Congress NLC
have blasted former media aide of
former President Goodluck Jonathan,
Doyin Okupe, for calling on state
governors to downsize their civil
servants so they can have enough funds
to pay salaries and stop the habit of
seeking bailout from the Federal
government.
Reacting to Okupe’s suggestion, the
chairman of NLC, Ayuba Wabba,
described his suggestion as a jaundiced
argument. He questioned Okupe’s
degree as a medical doctor. The
statement in part reads..
“Ordinarily, we would not have
responded to
Doyin Okupe when he urged governors,
in a statement few days ago, to retrench
civil servants as a panacea to irregular
payment of
salaries, because we know him.
In his jaundiced argument, very much
unlike one who is truly deserving of his
certificate from a medical school, Okupe
said, ‘virtually all state governments in
the country have over-bloated civil
service’.
To underscore this point, he said
between‘2008 and 2009, Ogun State
received N2 billion monthly from the
federation account and
paid out N1.8billion as staff salaries,
wages and overhead costs’ to civil
servants not more than 50,000 in a state
with a population of 5,000,000.
In his view therefore it was ‘an obvious
socio-economic absurdity and
incongruity where 10 per cent of the
population was
consuming 90 per cent of the wealth of
the state. Okupe is bandying political
statistics and this is neither good for his
health nor the health of those with whom
he seeks to ingratiate
himself. We at the Nigeria Labour
Congress believe in the equitable
distribution of the nation’s resources.
We will not subscribe to a situation
whereby 10
per cent corner 90 per cent of the
resources of the state. It is in furtherance
of this that we urge Okupe to do a
forensic audit of what Ogun got, what it
paid to civil servants, contractors
and politicians and what it used in
running the Government House!”
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