The All Progressives Congress in Ekiti State has accused Governor Ayodele Fayose of awarding N720 million to himself as the arrears of his unfinished first term.
The party said such conduct, while refusing to pay workers and poor pensioners, is selfish and callous for a governor who calls himself a friend of the masses.
The Publicity Secretary of the APC, Taiwo Olatubosun, in a statement noted that the governor had not paid September last year workers’ salary arrears while he has not paid pensioners in the last four months, even as the governor claimed he was friend of workers and poor masses.
Olatubosun described as shameful and heartless the governor’s refusal to pay statutory pensions benefit to Ekiti State elders, which is not more than N5,000 for many of them, who meritoriously served the state while at the same time cancelling former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s social security scheme that paid N5,000 promptly to 20,000 elderly Ekiti State people.
Many of the pensioners who have no children to take care of them have started dying, the APC alleged.
The party also accused Fayose of refusal to pay traditional rulers for five months while also refusing to pay gratuity to a single retired worker since he assumed office, wondering who exactly the governor’s friends are with his anti-people policies.
“Though he admitted he is owing only May salary as if he has any excuse to owe Ekiti workers for one day, as we write, over 10,000 Ekiti workers are yet to receive April salary. This is because not all workers he claimed to have paid have actually received their salaries,” Olatubosun said.
He added: “What he has been doing is to pay 10 out of 300 workers in a ministry and then goes to town with his propagandists that he has fully paid.
“Only last week, he electronically paid N13m into the accounts of each of the 16 local governments and collected the cash back from the council chairmen for purported joint projects like he did in his fraudulent poultry project in 2004.
“We are asking Fayose once again what he is doing with all the monies he saved from the empowerment programmes he cancelled. We also want to know where election contract deductions of N650 million monthly are going. Who are the beneficiaries? Are they more important than Ekiti workers?
“Who are actually his friends among the masses in all these after displacing market women from their stalls and taking Ekiti youths from Fayemi’s empowerment programmes?”
Olatubosun said the purported 1,000 ghost workers whom the governor claimed he discovered during his latest staff auditing was a fraud, explaining that it was a ploy to sack workers whose termination of appointment letters were being compiled for mass sack, adding: “And we wonder when ghosts started receiving letters.
“His claim that 250 workers died after Fayemi left office is baffling. If this were so, then all Nigerian pastors must relocate to Ekiti to intercede on behalf of Ekiti workers to stop mass deaths in the civil service.”
Olatubosun also criticised Fayose for his alleged frequent unofficial Dubai trips, saying his latest unofficial trip to South Africa where he was caught in a picture at the departure lounge of the airport drinking beer was an all-time low for a governor of Ekiti State people who took governance seriously above personal enjoyment.
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