Benue opposition owners of ghost workers

By Samuel Agbo

The attention of the Benue State All Progressives Congress, APC, has been drawn to media reports credited to the main opposition party in the state that the state government planned to sack some of its workers.
The reports are deliberately intended to incite Benue workers and consequently the electorate against the administration of Governor Samuel Ortom.
This strategy has become the trade mark of the opposition since it lost favor with the people in 2015 and is desperate to return to power so as to continue with looting and plunder which characterized its tenure in office.
Despite the fact that the opposition frittered its goodwill and brought the state to its knees it is using looted funds to try to hoodwink the people to forget the hardship it foisted on them over the years leading to much of the current economic challenges. More so, they are making desperate efforts to resist change and efforts to weed out the corruption it had entrenched in the system as a booby trap to undermine the success of the Ortom administration.
The foregoing is the context of the current media campaign on the purported sack of Benue workers. The genuine facts of the matter are different from the picture which the reported interview seeks to paint.
When Governor Ortom met with major stakeholders in the state on November 20, 2017 where he outlined steps initiated to permanently sort out the salary payment challenge the sack of genuine workers was not on the cards.
Areas for consideration for further reduction of the Benue State wage bill from the current N7.8 billion to N4.5 billion were listed. These included disengagement of all contract staff, supervised table payment, placement on medical students on scholarship rather than salary, preparation of salaries by the office of the Head of Service to be supervised by the Finance Ministry as is the practice elsewhere, and the bringing of salary structure of tertiary institutions to be at par with those in order states, etc.
From the forgoing, genuine workers on the payroll are under no threat whatsoever. The interview from the opposition indicates clearly that its members are owners of the cartel feeding fat on the over-bloated wage bill at the detriment of the genuine workers.
This fact is further underscored by deliberate falsehood and claims in the figures quoted to shamelessly justify the mischief. The immediate past administration in the state owed state workers for five months and local government staff much more by the time the Ortom administration took over.
The debt profile for salary arrears, pensions and gratuities was N69 billion which the state government requested as bailout but only N28 billion was released.
The amounts quoted as salaries paid in 2015 did not reflect the entire wage bill on all salary platforms, moreover, only half or quarter salaries were being paid during the periods mentioned. The main opposition’s quest to rubbish the ruling APC have been persistently met with outright resistance by the good people of Benue who have not forgotten how heinous and remissive the PDP malfunctioned for 16 years, leading not just Benue workers into untold poverty but Nigeria into reprehensible economic recession.
It is not only laughable, but spurious and somewhat odoriferous for any member of the main opposition party to cause anyone to believe that the former Governor, Gabriel Suswam, is loved by his people. This tag would leave any reasonable Nigerian with the question of how someone loved by his people as claimed would be miserably defeated in a senatorial race that consists of a smaller district.
The good people of Benue state have rejected the opposition party and its antics of concocting figures to mislead the discerning public as it would not change the belief of the people in the transparency of the governing APC.
Moreover, if not for purposes of mischief, the opposition press scribe who reeled out figures was nowhere in the corridors of power during the immediate past administration to become its authentic mouthpiece after office.
All the principal actors in that infamous and discredited era are alive to give account of their stewardship. But the false alarm raised by the spokesman underscores the fact that principal members of the opposition are ghost owners fearful of not only the collapse of their evil cartels but also their prosesecution. The tales of their leaders being prosecuted for corruption in various courts is an experience they dread but which will surely catch up with them as their past is bound to catch up with them.
The APC supports all initiatives being taken to tackle the salary challenge once and for all and urges the state government to look in the direction of opposition leaders as the real ghost owners who must face the wrath of the law for the pains they have inflicted on the people over the years.

Agbo is Benue state APC Publicity Secretary

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