Wage bill: Benue APC slams PDP for criticising Ortom

THE ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has accused the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in Benue State of inciting the people against the Governor Samuel Ortom administration’s resolve to reduce the state’s huge wage bill from N7.8 billion to N4.5 billion monthly.

Ortom had hinted a few weeks ago of his administration’s plan to slash workers’ salaries or fish out ghost workers responsible for the bloated wage bill for him to be able to meet his constitutional responsibilities to the people of the state.

But in a sharp response, the PDP had accused the state government of hiding under salary issue to sack workers in the state.

The party’s publicity secretary, Mr Samuel Agbo in a statement on Saturday berated the PDP over its outburst and charged the state governor to ignore it.

Agbo explained that such utterances have been the hallmark of the opposition party to hoodwink the people of the state to reclaim the power it lost in 2015.

He alleged that the PDP was making desperate efforts to resist change and efforts to weed out the corruption it had instituted in the system as a booby trap to undermine the success of the Ortom-led administration.

According to him, ‘despite  the fact that the opposition frittered its goodwill and brought the state to its kneels, 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’.

Agbo  said  that areas for consideration for further reduction of the Benue State wage bill from the current N7.8 billion to N4.5 billion 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 bringing of salary structure of tertiary institutions to be at par with those in order states.

Other measures, he canvassed,, included the screening of state and local government pensioners, disengagement of idle former staff of the Benue State Internal Revenue Service, BIRS, introduction of automated staff attendance registers, payment of only allowances backed by establishment circulars and removal of Staff with bad records and those medically unfit.

He added that the merger of some educational institutions, deployment of Information and  Communication Technology (ICT), best practices to tackle wage and internally generated revenue challenges.

The state publicity secretary however maintained that the outburst of 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.