The Oyo State chapter of the All Progressives Congress (APC) on Friday raised alarm that the claims of the Governor that the State is paying the sum of N11 billion to foot its monthly wage bill for 115,000 civil servants in an attempt to cover up it’s looting of the public treasury.
This allegation is coming after the Executive Governor of the State, Abiodun Oluwaseyi Makinde disclosed to participants at the Nigerian-American Business Forum in Tampa, Florida, United States that the state has a wage bill of #11 billion per month for 115,000 civil servants.
The number one opposition party in the State, APC, in a statement in Ibadan on Friday described the claims of the Governor as a “futile attempt to cover up the brazen looting of the public treasury by the present administration”.
The statement was signed by the party’s Assistant PublicitySecretary, Prince Ayobami Adejumo, who stated that the current administration in less than a year ” has done more harm than good to the people of the State”.
In the statement, the party wrote, “We had waited patiently for Governor Makinde to make a U-turn and blame his handlers for an improper briefing on this particular matter like he has always been doing since his assumption of office last year May.
“But it is apparent that the governor was on a mission to sell a dummy to do a cover-up on the palpable diversion of monies from the state government coffers into some private accounts.
“He went as far as the United States to make a disclosure of 115, 000 workforce and N11bn wage bill which he claimed to have been paying since June 2019 even when he had never mentioned this to anyone at home.
“To set the record straight, the statistics obtainable as at May 2019 is as followed: Core civil servants -10,789; TESCOM staff (teaching/non-teaching) -17,615; local government staff -12, 264; SUBEB Staff -23, 352; parastatals -2,266; NYSC corps members serving in the state, -3,403; state government pensioners -16,539, and a total wage bill of N5.2bn, including payments to all political office holders and subventions to state-owned tertiary institutions.
“It is worthy of note that monthly payments to local government council staff (12, 264); public primary school employees (23, 352) and local government pensioners (8,805) are being made directly from federal allocations to the 33 Local Government Areas.
“When did the state government commence the payment of its compressed new minimum wage to workers in the state and, is this responsible for the over N5.8bn increase in wage bill?”
OYOINSIGHT.COM had earlier reported how Engineer Akeem Alao, the gubernatorial candidate of the Alliance for Democracy (AD) in the 2019 general elections in the state tackled the State Governor over his claim that the state is currently paying N11 billion as salaries to 115,000 workers.
Alao, who sued Governor to the public court to explain where and how he got those staggering figures against the information at the doorstep of the generality of the people of Oyo State regarding the subject stated that the people deserved explanation from theGovernor.
