and agencies under in the ministry to ensure better service delivery.

Fashola made the call on Thursday in Abuja at the opening of a three-day retreat organized for heads of the ministry’s departments and agencies.

He said that the retreat was organized to foster relationship among participants, and urged the directors to take advantage of the forum to improve their performances and be acquainted to each other.

He advocated regular retreat for the ministry, saying that it would enhance teamwork needed to achieve its tasks.

“This retreat is an opportunity for us to exchange our emails and telephone numbers because service delivery is more difficult if we cannot identify ourselves.

“We must see ourselves as one of the privileged few that determine what affects the entire citizens of the country and to achieve our targets, we must apply civility and courtesy.

“Our responsibility as government is to understand that we are serving the entire public, starting from the lowest on the street to the highest,” the minister said.

He stated that the ministry had the highest fiscal allocation in the 2016 budget, because its services had the greatest impact on lives of citizens.

“We must set out targets to get maximum value for our budgetary allocation, and to do this, we must understand that maximum value is not a destination but a journey.

“We must understand that the performance of any government is measured by the prosperity of human lives,” he added.

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Some of the participants, who spoke to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), said that the retreat was a step in the right direction considering the need to know each other as colleagues.

Mr Olatunji Ajayi, a director in the ministry said the forum had availed him the opportunity to meet other directors he had never met in the ministry.

Ajayi commended the minister for putting up the programme and called for regular meeting of participants for performance evaluation and knowledge sharing.