Governor Ayodele Fayose has painted a more gloomy picture of a bleak financial future of the state even as he said that since there is nothing he could do to stop the workers from continuing with strike, “I wish them well.”
The governor who spoke on radio and television stations in Ado-Ekiti said that workers in the state would not say that he had not consistently been alerting Nigerians since late last year that a time like this would come.
“In fact, the next allocation (from the federal government) may be smaller than the one we are complaining about now.”
Governor Fayose said the economic situation of the state was worsened by the indiscriminate borrowing the former Governor Kayode Fayemi administration embarked upon.
“The N25 billion they raised from the capital market, the nearly N30 billion commercial loans, the UBEC, water scheme, fertilizer and other loans they incurred, led to the deduction of about N1 billion from our allocations monthly.
“Where were the labour and their leaders when they were borrowing all these monies?”
In a statement on Saturday by the Governor’s Chief Press Secretary, Idowu Adelusi, Fayose said that the state is handicapped by the continuous slide in statutory allocations coming to it and the general economic recession in the country.
He was quoted as having said: “For the April allocation shared in May, we got N752 million, while our wage bill is N2.6 billion monthly.
“The previous month we got a little over N1 billion and that has been the trend since last year.
“We have had to combine two monthly allocations to be able to pay a month salary, but since the beginning of this year, it is that three allocations are not even enough to pay a month’s salary.
“When you compare what we got from January to May, 2015 and what we got in the same period this year, we have a shortfall of over N6 billion.
“Some are talking about our internally generated revenue, there is nothing to hide.
“All the records are there for all to see and I have always told labour leaders to go and verify.
“The highest we have recorded is N302 million a month. There was a month we had N181 million.”
Governor Fayose said that strike action is not the solution to the poor resources available to the government, saying: “since I assumed office, every month the allocation paper comes from Abuja, a committee made up of labour leaders and other stakeholders has been the one sharing whatever comes among all sectors.
“If I am not hiding anything from labour leaders and workers, I expect them to understand. I feel their pain, but there is limit to what I can do in this type of situation.
“Since I have no power to stop workers from going on strike, I wish them well, but we need to understand what the situation is like.”
On the staff audit conducted by the government last year, Fayose said that 315 ghost workers were detected through the exercise and that the report would soon be made public.[myad]