• Governor Fayose
Ekiti State All Progressives Congress (APC) has accused Governor Ayodele Fayose of paying N720 million to himself as the salary arrears of his unfinished first term, saying such conduct, while refusing to pay workers and poor pensioners, is selfish and callous for a governor who calls himself a friend of the masses.
In a statement, APC Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatubosun, noted that the governor had not paid September, 2014 salary arrears, and he has not paid pensioners in the last four months, even as the governor claimed he was friend of workers and poor masses.
The party described as "shameful and heartless attitude", 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 at the same time cancelling former Governor Kayode Fayemi’s social security scheme that paid N5,000 promptly to 20,000 elderly Ekiti people, Olatunbosun stated many of the pensioners who have no children to take care of them have started dying.
APC also accused the governor of refusing to pay traditional rulers for five months, while also refusing to pay gratuity to a single retired worker since he assumed office, wondering who exactly the governor's friends are with his anti-people policies.
The statement said: “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.”
“Only last week, he electronically paid N13 million into the accounts of each of the 16 local governments and collected the cash back from the council chairmen for purported joint projects like 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 stated the purported 1,000 ghost workers whom the governor stated he discovered during his latest staff auditing was a fraud, explaining that it was a ploy to sack workers whose termination of appointment letters were being compiled for mass sack, wondering “when ghosts started receiving letters” adding that “His (Fayose's) claim that 250 workers died after Fayemi left office is baffling. If this were so, then all Nigerian pastors must relocate to Ekiti to intercede on behalf of Ekiti workers to stop mass deaths in the civil service.”
The statement also criticised the governor for his alleged frequent unofficial Dubai trips, saying his latest unofficial trip to South Africa where he was caught in a picture at the departure lounge of the airport drinking beer was an all-time low for a governor of Ekiti people who took governance seriously above personal enjoyment.