Ojo-Williams said the governor, through his indiscriminate recruitment exercise within his first year in office tripled the state’s monthly salary budget.
The PDP chieftain who heads the party’s legal team said the state needs a governor who understands that economics is an informed application of scarce resources to meet competing societal needs.
According to him,Aregbesola behaved as if he had unlimited resources to meet all expenditures. He accused the governor of spending billions on the elections in Ondo, Ekiti and Imo states.
He alleged that the recruitment exercise conducted by the governor within his first year ballooned the state’s monthly salary budget threefold, drew N500 million unaudited security vote and consequently exposed the state to an unprecedented debt regime, which he is now servicing with monthly allocation that is robbing workers of their pay.
“He took loans on projects that are grandiose and without direct impact on the lives of the people – federal roads and flyovers that hardly got off the drawing board, airports construction that never got off the ground. He destroyed over 2,000 newly completed primary school blocks worth several billions of naira built by Oyinlola’s government.
“His so-called mega schools remain uncompleted after four years and over N20billion. There are outright cases of strange expenditures like the Opon Imo and that of the Ede Waterworks, the mega schools which both UBEC and the federal government now claim to have funded. Only an accomplice would exonerate such a governor,” he said.
He debunked the statement credited to Chief Bisi Akande that Aregbesola met a loan burden that is making him not to perform.
“That is a wicked excuse from a leader who would not mind lying to hoodwink people outside the state. The truth of the matter is that the administration of Oyinlola took a credit line of N18.3billion to part-finance the 2010 budget. The bulk of that loan, about 60 percent, was to go into further development of UNIOSUN, technical education for school leavers and unemployed graduates and nine on-going road projects across the state.
“Less than 20 percent was earmarked for the development of sporting facilities across the state and this included the Osogbo Township Stadium, which is almost completed. But Oyinlola drew only N10 billion of that facility and paid back N2.4 billion before leaving in November 2010. That means he left a liability balance of N7.6 billion from that credit facility.
”Aregbesola came and went to another bank to take a loan of N25 billion, claiming he used it to refinance N7.6 billion. Does that make sense to any reasonable person who is not mischievous? And, again, will Akande claim not knowing that his boy has, in just four years, plunged the state into a debt of over N400 billion?”
He argued against Chief Akande’s claim that Aregbesola is the only governor in Nigeria who completely runs the state government and the local governments at the same time
“Every month, Aregbesola asks the 30 local governments to submit their salary vouchers to the state government, he then pays everyone from local government chairman to messengers. He controls both state funds and local government funds completely. Can you now see how enormous the problem is? History will definitely judge them,” he averred.
