Adebayo Abdulrahman
Seyi Makinde, governor of Oyo State, recently said that the state now pays 115,000 civil servants N11 billion monthly.
The governor was quoted to have made the claim, on Monday, during the Nigerian – American business forum held in Tampa, Florida, United States.
According to him, “Presently, Oyo State has 115,000 civil servants and a wage bill of N11 billion per month, which is just 1.4 percent of the total population. We can’t employ all the strong and energetic people in the state. Our job is to ensure we create opportunities that will be appealing to the private sector so they can come in and provide employment opportunities for 10 percent of the population who are presently unemployed and create more opportunities to attract further investment.”
However, checks by OYOINSIGHT.COM revealed that the claim of the governor is partially untrue.
Oyo State Doesn’t Pay Civil Servants N11b Monthly
Even though there has been a significant increase in the wage bill of Oyo state since the current administration took over the helm of affairs in the state on the 29th of May 2019, however, the Oyo state government feedback in a clarification it made through a series of tweets stated that the N11 billion the governor claims the state paid is the total wage bill as in February 2020 for workers both at the state and local government levels.
It added that the state workers were paid N6.5 billion while LG workers received N4.9 billion in the month of February.
Further investigations revealed that the government paid the state workers with the N5 billion it received as allocation from the federal government and N1.5 billion out of the N2.4 billion it generated internally.
Clarification
Even though the total wage bill of civil servants at both the state and local government is N11 billion, It is wrong for the governor to have claimed that the state government paid N11 billion to workers in the month of February since the state government paid only the state workers and the wage bill of civil servants at the local government level was paid from local government accounts.
