Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia State has refuted claims by the opposition parties and those antagonistic to his administration that he owes core civil servants in the state. Ikpeazu insists that he has maintained and paid 29,000 civil servants in his workforce up to date and owes nobody.
He provided this clarification when asked about the state of the civil service in his state on Channels Television Today’s Politics programme on Thursday.
“I am saying that I have maintained and paid 29,000 people in my workforce up to date,” he said.
Earlier in the show, the governor said that when you assume the position of governor of a state, you take on ownership and effective management of the state’s risks and liabilities.
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“So if you take up your position as governor, you have accepted to take on both liability and assets, and I don’t like to complain. I didn’t have to talk about what my predecessors did not do because what gave me my job in the first place was because there were things they didn’t do. So for someone to come and make a sweeping statement that no salary has been paid is a lie,” he said.
He repeated again that, from his record, he isn’t owing any core civil servant, rubbishing spurious allegations about 48-month salary arrears of some civil servants, especially pensioners and medical staff.
Ikpeazu, who is a member of the G5 aggrieved governors of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), made reference to an organisation that recruits staff, generates income, collects subvention, and pays its staff, saying that such an organisation cannot owe its staff.
“If you are the general manager of Abia State Transport Corporation and you receive a subvention of a certain amount every month and you collect money as a result of the business you do, why shouldn’t you pay your drivers?” he quizzed. “Because there is no free launch anywhere.”
He explained further, “If you run the Abia State Polytechnic, you collect the school fees from 10,000 students, you collect examination fees, and everything, and I am supposed to give you a subvention of N100 million every month, and then you went and hired a professor from Oxford to come and teach English language, and you did not tell me that you were hiring a professor, and you agree to pay him $1 million, you are going to find the money and pay him.
“My duty is to release that subvention to you—so they don’t pay any money into government coffers, but they are supposed to generate and run their parastatals themselves. But I don’t like to make excuses. This is what I don’t like to do.”
