Theft under PDP administration brought distress to nation’s economy —Aregbesola

Osun State Governor, Raufu Aregbesola at the weekend said that the activities of oil thieves during the administration of the People Democratic Party, PDP of former President Goodluck Jonathan wrecked the Nigerian economy leading to recession.

Aregbesola stated this  while receiving the members of the House of Representatives Committee on Basic Education and Services who paid him a courtesy visit  at the Government House, Osogbo, Osun state

 The Governor also pointed out that his administration which had received unwarranted attacks from the media ” is making the best of a bad economic situation in its handling of workers salaries in the state”

The governor’s assertion came on the heels of issues of teachers’ poor welfare highlighted by a member of the Committee, Hon Kehinde Agboola who led the lawmakers ‎on the visit.

 He stated that his administration was paying salaries as at when due including paying up to the 13th month before the dip in the financial fortune of the state.

According to him, “If you notice, the administration has received lots of negative media comments, but I rarely respond, not because I don’t know what to say, but I simply didn’t see any reason why I should be joining issues with people in the media when I know that the facts are different from the pictures they paint.

“For the records, I paid 100percent of basic salaries up until 2013. However, Nigerians easily forget that in June of 2014, calamity struck the Nigerian economy when a huge magnitude of crude oil was being stolen under the previous government which adversely affected the revenue from the federation account, and the government then repeatedly recorded slide in the revenue generation

“The inexplicable theft of crude oil reduced our production capacity to about 600,000 bpd. This led to serious inability on the part of the Federal Government to raise enough funds to distribute to other tiers of government which further brought down the allocations to our state

The June 2014 calamity of stolen oil also gutted the international oil market, and if the law of demand and supply can apply to the oil industry, the consequences of under-supply occasioned by activities of oil thieves which reduced our ability to meet our production quota, coupled with the global fall of oil price, adversely affected our revenue which led to our owing a huge sum of money from June 2014 to 2016″.

He explained further that his administration had to in the face of the financial challenges borrow money and came up with a rational way of applying its meagre resources in order to maximise result.

According to him, “To tell you how committed we are to workers, we had to borrow as much as N25billion to satisfy the needs of our workers hoping that it would be short-lived

“It was clear to us that living as if nothing is happening may the lead us into chaos, so we categorised them into the vulnerable, the critically vulnerable and so on. And we started our intervention based on the understanding we all had

“That was how we started prioritising the salary of workers from level 7 downward. Workers from level 8 were given half salary or 50percent of their due when the revenue improved, we increase the second category to 75 per cent every month”.

The lawmakers were in the state on an oversight visit to inspect ‎‎projects jointly funded by the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC), and the Osun State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB).