Fayemi Ran A Rogue Government, Leaving N49 Billion Debt Behind – Fayose Alleges As He Takes Over Ekiti
Fayose taking oath of office at his inauguration as Governor of Ekiti stateMr. Ayodele Fayose took over as governor of Ekiti state today, describing his immediate predecessor, Dr. Kayode Fayemi as a pretender and interloper who was foisted on the people of the state, even as he accused him of accumulating a total sum of N49 Billion as debt for him to contend with.
“My heart bleeds today as I report to you, that our state had been plunged into a heavy debt dungeon of over forty nine billion naira by our own brothers and sisters.”
Fayose who spoke after he has been sworn-in in Ado Ekiti, the state capital, said that with the immediate past governor in charge.”the ship of state drifted with neither a compass nor a navigator.”
He said that he left over 10 billion naira (in liquid cash and securities) in the state in October 2006 alongside all the monumental infrastructural and human developments that were emplaced
during his first coming, adding: “this huge sum was depleted by the quasi-military emergency government that was foisted on our people by a power hungry cabal which masterminded and supervised my ouster. All the governments that forced themselves on the good people of Ekiti since I left office in 2006, including the out-going cloned democrats, served every interest other than that of the ordinary Ekiti people.”
He gave a run-down of how the state had been plunged into a heavy debt dungeon as follows:
(i) Bond (Capital market) and Agric Loan – N21.2b
ii) Other Bank Loans – N15.5b
(iii) Outstanding, Salary (two months) – N3.2b
iv) Unremitted monthly deductions from salary (4 months) – N2.4b
(v) Unpaid Subventions to Parastatals and Tertiary Institutions – N700m
2014 Leave Bonus – N400m
Unpaid Pensions and Gratuities -N3.2b
Unremitted withholding taxes and other deductions -N850m
Indebtedness to Contractors – NIO.Ob
Total = N57.45P.
He also gave the position of monthly accruable incomes (net) to Ekiti State as follows:
(I) Statutory Allocation from the FG – 2.3b
Value Added Tax (VAT) – 650m
Internally Generated Revenue – 350m
3.300b
According to Fayose, the state has been committed financially up and until year 2020, even beyond his own administration.
“The proportionate benefits of this huge debt profile to our people remain to be seen or felt by the ordinary man and woman in our state.
“My intention here is not to join issues with the immediate past administration which was substantially responsible for this debt burden. However, I consider it expedient that this parlous position of our finances be made known to members of the public who gave us the mandate to be here. The situation is a challenge that requires our collective effort and creative devices to resolve. My consolation and hope is in our astute human resource capacity and creativity to pull our state out of the palpable quagmire. I therefore appeal to our people to show understanding at this period and be wary of their distractive tendencies, unfounded rumours and outright propaganda of falsehood, as the new government finds appropriate solutions to this immediate challenge.”
The governor regretted that Ekiti people were made to swim against the tides in the last eight years and that the popular will of the majority of the people was supplanted with the selfish interests of a powerful few.
“We were seized in the jugular by power mongering demagogues who foisted on us an emergency rule at first. They thereafter manipulated hallowed democratic institutions and produced
“Our state witnessed many tragedies, including destruction of human lives and properties. There were waste and unproductive expenditure of huge sums of money, considerable slowing down of progress, and incalculable sufferings and deprivations.
“There was smear and malicious campaign of calumny against the innocent and orchestrated celebration of the desperate. They could however fool all of the people some of the time, but could not sustain their foolery for long. Ekiti people have seen beyond their veil of fraud and deception and rejected them all.”
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Governor Adams Oshiomhole of Edo state has made it categorically clear that he is not going to contest the Presidency of Nigeria in the 2015 election as being speculated in many quarters across the country.
TAN’s Fraud And President Jonathan’s Ambition, By Erasmus Ikhide
There is every reason to be apprehensive as the 2015 presidential election approaches. Not majorly because Nigeria as we know it might shrink on the pages of the world map as has been loudly predicted but because certain group like Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) is poised to re-write the electoral law on the auspices of the presidency. A cursory look at TAN as an organization, it’s agenda and the forcible pimpernels who drive the group cast a slur on the dithering state of affairs on the presidency.
TAN’s banal, lawless and propulsive avowal to continue its campaign for the re-election of President Goodluck Jonathan in 2015 against the grains of electoral laws which stipulate 90 days period of open campaigns clearly corroborated earlier indices that President Jonathan values his Aso Rock tenancy than the security of Nigerians and the safety of the adducted Chibok girls. The foul mouthed Methuselah or Olisa Metuh, the PDP propagandist Secretary barely belaboured his vanquished self that his party, the PDP and the presidency have no hands in TAN’s re-election campaigns for the president. How evasive can that be?
The fact that key government officials, including the Secretary to the Government of the Federation, the PDP Governors and serving ministers such as Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, are part of the jamboree, moving from one geopolitical zone to the other collecting signatures, suggests that TAN is an organ of the PDP and President Jonathan’s campaign organization.
The presidency is not alone in the revolting TAN saga. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), which has a responsibility to regulate all electoral activities, including political campaigns, has seemingly capitulated. INEC has become a pathetic aberration, a helpless umpire, driven primitively like a puppet by its master. With its compulsive silence, INEC has squandered the public trust it enjoys over the relatively free, and largely commendation Ekiti and Osun elections a few months ago.
The cynicisms arising from INEC’s inability to rein in TAN, the PDP and the presidency to play by the electoral rules is such that dampened INEC’s assurances that it is capable of securing and guaranteeing a level playing field for all political parties as the 2015 elections approaches. INEC must rise to the occasion and responsibly too, through official pronouncements and other punitive measures as a precursor towards the disbandment of any violating political parties or outright disqualification of erring candidate from contesting in the 2015 election.
Nigerians are at a loss as to why INEC has not invoked the relevant electoral laws and bring sanction to bear on TAN, PDP and president Jonathan for doing violence to the rule of the game and the nation’s constitution he swore to protect. President Jonathan owes it as a duty to Nigerians and the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria to uphold every letter in the statue book. He owes it as a duty to disentangle himself from TAN’s falsehood, repulsive insult and the open mockery of the people’s sensibilities.
Given the enormous resources at the disposal of the presidency and its robot TAN, the people’s future and hope have been mangled by needless propaganda and violation of the ethical foundation of integrity – the bases of democracy. Our freedom from all forms of political manipulations are not guaranteed unless all democratic institutions perform their functions well. But these institutions are unable to do so because there is no independent check on the Presidency’s violation of democratic rules. The malfeasance and gross abuse and barefaced aggression against the electoral laws by president Jonathan and his hirelings is highly proverbial. Any further doubts that TAN’s campaigns and president Jonathan acceptance and funding of the group has not blunted the edge of the taunted rule of law?
The absurdity in TAN’s campaigns for president Jonathan’s re-election is multifarious. Aside the illegality of the campaigns whose time is premature, the falsehood of president Jonathan out performing his predecessors, even his equation with the like of Obama, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, among others in TAN’s bizarre, comical and desultory advertisement; it is the dramatisation of Jonathan’s failure to rescue the Chibok girls, and proceeded to use the same # tag and slogan as an anchor for his presidential restoration beyond 2015!
Is anyone conscious of the #BRING BACK JONATHAN 2015 banners donning TAN’s campaign venues across the country and its desecration of the struggle to free the Chibok girls held hostage by the Boko Haram militias over the last six months? Is it not possible for perceptive Nigerians to see through facade the wall of deception mounted by the president and the cacophony of voices represented by TAN? Can’t we root out this obscenity that has spiralled intermittently with us since the beginning of this Fourth Republic?
It is safe to say that the attempt by TAN and their incredible followers to make a caricature of the nation is propelled by president Jonathan’s relentless funding of the roughish and irritable group. This captures Karl Marx’s exposition on materialism; that class interest, greed and hidden motives are the driving forces of vaunting ambition. For as Marx said, ‘It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.’
This is one of the clearest exposition of Marx’s materialist conception of history since most modern day philosophers agreed that economic factors play a crucial role in the shaping of social,cultural and political life.
Briefly put – there is another anecdotal and ironical angle to TAN. The sponsors of TAN are majorly peopled by Southeast extraction of the country. Sadly enough, there is no road to Eastern Nigeria! A trip to Anambra State recently to pay the last respect to the Great One of Agulu, Dr Dora Akunyili invokes the 2012 River Niger horror flood and exploitation of the Eastern people’s emotive consciousness. Death toll from the flooding after heavy rain and the release of water from a dam in Cameroon rose to 70, with some 120,000 people displaced, 61,000 quartered in 30 camps across the state.
After spending six hours on the same spot in a stretch of less than 50 metres before River Niger head bridge and overlooking Onitsha, you could see property damage and how human suffering laid bare along the river course before entering the city. I was struck by the squalor of those forced by poverty to live near River Niger and the shanty town hugging its banks. It was a decent to hell! The misery in all its horror and destitution engulfing countless homes did not sufficiently attract the attention of TAN and president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration. This degree of privation which the people are grappling are the consequences president Jonathan’s miss-governance and anti people’s policies.
To make the case more harrowing for the citizens, there is already serious squabble over the non-payment of compensation by the government without which construction works on the Second Niger Bridge would not commence construction. Yet, TAN in daily advertisements in virtually all television stations anchored by Chief Zebrudia, continued deception by inundating Southeastern people and Nigerians at large with denuding falsehood. This deceit is further justified by the inclusion of Azikiwe and Ebele amongst the leader’s name.
Painfully and pitifully, this is the Charlotte and hogwash Eastern Nigeria and other ethnically blindfolded Nigerians celebrate as governance. To make matters worse, the TAN campaigns are propelled by dishonest characters whose sources of stupendous wealth are questionable. Also, from available evidence, some of the key personalities from the private sector associated with TAN at the highest levels are facing one case of corruption or the other with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). This is one of the absurdities of president Goodluck Jonathan’s administration that makes a mountain out of the anti-corruption mole hill.
There is nothing wrong for president Goodluck Jonathan to seek to elongate his tenancy in Aso Rock, as long as the Constitution of the Republic allows it, as it were. But everything is wrong when such elongation is prated on deceptive premises; roughish permutations of ethnocentric manipulation, exploitation of the people’s emotive weakness, and the oppressive greed of the oligarchs.
Erasmus, a public affairs analyst wrote in from Lagos, Nigeria. Tell: 234-805-622-5515
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