The Special Assistant to President Goodluck Jonathan on New Media, Reno Omokri, has berated the governor of Osun State, Rauf Aregbesola for allegedly budgeting a whopping 18.6 billion for the running of his office while workers in the state are yet to be paid salary since October 2014.
It will be recalled that in January, during the budget defense at the State House of Assembly, Mr Gboyega Oyetola, the Chief of Staff to Governor Aregbesola, disclosed that the budget for the Governor’s Office for 2015 is N18,645,514,610. According to Oyetola, N1,159,000,000 is expected to be expended on salaries, allowances and other remuneration of career officers and political office holders in the Office of the Governor.
The sum of N3,775,000,000 is expected to be spent on general administration of bureaus and agencies in the Office of the Governor, as part of overhead costs. The payment of salaries to the Governor, the Deputy Governor, Judges, the State Independent Electoral Commission and others would gulp N2billion.
On Tuesday, civil servants in Osun State staged a protest against the alleged non-payment of five months salaries by the state government. The workers, led by the Chairman of the Trade Union Congress in the state, Mr. Olatunji Akinyemi, marched through the Osogbo/Gbongan road, chanting anti-government songs.
The workers said that apart from the failure of the Governor Rauf Aregbesola -led administration to pay them the outstanding salaries, the same government had refused to remit pension deducted from their previous salaries to their various retirement savings accounts.
They claimed that the governor was busy spending the state’s resources on campaigns of the All Progressives Congress and left workers to suffer untold hardship.
Omokri, took to his Twitter page, on Wednesday, to question the manner of change been promoted by the All Progressives Congress, APC, if one of its governors cannot pay workers’ salaries, describing it as a foretaste of the change APC promises. (Vanguard, Omokri/Twitter).