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| Governor Ayo Fayose |
For the past two months the Ekiti state government led by Governor Ayo Fayose has been conducting various verification assessments to fish out ghost workers in the different state ministries.
The verification process, Fayose’s media aide, Lere Olayinka, says has uncovered over 1,000 fake workers but the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti state says the two month verification process “has caused hardship for civil servants and teachers”.
The APC called the process a “wicked tactic to secure workers’ cooperation” adding that the verification process was supposed to last for one month but has now dragged on for two months without any ghost workers discovered.
The party accused Fayose of “failed promises to pay their salaries. ”
In a statement yesterday by the party’s publicity secretary in the state, Taiwo Olatubosun, the APC condemned the governor’s verification exercise which it calls a callous way of denying workers their entitlements.
The Ekiti APC decried how expectant mothers were made to wait under the sun for long hours to collect their salaries.
It added that Fayose had stopped the empowerment schemes started by the former governor Kayode Fayemi and hence has enough funds to pay salaries.
The statement reads on the Nation:
“We have heard the governor say that the state is broke and we can’t find merit in that declaration.
“The number of workers who were sacked and drastic cuts in the allowances and running grants of workers, including traditional rulers’, would have saved the state millions of naira.
“Governor Kayode Fayemi carried out verification only once through biometric auditing that brought sanity to wage payment system.
“We wonder why after Fayose did verification three times within seven months, the governor was still subjecting workers to unnecessary verification contraption.
“We in APC pity the workers, including expectant mothers, who queue endlessly in the sun waiting to do this ill-conceived exercise.”
The governor had said that workers would receive salaries 48hrs after their verification“but two months after some workers completed the exercise, the governor has refused to pay, instead he is keeping workers for hours in the sun for the salary that would not come.
“As a result, the workers have become confused, dejected and despondent.
“Ekiti people have heard how N650 million is being deducted from source to pay the governor’s election contractors. For six months, Fayose didn’t pay kobo on the purported Fayemi’s over-bloated debts.
“Savings in millions are made from cuts in workers’ and Obas’ allowances and running grants, including the savings in millions from thousands who lost their jobs. Social security for 20,000 elders was also cancelled by the governor.
“The question is what is the governor doing with Ekiti money?”
Fayose’s media aide denied the allegations by the APC. He said: “Over 250 dead workers have been receiving salary through the e-payment system introduced and contracted to a Lagos based company.
“We have kept faith with our covenant with the workers by paying the April salary of those already cleared.
“As at today, we have discovered more than 1,000 people that were receiving salary fraudulently, out of which over 250 are dead.”
Meanwhile in Osun state, workers have not been paid salaries for up to seven months. The governor of the state, Rauf Aregbesola said the reduced allocation from the federal government is to blame for the situation.
Aregbesola revealed that the state received N5bn as its monthly allocation in February 2013, but N540m was paid to the state government in April 2015 thus leading to a sensitive situation for the state.
Despite his failure to pay state workers for the past seven months, Governor Aregbesola state has said that his administration has performed excellently well since his assumption of office for a second term in August 2014.
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