Osun State Governor, Mr. Rauf Aregbesola, has blamed the alleged financial recklessness of the past administration of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the inability of his administration to pay full salaries to workers for the past 26 months.
The Commissioner for Information, Mr. Adelani Baderinwa, said this on behalf of his principal in a statement issued on Thursday in reaction to the 21-day strike notice given to the governor by the Council of Academic Staff Unions of Osun State Owned Tertiary Institutions.
The lecturers had lamented that many of their colleagues had died as a result of hardship occasioned by half salaries and the high tax regime. Apart from welfare issues, the lecturers also lamented lack of well equipped laboratories, toilets for students and poor condition of roads in the two polytechnics and two colleges of education owned by the state.
But the commissioner, who blamed the financial position of the state on the alleged maladministration of the last PDP government appealed to the lecturers to bear with the state government.
Baderinwa said the governor was not happy paying modulated salaries to some categories of workers but he assured them that the situation would change immediately the finances of the state improved.
The statement read, “It is doubtless that the present administration is very committed to welfare of the workers in the state and it has demonstrated it with series of welfare packages for the workers. The government wishes to state that the payment of modulated salary is heart- aching and saddening as recently stated by Governor Rauf Aregbesola.”
