TheCable

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) says Doyin Okupe, former senior special adviser to ex-President Goodluck Jonathan on public affairs, makes comments “very much unlike one who is truly deserving of his certificate from a medical school”.

Reacting to Okupe’s advice to governors to reduce their workforce in order to end their dependence on the federal government for bailouts, the union said the figures, which Okupe based his arguments on, were flawed.

Okupe had used Ogun as an example of a state that spent 90 per cent of its revenue on only 10 per cent of the population of the state.

But in a statement issued by Ayuba Wabba, president of the NLC, the union blamed the economic crisis on serial acts of corruption, unlawful and equally unacceptable severance packages for ex-governors and their deputies, and failure to invest.

“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,” the statement read.

“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!”