The All Progressives Congress (APC) in Ekiti State has faulted Governor Ayodele Fayose’s claims that the fresh Paris Club refund will be insufficient to pay more than one month’s salary.
The party said all the governor’s claims to labour leaders that the fresh fund is half of the last refund is false, misleading and an attempt to misappropriate the money for selfish reasons.
Fayose had last week called some labour leaders to a meeting to brief them about the fresh Paris Club refunds due to states to pay workers’ salaries.
According to the table Paris Club released on refunds to all the 36 states released by the Federal Ministry of Finance, Ekiti State’s share is N9.6b
Fayose had claimed during his media chat programme on the state media and at the meeting with Labour leaders, that the money due to Ekiti was half of the last refund of N8.8b, claiming that debts deductions and local government share of the refund had shrunk the balance to N4b for Ekiti State Government.
However, the APC Publicity Secretary, Taiwo Olatunbosun, in a statement on Monday said the governor was only applying “his usual distortion of facts to brainwash Ekiti workers and people in general in order to misapply the money for selfish reasons”.
Olatubosun noted that the refund is neither subject to any deduction over debts nor having any local government component that will make the cash shared to Ekiti State to be less than N9.6b as published by the Federal Government. He said only statutory allocations are subject to deductions over state’s debts.
“We challenge Governor Fayose over this false claim as the Paris refund is not subject to any deduction. It is the state’s monthly allocation that is subject to deduction while the local government allocation is also not subject to deduction.
“It was Ekiti State Government that borrowed money from the Paris Club and not the local governments and so refunds cannot be made to local government.”
