The Media Office of the Ekiti State Governor-elect, Dr Kayode Fayemi, has asked the outgoing Governor Ayodele Fayose to clear arrears of salaries and other entitlement of workers and pensioners with N5.52 biilion June 2018 federal allocation. In a statement issued in Ado-Ekiti, the state capital by the Director, Wole Olujobi, said “henceforth, Fayose must make accountability and human face critical factors in the policies of his administration.” Olujobi maintained that usual practice by the governor to collect federal allocations and call stakeholders meetings to deceive Ekiti people on the sharing formula between the state and local governments would no longer be acceptable.
The statement reads: “Information available to us suggests that Fayose at the weekend called all the Directors in the state service to a meeting in the new Governor’s Lodge, pleading with them not to release sensitive information to the opposition, including non-disclosure of the state’s finances.
“But we want to say that the state has received N5.52billion fresh June federal allocation and we demand that the money be spent to pay salary, and should not be subjected to the circus of lies and deceits that often accompanied the sharing of the allocations in the past whereby local governments were given their shares in the morning and in the night they would be coerced to return the money to the governor’s office while local government’s workers remained unpaid for nine months.
“Fresh reports on the status of the state’s internally generated revenue (IGR) have indicated that between October 16, 2014 to date, the state has a revenue profile of N34, 560, 000, 000 kept in secret accounts in one old generation bank account and another new generation bank account, yet there is nothing to suggest that the money was spent for the benefit of Ekiti people.
“This revenue profile in the two banks is outside the traffic and environmental offences fines and charges reportedly kept in accounts unknown to the state’s accounting and financial system at an old generation bank at Ijigbo area of the state capital.” Meanwhile, workers have given Fayose a 14-day ultimatum within which to settle all salary arrears including pensions of retired workers. The workers under the aegis of EkitiState OrganisedLabour insisted that the Fayoseled government, the tenure of which expired on October 16, must fully redeem entire backlog of workers’ entitlements.