The All Progressives Congress (APC), in Ekiti State, has accused Governor Ayodele Fayose of awarding N720m to himself as the arrears of his unfinished first term.
The party said it was particularly angry over such aconduct “while refusing to pay workers and poor pensioners is selfish and callous for a governor, who calls himself a friend of the masses.”
But Fayose who spoke through his Chief Press Secretary (CPS), IdowuAdelusi, said from all indications, the APC, in EkitiState, had promoted falsehood to the level of a trade, and we pity the party and it’s lying leaders.
The APC’s Publicity Secretary, TaiwoOlatubosun, noted that the governor had not paid September last year salary arrears to workers, while he had not paid pensioners in the last four months, even as he claimed he was a friend of workers and poor masses.
He described as shameful and heartless the governor’s refusal to pay statutory pensions benefit to Ekiti elders which is not more than N5, 000 for many of them, who meritoriously served the state, while cancelling former Governor KayodeFayemi’s social security scheme that paid N5, 000 promptly to 20,000 elderly Ekiti people. Many of the pensioners who had no children to take care of them have started dying.
“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 paid in full. “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, as 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 said he discovered during his latest staff auditing was a fraud, explaining that it was a ploy to sack workers, whose dismissal letters were being compiled for mass disengagement “and we wonder when ghosts started receiving letters.”
